Sunday, October 19, 2014

The art of ghosting

What is the art of ghosting?
Ghosting means to establish invisible presence, and gain invisible access, where you should not have access, getting information which you should not have, and trust, to make the environment, to work for you, without raising any suspicion, while being hidden where no one will ever look for you – in plain sight – in front of everyone’s eyes.


What is a ghost?
Ghost is a person who is skilled at social engineering, skilled in long term planning ahead of time, able to collect information and assemble the pieces of the puzzle using current line of events and circumstances as a layout to assemble the pieces of the puzzle.


What a ghost is capable of?
Well developed and well established ghost is capable of ALMOST anything at his will and convenience. Well ALMOST anything.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Few useful tips how to increase the lifespan of an SSD



Few useful tips how to increase the lifespan of an SSD

1. Do not defragment your SSD. SSD does not suffer performance loss caused by fragmentation.  Defragmenting it, will only fatigue it, but it will not increase it’s performance. You sacrifice it’s life for nothing in return. Slowing down on an SSD, means the SSD is wearing out, and it needs wear leveling. Slowing down of an SSD is caused down, because of Error correction code being used, to try to correct not fully or not properly read data, after multiple retries to make a good read. Self Healing and wear leveling will fix this for some number of times, but ultimately, the SSD will die.

Bicycle brakes - brake pads alignment



Bicycle brakes  - brake pads alignment

Bicycle brakes evolved over time, increasing stopping power, from inadequate low – so low, it is beyond useless, to insanely high – modern hydraulic disc brakes, offer incredible amount of braking power, by gently squeezing them with one finger. The biggest breakthrough came when engineers, realized 2 things:

1 That you can create insanely strong brakes, but if braking pads are NOT properly aligned, this braking power is lost. This is why adjustable brake pads were created, with some free play designed into them in order to allow them to align properly.

2. The brake must have proper balance left-to-right, in order to distribute brakeforce evenly.

Disc brake dynamics - The actual difference between mechanical disc brake and hydraulic disc brake



Disc brake dynamics - The actual difference between mechanical disc brake and hydraulic disc brake

Regardless how much engineers try to convince us, that modern high end mechanical disc brakes, controlled by high-end braking cables and high-end cable housings, can be real match to a hydraulic disc brake, the actual picture is quite different. Mechanical brakes suffer from cable stretching, regardless of everything. Yes, yes, I know the blah-blah-blah-blah that high-end cable in high-end cable housing do not suffer that much as low-end cables in low-end housings… but at the end of the day, the high-end cable also stretches. Even this combo has so called slack, which appears and accumulates during long term use. This is the reason for the brake to be inefficient, in most cases. Another issue is that almost all mechanical disk brakes have only one moving piston, which moves only one brake pad. In this case the static one must be set up properly a tiny hair away from braking disk, in order to make it work at all. This is the reason for 50% of inefficiency, and the braking cable stretching is the other reason that causes inefficiency.