Welcome to my digital home! There are lots of articles you might find helpful buried in this site on topics such as modifying an Alfa Romeo 159, rebuilding a Lotus 7 (Robin Hood 2B), not to mention a ton of stuff on technology in general. It’s all here somewhere, so use the search function or navigate using the menu structure. if you want to talk, reach out via the contact function, I usually do answer!
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InfoSecI read an interesting article the other day about the fact that Cray have toppled IBM of the top spot in the super computer race with a staggering 1.64 Petaflops of processing grunt from its XT Jaguar supercomputer. Of course, I expect this will be short lived given the Roadrunner has a theoretical 1.7 Petaflop capacity.
So what I hear you cry!
Well think of this, Cloud computing is here to stay and can yield some massive processing potential, but its still quite young and clouds tend to be privately owned and sold to the highest bidder. But what if we could all club together and build a cloud so big, so powerful it blew the Crays and IBMs of this world out of the water?
Again, I hear the crys of yeah right!
Well, ask yourself this, do I own a PS3? if the answer is yes, welcome to the “PSCloud”
The concept is simple, in a PS3 there is an IBM Cell Processor with 8 CPU cores, a very powerful CPU indeed! and guess what, IBM’s Roadrunner uses them too, yes, the Roadrunner has just short of 13,000 Cell Processors in it, of course it has quite a few AMD’s as well (6.4K), but the cells are the bulk of it.
So lets look at the facts, the same basic architecture used for the supercomputer market is in our homes, and cloud computing is here to stay, well I’m no rocket scientist but I reckon if we put these two concepts together, Roadrunner and Jaguar have a problem on their hands.
As of November 2008, over 16 million PS3’s have been sold around the world, of which we can assume by the design and nature of the unit, that nearly all of them are connected to the internet, so if we were able to join them into a single cloud, what sort of processing power could we achieve?
I ask you this….. If 13,000 Cells and 6K AMD’s get you 1.6 Petaflops, what would 16million Cells get you?
All we need to make this happen is a software/firmware update to turn the PS3 into a cloud member and a peer based command and control mechanism, any programmers out there?Related Images: [...]
LiveMixeshttps://jabawoki.com/wp-content/mp3/Jabs_14092001_OldSkool_House.mp3
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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Alfa 159The final stage was putting all the wiring in place. I opted for 4 gauge cable from the battery up front and a 4 gauge earth in the rear, both connected back to brass 4 way distribution blocks so I could pull 8 gauge runs to amps and the line converter. This also left me the easy upgrade route for adding additional amps to run upgraded mids & tweeters in the cabin, but that’s another project!!
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Alfa 159This post covers the exterior lighting modifications made to my 2008 Alfa Romeo 159 TI. If you are interested in the interior LED conversion guide, click here. This modification can be completed as a single project or as a series of smaller projects as the cost of components is still quite high due to some of the LED types in use. If you do choose to split the project I would suggest separating the turn signals / Indicators, Numberplate lights, sidelights and rear clusters into stand alone projects.
For an alternative approach to upgrade the “Third Brake Light” at position 9, click here to see the Cylon Project.
Each topic area is collapsed below for your ease of navigation so either “Show All” or Expand each sub-topic as needed:
The parts you need for this conversion are as follows:
4 x Type 380 (1157) RED 13-LED Superlux [BAY15D,380,1157,P21/5w] 12v (Positions 5,6,7&8)
1 x Type 382 CREE Q5 12V/24V HIGH POWER LED BULB for the reverse light (Position 8 )
1 x Type 382/P21W 5W CREE Q5 RED LED BULB for the fog light (Position 6)
2 x CANBUS Type 501/W5W/T10 24 LED Bulbs for the front side lights (Positions 1&2)
2 x CANBUS Type 501/W5W/T10 4 LED Bulbs for the numberplate lights (Position 10 )
4 x BAU15s 7507 Q5+12SMD=7W Brake/Signal Light 150° LED Bulbs Amber/Yellow PY21W for the front and rear indicators (Positions 1,2,5&7)
2 x 5 SMD LED AMBER ORANGE INDICATOR SIGNAL TURNING SIDE LIGHT BULB T10 W5W 501 for the side repeaters (Positions 3&4)
11 x 50w 10 ohm Aluminium clad wire wound resistors
2 x 25w 47 ohm Aluminium clad wire wound resistors
2 x 330 ohm 0.6w metal resistors
Lots of wire & plenty of heat shrink wrap
10 x Red Scotch clips
8 x Red 3mm male spade terminals
8 x Red 3mm female spade terminals
Estimated Cost: £170-200
Required Tools:
Soldering iron
Solder
Flux paste
Helping hands
Hot glue gun
Pro-Tip: You can remove the need to solder as well as reduce the overall effort if your prepared to increase your spend to buy the resistors pre-made from ebay. The example increase is DIY=£2 for a pair, whereas on ebay that would be £7-10 for the pair.
