[ale] Opera Reinvents the Internet?

[aaron]

On 2009, Jul, 24, , at 9:12 AM, Brandon Checketts wrote:

> Interesting concept I guess, but I don't see it really taking off.
>> From a technical standpoint, I see several problems:
>
> - I don't want to leave my computer on 24/7 so that my friends can
> access my content

For the ability to personally access my home system, I'd leave it on
24/7.  There are probably dozens of people on this list who have
systems at home that are on 24/7.  With properly working APCI and
such, the power consumption is minimal and most us privileged people
aren't going to think twice about this.

> - Bandwidth issues with serving content from a home connection which
> commonly has uploads capped at 384 kbps

The suggestion was not that this service was for high volume
accessibility.  Even the 384 kbps window is plenty adequate for
serving a personal web page and personal files for family, friends
and small business clients.

Also, 384 kbps is a U.S. number. Hate to break it to you, but we're
not the only country on the planet and we don't have the most  
technically
advanced infrastructures (for instance, our greed before need health
care infrastructure costs at least twice as much as in any other
country's and yet we still have the shortest life expectancy and
the highest infant mortality rates among all of our much more
affordable peers).

Additionally, once public pressure for private upload bandwidth
surpasses the the fraud market forces that are desperately
clinging to antique top down distribution models, the upload
capacity here will start to match that of the civilized world.

> - The promotional text doesn't make it clear if the servers operate on
> standard ports.  I would hope so, but if the target market is
> non-technical users, you are going to need them to enable port
> forwarding on their routers, which is not trivial.  It hints that  
> these
> services us some kind of peer-to-peer protocol, but doing that limits
> usage to just Opera users, meaning this will never get enough momentum
> to really take off.

I'm in process of getting the beta of this to work on a Mac OSeX
PPC right now, but the beta 2 update looks to be broken and I can't
track port usage yet, nor do I know how easy it will be to go out
through my firewall. All I can add is that a proxy server is among
the user GUI configurable service packages.

There is a lot to read on the Opera site, but the documentation
does state that remote access is available from any standards
compliant browser which is why I also noted this specifically in
my post:
===
>>   All the services
>> can be managed from within an Opera browser via a simple,
>> user friendly interface, and then accessed from any other
>> standards compliant web browser on the net.
===

> My take:  Shared hosting services are cheap and bypass all of these
> problems and still own your own content.   You are, of course,  
> dependent
> on your hosting provider, but most of them are decent enough.

My take is that most of the "problems" you suggest either aren't
there or are entirely trivial in the context of the intended use.

In trying to set this up, though, I do have question marks around
the potential security issues.  Another big question issue comes
from the service's requirement of a registration account with Opera --
I am assuming that the Opera account and servers are needed as a
kind of routing arbiter for establishing the initial peer to peer
links with non-opera browsers, much like the way internet phone
calls are handled (in my understanding of how that works, anyway).

The service does not require a registered domain name for your
personal web pages, so it would make sense that an outside routing
agent would be needed. The remote access URL's talked  about in the
"Getting Started" video took some form of "xxx.opera.com/username".

I'll know more about those question points once I get this damn
beta working. You'd think that at these prices they could get it
right before they released it! ;-)

peace
aaron


> aaron wrote:
>> Opera just reinvented the internet.
>>
>> OK. I take that back. That's a bit overboard.
>> They didn't just reinvent the internet.
>>
>> However, what they did just do is very close.
>>
>> They just made it a totally trivial matter for everyone
>> on the web to become their own hosting service provider
>> using their own, private home based systems.
>>
>> Opera Unite repackages all the common internet services
>> (web server, file server, media server, etc.) within
>> a peer to peer networking protocol.

>>   All the services
>> can be managed from within an Opera browser via a simple,
>> user friendly interface, and then accessed from any other
>> standards compliant web browser on the net.
>>
>> http://unite.opera.com/
>> http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/06/16/
>>
>> Pretty mind blowing idea, IMHO.  I should be sleeping,
>> but I just had to share this first!
>>
>> peace
>> aaron
>>
>>
>> PS: This item came to my attention in the latest Linux
>> format issue, which arrived at my home this afternoon.
>> I'm about 10 pages in and so far I've hit about a dozen
>> really useful bits of information.  I'll have to try
>> to share some of those other ones with y'all later. ;-)
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ale mailing list
>> Ale at ale.org
>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale