Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • July 10, 2025 2:13 PM

@ ALL in the UK,

As others and the referenced article have brought up a certain conflict and people that might believe in free speech about it…

You should all be aware of, and take caution that,

The very much “on the take” actions of UK ministers including Yvette Cooper who have claimed a protest group is a terrorist organisation.

Whilst I might not agree with the actions of the protest group, I can not see any legitimate reason to call them terrorists unlike those working for the politicians.

Any way mentioning the now “proscribed group” by name is technically a serious crime… So how I caution against it without mentioning them is one of those things that arise with major abuses of power by politicians…

So I will just link to Minister Yvette Cooper’s own words made in the UK “Commons parliament” as justification for the “on the take” actions that she and other ministers profit by,

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2025-06-23/debates/25062337000014/PalestineActionProscription

Clive Robinson • July 11, 2025 10:28 AM

@ Winter,

With regards your comment to @lost of,

“I cannot find a connection between your accusation and the link you supplied.”

That’s because the article has not been read by @lost.

A check on this and other related sites shows a “concerted plan” to “dish dirt” on behalf of a clique within a national government that war mongers very frequently.

Thus I suspect that @lost is a payed for troll just cutting and pasting from some well heeled script supplier.

We see such well heeled funders in the UK slipping tens of thousands at a time into the “pockets” of UK ministers who many call “Blairites” but other words are rather more appropriate.

So many have been caught taking money or gifts in ways to get around regulations, it’s clearly not “accidental” but quite deliberate enrichment for political favours and the like.

Clive Robinson • July 16, 2025 6:42 AM

@ Winter, et al,

With regards “Operation Vula” it became more public around the end of 2013. In part because those involved had hit retirment age, and felt the need to “correct the historians” and their false assumptions given as though facts (not uncommon to happen hence the slew of WWII info in the 70’s and 80’s).

History sees Operation Vula in several ways but one thing they have probably got right was,

“It was too little too late”

And although effective at what it did, the need for it had passed for a whole number of reasons.

Also as has been pointed out the release of information appeared coincident with the drip drip release of bad news about the ANC internal conflicts and actual violence of power struggles.

The thing most do not realise is that those 8bit home/business computers of the 1980’s are way way more secure than anything you could reasonably buy post 1995.

They did not contain “radio systems” and they did not contain “Flash Memory” nor importantly did they have “semi mutable memory” like hard drives.

So once turned off and the cassette tape / micro drive or floppy disk was removed and in effect destroyed there was no real “physical evidence” that could be used.

Unlike modern PC’s that are designed from the ground up to betray you at every level, because private information is seen as currency by rather more than Government guard labour intelligence / counter-intelligence / security agencies.

It’s why I call current AI LLM and ML systems the worst form of surveillance tool so far pushed out by the “Silicon Valley Corps” like Alphabet/Google, Meta, Microsoft and even Apple.

Operation Vula was a system in a particular point in time.

For instance back then telephone boxes were on nearly every street corner in town thus having them to use randomly gave security. The modern mobile phones that have replaced them give no such security.

Likewise the Internet has destroyed the advantages of international phone calls, that although “circuit switched” were to difficult to trace back effectively. Where as TCP… you effectively have a back trace from the initiation of the first ACK, even though it is packet switched.

If people were to try to do an Operation Vula today they would do it very very differently to then.

As I’ve mentioned before I used to once run my own “Pirate” look-alike “Numbers Station” for “other reasons”. It was down in the 6Mhz “49 meter broadcast” band that used to provide good coverage at low power and because it had little “ground wave” was difficult to DF (look up NVIS as to why).

As the generator, I used an Apple ][ and early “voice card” I’d designed that just sat there making hour after hour of “numbers” to low cost cassette tape. I later did similar with a 386 PC as it did not need a voice card, just pushed out “.WAV” files in a basic format. A friend did a version for a BBC model B that they had access to.

Oh the thing about “DTMF” is they are really not at all nice to work with as they don’t have a nice sound envelope for various “technical reasons”.

But they were in use to send messages long before Operation Vula, by certain terrorist organisations to send “bomb warnings” to News Paper “news desks” and the like thus serving a triple purpose,

1, Keeping journalists in the primary loop.
2, Providing a cut-out from authorities.
3, Ensuring that warnings were made public.

Also they could be sent in less than a minute from any phone or importantly “telephone pair”.

Because in rural areas quite often phone wires remained above ground and thus could be tapped onto.

Likewise in built up areas there were “frame boxes” on street corners where putting a tap in on a random pair was trivial.

Likewise in the major towns and above with tower blocks you could do the same in the basement frame room.

Look up a device called “A Pole Job” it was a way to do a random connection remotely and could be quite sophisticated. But these to are passing into history, their time from the 1960’s to 2010’s now effectively passed. Much like their brethren of the “infinity bug”.