Opera Unite
Tuesday, June 16, 2009 11:39:03
Last week, the makers of Opera, one of the top mobile browsers and a reasonably successful full-scale browser, promised a new technology that would change the web forever, without providing any additional details. This announcement caused all kinds of speculation, from enhanced cloud computing, to advanced syncing software, to personal web servers. It turns out that personal web servers is what it was.
Today, Opera announced the new feature, called Opera Unite. It promises an easy and safe way to share files, media, web sites, and notes, without a lot of technical knowledge that's typically required for such an undertaking. Of course, hosting a personal web server is not anything new, but it has never really been anything that the average person has been able to do. Opera's goal is to bring this technology to the everyday user.
There's plenty of support out there for easily sharing files with people. Social networking sites like Facebook let you easily share things like pictures and videos, with no technical knowledge required. Sites like Flickr are designed to let you share and organize photos, again with no technical knowledge. However, all of these force you to rely on other companies to host and store your data. If they are undergoing maintenance, or if by some chance get attacked and lose your data, then you're out of luck. Hosting your files locally gives you full control over your data. Store what you want, where you want, and you don't even have to upload them to a central server. You're not limited to file sizes, picture resolution, or anything other than the size of your hard drive and your outgoing bandwidth.
There are plenty of concerns with this technology. First and foremost is security. I haven't found any information on exactly how this will work, but I can only assume that this requires opening a port on your PC (and router) to the outside world, which exposes you just a little bit more to hackers and other low-life dirtbags out there. I'm sure Opera is doing everything they can to keep your system safe, but hackers get more and more creative every day.
EDIT: I found some more technical details on how the server connects to the world, and it turns out that you don't need to open ports. Users from the outside world connect to a central Opera server, and your home server also connects to that server, asking if anyone is making a request. So your home server just connects via normal outgoing channels to the server, instead of someone connecting directly to you. This has the effect of being safer, but also means that if the Opera servers are down, then you lose connectivity to your server, which was one of the benefits of having a home server in the first place.
One complaint that has already come up is the fact that this is not scalable, the way centralized servers are. You are limited to your network's upload speed, and your PC's performance. Multiple people connecting at the same time will experience pitiful download speeds, compared with the majority of the web. However, thinking about your target audience, I'm sure this is fine for most people. The people who use this won't have thousands of people connecting to their site - probably just a few, and probably not all at once. If you are planning on running a full-fledged business or multimedia center for the public, then this probably isn't for you.
This solution requires that the host keep their computer on and connected at all times, if they want their data available for download/update. This is an unreasonable requirement for users on laptops, and many others who don't want to leave their machines on 24 hours a day.
Data would be protected via passwords, but from what I've seen, there is no encryption of the requests and responses, meaning basic hacking techniques would succeed in stealing passwords, and therefore data. Obviously, sensitive materials should not be stored in any way where the application can see it.
Although Opera claims that they do not monitor people's files, they do have the power to block users who they have received complaints against - people sharing copyrighted materials, for example. This may be too much power for a software company to wield. This type of control currently exists only with your ISP, and that's really where it belongs.
I predict that Unite will be a good start to this self-hosting phenomenon. However, Opera has enjoyed only very limited success as a browser, and I don't see the majority of the community adopting this first attempt at a simple home web server. I'd expect to see other similar products arise from competitors, each with their own benefits, and a clear winner not determined for years to come. And until home servers are commonplace the way desktops/laptops are, and a new bandwidth paradigm is reached, I don't expect this to be widely used.
Tags: browser tech
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