“CAN Bus”
Most modern cars make use of numerous computers within the vehicle all connected through something known as a Controller Area Network or “CAN Bus” for short. One of these computers is typically dedicated to looking after the internal electronics such as dials and gauges etc as well as the lighting circuits, in the Alfa its called the “Bodywork Computer” or “NBC” and one of its jobs is to make sure that if a bulb blows, you are warned when you get into the car with a friendly picture of your car and a warning symbol showing you which bulb has blown. This is a great feature, but unfortunately, it works against you when your swapping a traditional filament bulb for a new style LED replacement. The reason why is that a traditional bulb illuminates by putting a voltage across a metal element, essentially shorting out the circuit, causing it to heat up and emit light. This process creates a reasonably high load, measured in amps. LED bulbs work completely differently, essentially, they produce light by pushing electrons around inside a solid semi-conductor, which is a much more efficient process that creates significantly less load. This is where the problem comes! The bodywork computer puts a small amount of electricity on the bulb circuit to test that it has a connection and that the filament has not blown, so when you swap your old filament bulb for a LED one, you get one or two issues. The first issue is that the bodywork computer thinks the bulb has blown and lets you know, the second is that the small amount of power used to perform the test is actually enough to gently illuminate the LED, so it always stays on and never switches off, even when the ignition is off!
In order to fix this issue you need to use more power than you need to actually run the LED so you need to add resistance to the circuit to absorb and use extra power and simulate load. Exactly how much resistance you need is a mathematical calculation known as “ohms law” which takes a number of variables and tells you how much resistance, measured in ohms, you need to add. When you add resistance to a circuit it creates heat as the excess power is turned into heat energy to be dissipated. For this reason its important to make use of a large wattage resistor (wattage is the measure of a resistors heat dissipation ability) so that you don’t either burn out the component or even worse, create a fire hazard.
For each of the bulbs I have used, I have first measured the amps that the original filament bulb runs at, and then the amps that the replacement LED runs at to determine the correct resistor to add. For most of my replacement LEDs I have needed to simulate around 1.2amps of additional load, which was achieved using a 50w, 10 ohm aluminium wire wound resistor, however for the two side repeaters I only needed to simulate around 0.3 amps, so I used a 47 ohm, 25w aluminium wire wound resistor. In this case, because the ohms was higher and the load to simulate was lower, I was able to use a smaller wattage which reduced the actual size of the resistor.
As a point of note, every bulb in the 159 except the reverse light and the third brake light, has a CAN-BUS sensing circuit on it, and as such, will need to be replaced with a CAN-BUS capable LED or have additional resitors added to that circuit.
Front Clusters
The front clusters can be quite difficult to work with as, depending on your engine, there may not be much room to work. As mine is the 2.4 JTDM engine, I have the least amount of room so small hands, patients and a high tolerance for pain are required. The 24LED sidelights require a small modification to them before they are installed as, despite being sold as “CAN Bus friendly”, they do not simulate enough load for the Alfa to be happy with, as such, additional load, all be it a very small amount, is required. The modification requires the addition of a 330 ohm 0.6w resistor to each bulb so that when it is installed, the computer is happy that the bulb is not blown. I achieved this by soldering the LED directly onto the bulb as per the following images. Once the bulbs are ready to be installed, the next job is to prepare two of the 10 ohm 50w resistors for the front indicators. This is done by soldering around 6-8 inches of wire onto either terminal of the resistors, heat shrinking the exposed connections, and then putting scotch blocks on the end, ready to be attached to the wires inside the headlight.
