Agreed.

However I think that they believe that through broad vague laws, selective enforcement, mass surveillance and censorship they don't need our respect and consent.

I weep for the future, these things seem to be cyclic.

And the City of London has legal authority for an exceedingly small area, and precisely ZERO international authority.

Technically true, but as I mentioned in another post, the City of London police are one of the major authorities behind international money laundering laws. They put on an am AML database and any financial institution in the western world, because these lists are shared internationally, with find it very risky to do business with a listed entitity.I imagine this is the primary threat they use

There is almost no way to get yourself off such a list, other than to convince the authority that put you and your associates on it, that you are innocent.

The primary thing I think they City of London cops could do to someone is put them in an international anti-money laundering database.

International financial crime is a bit part of what the City of London (being the ÚK's finacial capital) police do, these lists are shared throughout the international banking system and being on one can make conducting business anywhere in the western world rather awkward.

In today's world jurisdiction and legal authority are nice to haves.
You don't need to even accuse someone of something, just put them on a database, no-fly list, person of interest register, financial blacklists, etc. Threats from authorities do have weight even if there is no law backuping them up, it's disgusting.

Sure you can probably win in court, but not before massive financial expense and being fucked with for a few decades.

I agree with you. However around the world the actions the NSA and GCHQ (and many others) has resulted in a microscopic reaction from the general public.
This has led many in power in power to believe that that can do what they damn well please, and the threat that the powers that be are against you is sufficient to scare people into submission because they don't believe the law really protects individuals any more.

Civil rights have been under attack in Britain for a long time. Since Thatcher, continued enthusiastically by Blair/Brown and now Cameron's government we have seen a massive assault on traditional freedoms and protections. Judicial oversight, Freedom of speech, free assembly/protest, presumption of innocence, freedom from mass surveillance have all come under massive attack by various bills over the last 20 years. This is has been met with hardly a reaction from the general public, most people don't seem to think it affects them and this has emboldened governments and institutions to act in a more and more authoritarian manner, working under the strong belief that they are doing what the public want for their own good. I fear by the time people start to react, we will be so far down the road; it will take something close to a revolution to change. We are not big on revolutions on Britain.

If there Americans felt strongly enough to disable non-US Military use of their GPS system in an area, I would be extremely surprised if they would leave rival systems functional. Jamming GPS would be trivial for them.

OK, I stand corrected.

The UK Official Secrets Act applies to everyone (with varying scope, but only likely to be enforceable in UK jurisdiction ), OK they get you to sign it, but that us mostly a symbolic gesture to remind you of your obligations and the penalties. Under the act you don't even need to have clearance or be the recipient of a leak. Even if you have worked it out for yourself from publicly available information you can still be gagged, and breaking a gag can bring down the full force of the law against you.

"One, we should expose. If you do not have a security clearance, and if you have not received a National Security Letter, you are not bound by a federal confidentially requirements or a gag order"

Once again the UK trumps the US in the paranoia and anti-freedom game. The UK Official Secrets Act applies to all British subjects, OK they get you to sign it, but that us mostly a symbolic gesture to remind you of your obligations and the penalties. Under the act you don't even need to have clearance or be the recipient of a leak. Even if you have worked it out for yourself from publicly available information you can still be gagged, and breaking a gag can bring down the full force of the law against you.

If you have a lot of spliced fibre runs then an Optical-TDR is golden, but not cheap. If you are using copper, then most modern switches have TDR functionality built in. On a Cisco switch the command 'test cable-diagnostics tdr interface ' will do the business.

I have found a tone probe (you attached a box to the line which sends a 'tone' down the cable. then use a wand to trace the cable by induction). They are great for tracing cables run without having to resort to the old 'tug-and-trace' method, and usually include a Cat5 cable tester. Fluke make one for about £100.

They can't sell them, they don't own them. the RIR (RIPE NCC) has very strict rules over the transfer of IPv4 addresses. If the currently end user no longer requires them they should are to be returned to RIPE for zero compensation, RIPE can then re-assign based on applications requirements and justification. The rules were brought in to prevent people setting up shell companies to land grab all the remaining address space once it became obvious it would be exhausted.

Indeed, I suspect some parts are missing.

As mentioned interrupt processing / context switches can add latency and jitter. As a 10G LAN has a very small round-trip delay (RTD), TCP can calculate the re-transmit timeout (RTO) to be a very small number. which makes it very sensitive to small amounts jitter, and can result in packets incorrectly being flagged as lost, this causes re-transmission and for the TCP window size to be zeroed (killing throughput) (some congestion control tuning can help here). The problem can become severe with 10G networks to a VM over a software bridge, but to the jitter introduced by the bridge. (SR-IOV can help here). There is a lot you can do to TCP to improve its performance in such circumstances, increased window buffers, use a modern congestion control algorithm, interrupt coalescing, SR-IOV. For very low latency applications (like HFT) people generally don't use interrupts, they configure their NIC to kernel bypass (user space library with direct access to the NIC hardware, to avoid context switching), map to the optimum NUMA space for the core handing network events, keep their application in CPU cache, align data-structures to cache lines, turn off all hyper-threading and power saving and assign a core to busy spin checking for network events, not very green.

The powers that be have been pushing for a ubiquitous telecoms surveillance pork fest for at least the last 20 years. There is a fresh push with every new government / home secretary. I have no doubt whatsoever that we have not seen the last of this, need to stay vigilant.