Ars Technica Features

Most members of Anonymous would prefer to stay, well, anonymous. But as the group has engaged in increasingly high-profile attacks on government and corporate websites, doing so effectively and staying out of harm's way have become an ever-growing challenge. To protect itself, the group has altered its tactics over the past year to both increase the firepower of its attacks and shield members from the prying eyes of law enforcement.

As the Arab Spring hits its first anniversary, tech activists around the globe are continuing their efforts to enable secure communications—especially in areas of the world that are in conflict or transition. After all, it's become an open secret that governments ranging from Assad's Syria to local American law enforcement to the newly created government of South Sudan are actively trying to find out what is being said and transmitted over their airwaves and networks.

In response to the pressure, a huge range of projects, apps and strategies have been designed to protect mobile communications (voice, text, and data) as well as more traditional Wi-Fi networks and even individual computers.

These projects are being developed all over the world by some small, local organizations, as well as larger, more ambitious projects that are receiving funding from the likes of the New America Foundation. The organization is a key part of the US Department of State's $70 million being spent on "Internet freedom" projects, including a so-called "Internet-in-a-suitcase" deployment.

Nicholas Negroponte, the head of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, sure knows how to get people's attention. About three months ago, the venerable ed-tech evangelist told the Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco that his organization would "literally take tablets and drop them out of helicopters," and return a year later to see if the effort was a success.

While the comment has faced criticism from those in technology and education circles, it certainly made a splash. OLPC still makes a laptop (the XO 1.75), but the organization now has its eyes firmly set on its new tablet (the XO 3), a solar-powered device that the group describes as "unbreakable and without holes in it."

Consider the tech it takes to back the search box on Google's home page: behind the algorithms, the cached search terms, and the other features that spring to life as you type in a query sits a data store that essentially contains a full-text snapshot of most of the Web. While you and thousands of other people are simultaneously submitting searches, that snapshot is constantly being updated with a firehose of changes. At the same time, the data is being processed by thousands of individual server processes, each doing everything from figuring out which contextual ads you will be served to determining in what order to cough up search results.

The storage system backing Google's search engine has to be able to serve millions of data reads and writes daily from thousands of individual processes running on thousands of servers, can almost never be down for a backup or maintenance, and has to perpetually grow to accommodate the ever-expanding number of pages added by Google's Web-crawling robots. In total, Google processes over 20 petabytes of data per day.

From iOS and Android to BlackBerry and Windows Phone, the app store model has become the main way mobile device users find, download, and update their software. And with employees increasingly begging for access to corporate resources from smartphones and tablets, IT departments are starting to wonder whether they should jump into the app store business themselves.

"The public app store is kind of the wild, wild West," Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond tells Ars. Private app stores, hosted for the employees of a single business, are receiving “a lot of interest from the clients I talk to. Folks realize that self-provisioning is the long-term trend."

The desktop benchmark scores for AMD's new Bulldozer architecture didn't make happy reading for fans of the chip company, with the new design sometimes failing to beat AMD's own predecessor architecture, let alone Intel's comparable offerings. Hope still persisted, however, that the processor's architecture might fare better when tasked with server workloads. With the release last week of AMD's first Bulldozer server processors, branded the Opteron 6200 series and codenamed "Interlagos," a host of such benchmarks have arrived from AMD and others.

One reason for the underwhelming performance on the desktop is that the Bulldozer architecture emphasizes multithreaded performance over single-threaded performance. For desktop applications, where single-threaded performance is still king, this is a problem. Server workloads, in contrast, typically have to handle multiple users, network connections, and virtual machines concurrently. This makes them a much better fit for processors that support lots of concurrent threads. Some commentators have even suggested that Bulldozer was, first and foremost, a server processor; relatively weak desktop performance was to be expected, but it would all come good in the server room.

Unfortunately for AMD, it looks as though the decisions that hurt Bulldozer on the desktop continue to hurt it in the server room. Although the server benchmarks don't show the same regressions as were found on the desktop, they do little to justify the design of the new architecture.