The installation process is fiddly and generally very annoying but essentially for the sidelight, follow the eLearn guide below:
For the indicator, the following eLearn guide shows you how to change the bulb, however, in addition to this, you need to scotch clip the resistor to the two wires connecting to the bulb holder and place it somewhere inside the light unit once complete. In general I use a heat transfer sticky pad to affix the resistor to a suitable surface to stop it moving around:
Rear Clusters
The rear clusters are by far the most involved and require the most effort. They are split into two sections per side, one fixed to each wing (Potions 5&7) and two fixed to the boot lid (Positions 6&8). As each light unit contains a number of bulbs to replace its easier to make a “loom extension” that sits in between the original connector and the light unit and adds in the extra resistors in bulk for the bulbs. As such the light units at Positions 5 & 7 require 3 x 10 ohm , 50 w, aluminium wire wound resistors each, while the light unit at Position 6 requires 2 x10 ohm , 50 w, aluminium wire wound resistors and the light unit at Position 8 only requires 1 x10 ohm, 50 w, aluminium wire wound resistor.
For Position 8 it is easier to just scotch clip a single resistor into place over the “tail light” connection, as this is the only live circuit that makes use of a CAN Bus check signal. The Reverse Light does not have any CAN Bus checking (we will assume because you would notice!), and despite the type 1159 dual element stop/tail bulb being used in this position, only the tail element is wired up. I assume this was a “design feature” to save you carrying two different bulb types for the rear, although I find it quite stupid personally. Position 8 wiring is illustrated below:
Position 6 requires two resistors installing and as such its easier to build an extension for that connector than actually scotch clip them in place. The extension looks like the following and is attached to the shell of the car using heat transfer sticky pads for optimum heat dissipation into the vehicles shell:
These rear clusters are accessed for this upgrade as per the following guide:
Positions 5 & 7 are both the same with a three resistor unit required. The following images show the unit and the installation:
Whenever I have installed a loom extension I have coated the connections in hot glue so that they cannot come loose during driving conditions and I have used the sticky pads to secure the resistors on top of the metal surround for the light unit for optimal heat dissipation into the body shell..
The bulbs and loom extensions are then installed through the normal bulb change procedure:
Side Repeaters
The side repeaters have a limited amount of space to accommodate a bulb and as such the overall size of the bulb is an important factor. The chosen bulb is as large as the unit can house and also makes use of a multi-SMD architecture to provide a good directional light output. Aside from changing the bulb, additional resistance is needed to simulate the missing load of the original bulb. These resistors can be mounted in the engine bay, and cables run through the wing to join up with the side repeaters, where they can be scotch clipped to the existing wiring and then covered in ample amounts of insulation tape to avoid any moisture getting into the joins:
I used heat transfer sticky pads to stick the resistors to the top of the suspension pillars and ran the cable through the seem at the top of the wing down through to the side repeater hole for ease. This was a remarkably easy process and required only limited “fishing” for the cable.
Removal of the side repeater is a very simple process as per the following eLearn guide:
Number Plate Lights
The number plate LEDs are a simple swap of the original W5W type bulbs for the 4 LED versions. The 4 LED versions have been chosen for two primary reasons, firstly, I do not want it to be brighter than the original bulbs and secondly, the bulb housing do not have any built in reflectors, so its important to have the LEDs pointing the right way. The chosen bulbs satisfy these criteria well and provide a good light output. The upgrade is simple and the eLearn guide is below:
The finished product looks like this:
Third Brake Light
The third brake light employs a 10 x filament bulb light bar plugged into the back of the reflector unit, so to complete the LED conversion this is going to need to change. To do this, you will need to make a replacement bulb as no “off the shelf” direct replacements exist. I have built one called “The Cylon” which runs each LED individually and has some cool effects, but if you just want a simple LED replacement you can try the following approach. (warning, I have not done this so it needs verifying).
