What David Cameron just proposed would endanger every Briton and destroy the IT industry

boing
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Look at what organizations the British police forces are infiltrating.

The major threat is not some “terrorists”. These are just a mildly annoying vermin with beneficial side effects. The threat they are preparing for are citizen activist groups. Unlike terrorists, in the fast-paced world of today these are pretty much dependent on modern technology. And they can cause much more damage to the money-pipelines between the corporations and the government-members than any ragtag group with explosives and machine guns ever could.

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He’s terrified of a bad press from Murdoch, Rothermere and the Barclay Brothers. Live by PR, die by PR.
Murdoch has revealed his general anti-Muslim views; the Daily Mail’s default position is “think of the children”, and I’d better avoid the topic of the Barclay Brothers because, lawyers.

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This Telegraph article got the whole story in one brilliant headline:

“Spies Should Be Able to Monitor All Online Messaging, Says David Cameron”
Christopher Hope, Senior Political Correspondent 12 Jan 2015

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I wonder if I can register to vote in South Thanet?

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Did you not notice that the irony bit was set on the message header?

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If we’ve a Class War Women’s Death Brigade candidate I’ll vote for them*, otherwise I’ll probably vote Green.

*(who wouldn’t? Come on)

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If it wasn’t before, it is now. And @Thebarton_Gamer, I recognise that I’ve been horribly stunted and twisted by having grown up in what was then America, but I don’t “get it”.

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It’s rhyming slang.

Charlie is short for Charlie Hunt. Think of a derogatory word ending in ‘unt’.

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Also, ‘bit of a Jeremy’.

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The Robert Crumb’s Ideal Woman Party, aka the NSFW Party.
Imagine David “calm down dear” Cameron facing several hundred of Crumb’s Amazons. He’d be pulp.

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I’m tempted to vote SPGB if they have a candidate in Oxford East (the EU election candidate here was Oxford based).

Apparenty Bernie Sanders brother Larry is standing for the Green Party in Oxford West. he doesn’t have much chance of winning there though.

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That link led to a mini-Wiki Clickhole; turns out I’m a Revanchist Impossibilist, and I need to borrow some guns briefly…

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@doctorow, a tiny little comment.

Intrinsic to core Internet protocols like IPv4/6, TCP and UDP is the potential to “tunnel” one protocol inside another.

More generally, if you have any way to get bidirectional communication, you can use it to tunnel IP packets through (and with them all the TCP/UDP/ICMP/whatever that IP can hold).

A packet is a block of data with header and payload (and sometimes checksum at the end). Encapsulating packets in different-type packets is the bread and butter of networks; Ethernet hardware cannot handle anything but Ethernet frames, so IP packets are encapsulated to such frames, and target address is obtained via ARP protocol that serves to map MAC addresses (which identify the network cards) to IP addresses (which are assigned to the computers). The Ethernet frame then has the IP packet as its payload. On reception by the network card hardware, it is fed to the operating system’s kernel, where it is stripped of the frame’s headers and the payload is fed to the IP stack. (Or IPX stack, or other, if non-IP protocol is used.)

Same applies for TCP, UDP, ICMP, and the less known sub-protocols that are the payload of the raw IP packets.

You can have a direct LAN-to-LAN tunnel, acting as if the networks were connected with a cable, by putting the whole ethernet frames as payloads to (say) UDP packets, sending them through the Net, and then on the other side the raw frames can be fed to the Ethernet network.

Same for IP packets; they can be encapsulated in e.g. UDP with ease. (So, on the “wire”, you get
(Ethernet header (IP header (UDP header (tunneled IP header (TCP or UDP header, whatever we are sending (data themselves) )))))

Same way we can tunnel IP through anything higher-level. There are existing programs for tunneling through ICMP, or even DNS. And others can be written on demand, as the situation requires; the availability of a lot of opensource network utilities provides us with a wide palette of almost-there prefab solutions for many needs.

Anything can be tunneled through anything. Even if we have nothing but ASCII chat, we still can send base64 encoded raw packets back and forth. The latencies and bandwidth will be crap but that is the cost of such approach.

Then there’s steganography, where we dilute the important data in some cover data. A low-bandwidth binary channel can be hidden in e.g. a video chat that way. Wasteful, but fairly difficult to discover, especially at low ratio of covert data to overt data. We are used to SMS messages; these 160-character morsels of text are small enough to be hidden in almost anything and are proven to be sufficient for many communication needs.

TL;DR version: any protocol[1] can be tunneled through any bidirectional communication channel. Also, a sufficiently narrow-bandwidth covert channel can be hidden in a sufficiently wide-bandwidth overt channel.

[1] Within the limits of available bandwidth and speed.

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Rightiho. 07:15 it is then.

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Goddammit you just blew our double agents.

EDIT - by which I mean ‘compromised’ of course.

EDIT EDIT - by which I mean ‘uncovered’ of course.

Dammit.

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You’ll need to remove the pebbles from all beaches, otherwise their arrangements might be used to - well, I’ve said too much already.

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And the culled pigeons can go to the food banks.

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Soylent Grey is pigeons!

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