Tadlock Enterprises » cloud computing http://www.tadlockenterprises.com A specialized west coast firm focused on product and technology vision, planning and execution. Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:45:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Hack a Wireless Network for $17 http://www.tadlockenterprises.com/2009/12/hack-a-wireless-network-for-17/ http://www.tadlockenterprises.com/2009/12/hack-a-wireless-network-for-17/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:00:08 +0000 Craig Tadlock http://www.tadlockenterprises.com/?p=371 Cloud computing has started to change the way we think about building and hosting applications. The access to large computing resources on demand has allowed applications to rapidly handle their scaling needs. But it also has other uses… like breaking (oh, I mean testing) your (someone else’s) wireless network. WPA Cracker is a cloud solution to crack WPA-PSK wireless networks. It does this by leveraging a 400 CPU cluster and  a 135 million word dictionary. You just need to upload your network traffic capture to their server and after a bit of crunching it spits out they key. They claim it takes about 20 minutes to break, which will cost you all of $17. I think this is great. I’m pretty sure professional hacking groups had access to these types of resources in the past; so it’s really nothing new. Hopefully now that it has become a bit more public people will take the proper security steps to protect their networks, servers and data.

]]> http://www.tadlockenterprises.com/2009/12/hack-a-wireless-network-for-17/feed/ 0 Cloud Processing for Client Applications http://www.tadlockenterprises.com/2009/11/cloud-processing-for-client-applications/ http://www.tadlockenterprises.com/2009/11/cloud-processing-for-client-applications/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:54:57 +0000 Craig Tadlock http://www.tadlockenterprises.com/?p=166 Funny, I was just wondering about something this morning… then I check the latest tech news and sure enough there is an article similar to what I was thinking! So here it is… Cloud/grid computing is all the rage these days. In the current model you put your entire application in the cloud and run it from there. This is good for some things like web servers and databases, but not great for other things. Applications that don’t fit well into the current cloud model tend to be very rich UI focused applications; for example most of the applications you run on your desktop/laptop. However there is a subset of those desktop applications that at time require intense processing power, much more that your little desktop/laptop can provide. Examples of this include compiling code (VS.NET), transcoding audio/video, crazy Excel spreadsheets… What you really want is a local application experience but use the power of the cloud for the intense processing tasks. Imagine this; you are using VS.NET and TFS for a large enterprises system with several applications and databases. When you click rebuild all, it automatically puts your changes into a shelveset on the server, kicks off a server build (which leverages a huge CPU farm of build servers), then when done copies the outputs to your local machine. This would be great for huge systems! At Spot Runner it took 5+ minutes to rebuild the entire solution on the local developer machines. We had the choice of either upgrading 100 engineer’s systems to be more powerful (expensive) or leaving it be and paying the cost in developer productivity (more expensive). This would have solved both problems by giving faster rebuild times and allowing us to maximize the usage of our cap-ex server expenditure by centralizing it. There really isn’t anything stopping this from becoming reality. I could see a model both where the computing-cloud is internal to the corporate network or an external cloud (Amazon, Microsoft, Google…). I have to imagine these companies are already working on this. If you know anything about this, let me know!

http://techflash.com/seattle/2009/11/microsoft_juicing_up_excel.html

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