You will need to get 10 x 5mm round high power red LEDs with as wide a viewing angle as possible, like these, but do your own research to find the best ones you can. Once you have your LEDs you can use an on-line LED wizard to figure out the best way of wiring them up and what resistance you need to add. This will give you an output like this:
All you then need to do is remove the third brake light from the car, get out your soldering iron and hot glue your LEDs directly into the back of the reflector:
Once the glue is dry, make the connections as shown in the diagram, solder up all the parts and run about 18 inches of cable from the new unit to a “2 pin header row” that can be used to make a plug:
The completed unit can then be installed back into the car. There is no CAN Bus issues on this circuit so the light will just work like the original.
The complete/finished product is better displayed as a video and as such you can watch this one I made of the complete conversion:
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RH2B Build DiarySo after installing my lovely new OMP race wheel it was apparent that all was not well with the steering column! In fact, this was an understatement as there was a good 1-2″ of play side to side on the column whcih was just not going to do. a quick investigation identified the issue. A 30+ year old bush that had given up the ghost!
Sierra Steering Column bush from the donor car! probably 83-90 so quite old now!
After a bit of time on google I established that this was a standard Sierra steering column bush, and also that Kit Spares held them in stock (probably should have started there 🙂 ) £20 including shipping and a couple of days later it was time to pull the column apart and figure out how this all hangs together.
Fortunately, its as easy as you would expect. The column is hung on the original mount points at the top and passes through a 3mm steel holder at the bottom, so all that was needed was to loosen the joiner in the engine bay, remove the bolts off the column top and slide the whole thing out. Once out the old bush litter ally fell out into the foot well!
installing the new bush was a little more fiddly as it actually fitted snugly and needed some fettering with fairy liquid and some random tools. Once in, the column could be slid back into place and I could set about bolting the top half back in.
When i removed the top half I was less than impressed with the mounting solution. What is becoming a trend with this vehicle is the original builders approach to solving technical problems was, lets say, a bit garden shed; and I wanted to be a little more professional about it! So where the Sierra steering column mounts were 18mm open voids that clearly took a bush of some kind once upon a time, and instead had been friction mounted with an M10 and a large washer, I decided to pop along to my favourite hardware supplier, Stirling Nut and Bolt.
This is heaven for fasteners of any kind. They literally have everything you could ever want and at trade prices so you don’t spend an arm and a leg! A quick tour of the warehouse and 15 minutes later I had 2 x M10.9×50 High tensile bolts, 2 x M10x50 washers, 20x 18mm M10 spacer washers and an assortment of other similar things to work with just in case. A whole £7 later…… (i’ll let you stew on that), I was back home and assembling my newly acquired parts into an M10 spacer bolt arrangement that went, M10 Bolt, 50mm washer, 6 x 18mm spacer washers inside of the column mount, then the frame mount point, then a nylock high tensile nut.
This solution made the column extremely rigid and removed flex at the lower end where the bush took up the remaining pivot movement and the column was firm, central and more aligned that its previous installation!
Under side of steering column
Come the winter this is all coming apart again as part of the big rebuild, but for now, I have a safe, secure steering solution for this summers fun!
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RH2B Build DiaryThe original seats in the 2b were a little worse for wear when I bought the car, but I had mistakenly thought that it would be a relatively cheap thing to fix. Little did I know that trimmers charge a small fortune for their skills!
In fact, I was being quoted around £200 per seat to have them fixed, and new seats were about £200 per seat! So, well, you know….. I bought some new seats! That said, I wanted to minimise the cost here as I had hemorrhaged way more than I initially budgeted to get it ready for the summer, so I set about some ebay stalking, and after several back and forth’s on buying expensive branded, quality seats vs something secondhand and cheap, I found a seller with a new pair of the exact seats that were in the car currently (retro style buckets) but in plain black vinyl.
The best part about this find was that the seller was clearly just a regular guy that thought he would get rich selling motorsport parts on ebay but clearly didn’t have the roaring success he planned for and was sat on some stock he needed to shift. This presented an opportunity for a cheeky offer! So an offer was made, and accepted, that got me 2 brand new seats for £260 delivered 🙂 #Result!
New Seats
As part of the change I also wanted to put in new low profile, double lock rails, so that added another £50 to the bill but it was necessary to get the seats fitted in the best possible way.
Double lock low profile adjustable rails
Once I had modified the rails to fit the bolt pattern of the new seats (nothing is plug and play in the kit car world!) I offered the seat into the car and sat in it for an initial test. This is where my heart sank. I was a good 4 inches over the top of the windscreen at eyeline 🙁 Not an ideal seating position by any means. It turns out these new seats had a 6″ pad in the base that meant I was 4″ higher than the set that came out. This was not going to do, so after several emotional responses from frustration to anger to sadness, I decided there was only one option….. heat a large carving knife up till it was glowing red and trim the foam!
Its not that difficult to do as it stands (although i do recommend breathing apparatus as you get very dizzy very quickly!). Just pop the staples off the bottom on one end, remove the foam seat base, heat the knife, slice (like butter) through the foam, then reinstall the foam, glue back on the cover, staple the excess material out of sight and your back in business… all be it a lot lower to the ground! Its not perfect, but I do plan on a major rebuild this winter, and I am likely to be looking for some better / more modern low profile buckets as part of that so this is just for the summer.
Once I had the seats ready for install it was onto the floor. I wanted to reinforce the floor where the seats mounted to as the floor had developed flex in one corner of the seat mounting position whcih made the seat seem loose and rock. To solve this I decided to replicate what the builder had already done to reinforce the floor in the front seat mounting location. Essentially adding a 25X25x3mm angle iron from side to side. Again, this was a seasonal fix as come the winter I want to weld in a lowered floor to gain an inch of height inside the cabin.
Front (existing) and Rear (new) angle iron reinforcements
A purchased a 25x25x3mm 2m length of stainless steel angle iron and cut it to size. I then mounted it on the front edge of the 3mm steel subframe mounts in the rear floor location whcih was the right daytum to provide me a straight line side to side I could use as the rear seat mount. After measuring, cutting, drilling several holes, painting and bolting it all in with M8 stainless bolts, I had the perfect strengthening part that meant the weight of the passengers was spread evenly across the chassis on both sides via the subframe mounts and in the middle via the tunnel mounts, so therefore would not move.
Floor reinforcement rail
Now the seats, floor and seat runners were all ready, it was just a case of making a cardboard template, measuring, drilling, and then bolting it all together with M8 Stainless bolts. The finished article is great IMO. they look period to the car and are much less garish that the ones that came out, which had some interesting colours and the word “dubollox” embroidered in….
Old vs new seats
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Alfa 159 / ElectronicsAs part of my quest to replace every single bulb in my Alfa with an LED equivalent, I noticed that the high level brake light utilised small bulbs and not LEDs (strange I know, but that’s Alfa for you!). So me being me, I took it apart and found that it would be very easy to replace the bulbs with LEDs whcih was a result. Of course, this wasn’t enough so I thought, If I had 10 LEDs what could I do with them 🙂
Enter the ATMega328 MCU, or as you may know it, the Arduino 🙂
The ATMega328 has 14 Digital Pins, 6 of which are PWM and an additional 6 x analogue inputs, problem is I needed 10 x PWM pins. The best option in this case is to use a shift register such as a 595 to extend your pins, but as I didn’t have one to hand, I decided to do it the hard way. There is a software library for the arduino SDK called : SoftPWM.h which lets you simulate PWM on any pin, which is quite useful to limit the hardware used and make better use of the processing power of the chip. So 4 hours of “figuring it out” yielded this result:
The basic functional requirement was simple:
When the brake pedal is pressed illuminate as normal
If the pedal is pressed for more than 5 seconds get your cylon on 🙂
You can download the sketch from the downloads section if you want to play with it. There are lots of arduino cyclon sketches around, but most / all of them are 6 LED’s or less due to the hardware PWM limitation, so this one lets you have up to 14 LEDs without moving into shift register world. and the schematic is below for your information:
This is isn’t the finished product btw, juts a learning experience on the way. I have some high powered LED’s on the way from China, and some shift registers in the post, as the main issue with doing this in software is speed and I need some more speed for some additional functions 🙂
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InfoSecI have seen some comments of late about the PSN hack being due to Sony having no firewalls in place and out of date Apache instances. A brief amount of research defuncts this assertion, however, I was genuinely surprised at the level and voracity of the comments around it. Most of which related to people essentially “living and dieing” by their firewalls. This position is ludicrous to say the least, as a firewall is but one control, not the be all and end all of security, and in my own personal experience, sometimes, they are simply not up to the task and you need to think outside the box.
So here is the problem……
You are designing/running a global gaming platform that is highly latency sensitive, your planning on having all the worlds gamers use your platform and push it to its limits. If you even drop one packet, you could frag someone in game and cause the most heinous flaming you have ever experienced resulting in lost customers for the company, but, it needs to be secure. What next?
Believe it or not, I have personally been in this scenario during my time at EA. I had to design, build and deploy the EMEA Online Web & Game Platform, as well as co-develop the global gaming platforms for the wider business. What I can share with you is that firewalls, no matter how big/good/expensive they are suffer 2 problems…. 1) They are a bottle neck into your environment that when you scale up to millions of users, is a problem, and 2) they introduce latency by doing their job.
So what are the options? Well on the one hand, you could design around the problem, spend a large amount of cash on the “biggest and best” firewalls money can buy, create smaller firewalled segments and multi-layer your network to cope with the limits of the firewalls perhaps? True, yes you could, but this additional complexity introduces more routing hops and more kit for the packets to flow through, which increases latency & degrades the overall experience for the players. Another option is to not use firewalls…..
So what do you do, when you cant put a firewall in place? easy 🙂 All a firewall is doing is a) controlling the flow of IP using an Access Control List & b) looking at the packet for something malicious in it (please note, I am specifically talking about a basic statefull inspection firewall (L3) and not anything extra in the UTM (L7) space, as these add way too much latency to packets for gaming consideration). Given that the firewall is performing these two simple tasks, all you need to do is replicate them elsewhere. Firstly, all your existing network infrastructure can handle the ACL function, easier and faster, and given the packets are already going through this kit, it doesn’t add any latency to the path. Next, its all about understanding the attack and being vigilant…..
Essentially, if your gonna break into a computer system, you need a few basic components:
A Threat Agent (Bad guy with motivation, we will call him Fred)
An Attack Vector (Something Bad he cooked up, like an SQL Injection)
An Attack Surface (Your infrastructure, applications etc)
A Vulnerability (Something you missed that matches Fred’s attack)
So, if Fred needs all these things to line up before he can achieve success, its all about making sure that you minimise your attack surface, and keep it vulnerability free.This is going to mean that you design your environment to be simple and easy to manage, and that you have some solid, well executed vulnerability management programmes in place, typically including real time (or near real time) monitoring of services for vulnerabilities, and excellent patching programmes, fully automated. Essentially, you want one system to identify a vulnerability in one of your web services, and tell the other system to patch it. It is possible to do and works well, but your gonna have to clean up the odd system failure, so make sure your system is highly resilient (by definition of the type of environment, it would be anyway). Now, I appreciate that a 0Day is going to pwn you, but guess what, it still would even with the firewall, so don’t get all upset about it, just have your CSIRT ready to go and make sure it is well oiled!
On that subject, this is one of the key controls you should have anyway, but wont. Your ability to respond to an issue, and appropriately deal with it is what people will observe. It doesn’t matter how good you are, how well you have designed something, at some point its all going to hit the fan. The other key control your going to need is monitoring, so you know when you need the CSIRT! You will need to implement full monitoring and alerting for the environment, from availability and security perspectives. You need to know everything, every device is doing at all times, because correlating this information can help you identify attacks in progress before they get anywhere near success. All your kit is already logging issues silently to itself, so your not going to add any extra burden on the environment, and typically, you would create a separate network to handle management traffic to keep it off your primary network anyway, so its not going to impact service delivery.
Also, when your talking about the gaming industry, typically, aside from the usual raft of web services running, your talking about very specific, proprietary services running on random ports to facilitate multi player gaming, so your “Threat Agents” are a limited pool of elite gamers, who’s typical motivation is not to pwn your systems and steal your data, but is usually limited to 1) administrative control of the game so they can kick who they don’t like out, and b) the ability to alter scores and leader board positions!
I would like to finish my brief rant/educational spout on a simple truth, firewalls don’t make you secure, they make you lazy.
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RH2B Build DiaryWhen I collected the car and drove it a few times in the winter was incredibly loud, like TO LOUD, and I like loud! So Something wasn’t quite right with the exhaust, and it needed to be sorted.
I removed the exhaust and bought some acouosti-mat sound deadening material to repack the exhaust only to discover it was not repack-able. Fortunately, a local fabricator said he would cut it open, repack and weld it back up for me, so that averted the crisis!
All that remained of the original packing material.
To say it needed doing was an understatement, it was completely empty of packing so was essentially a straight pipe with an echo chamber!
Once the fabricator sorted the packing for me, I wrapped it in exhaust wrap, reinstalled the heat shield and put it back on the car. The sound was much more palatable. Sporty, throaty but not deafening!
Much better!
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InfoSecCourtesy of the Institute for Information Security Professionals
As I mentioned in the opening CEO article, the inaugural Top Gun event in Manchester was a great success on many fronts. We had 20 participants, organised into the Red and Blue teams, plus 5 members of the Control Team, and the day just seemed to fly past, so intense was the concentration, interaction, ingenuity and fun.
We cannot give too much away as to the content of the case study or the processes we followed on the day, for fear that we might spoil some of the element of surprise for participants in future events. Suffice to say that those who were there threw themselves into the exercise and, accordingly got the most out of it, as well as proposing a few additional suggestions for developing and improving it for future players.
Let us however, convey the particular views of a member of one of the teams, and let them tell you what they thought of the event.
“TopGun, The Blue View. (Jay Abbott, PwC)
I have to admit, I was genuinely sceptical about the TopGun event as the idea of playing the Security equivalent of Battleships during one of my busiest times of the year was not one that featured far up the “to do” list, that said, I am genuinely pleased that I made the time to attend. We arrived with very little information about what was planned, and were immediately split into two teams, Red and Blue, The Red were of course the attackers, and Blue were the defenders and the teams split had been pre-planned by the organisers to ensure that a good cross section of skills rested in each team to keep things fair.
The remit was simple, we each were given suitable pieces of a puzzle, i.e. some deliberately sketchy information related to the organisation, typical of that you would find on your first day of work or your first information gathering exercise. From there it was a case of building a better picture of what you have and figuring out the best way forward (sound familiar?). At this point, the teams were physically split and departed into adjacent “war rooms” to prepare their respective strategies. We each could communicate with our “control” staff, who acted as the coordination of the event and holders of information. The co-ordination role was pivotal in the success of the event as they were able to coordinate the virtual attack and defence strategies in real-time to keep the feeling of real-life and to ensure that the game was fair.
From a blue perspective it was business as usual, we had a budget and an environment to protect, we had to evaluate the skills in our team, establish specialism’s that could work in key streams, and run the entire thing like a project.
All in all it was a very worthwhile day that created a great deal of discussion and provoked much debate. What I personally took from the day was something that I see all too often, but is perhaps not as obvious to all, to quote Paul Dorey on the day it is summed up in the phrase “Security is Asymmetric”. Put simply this is the fact that someone attacking an organisation need only find one hole or vulnerability in order to succeed, while those protecting the organisation must try to plug every hole and mitigate every vulnerability to be secure.”
Event wrap-up discussion and lessons learnt – great work everyone!
The participants captured their comments on an evaluation form and we are reviewing and acting on those comments. They also scored the event out of a scale of 1 to 5, and rated the event at 4.3 overall, but with specific scores of 4.5 for facilitation and presentation, and 4.6 for opportunity to discuss and exchange ideas. A great success by any measure.
Thanks to all involved, and to PwC, our hosts for the day.
Courtesy of the Institute for Information Security Professionals
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