Opera CEO Claims Unite is Secure, But That's Not Its Real Problem
In a recent interview with Network World, Opera CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, defends the company's upcoming web browser (Opera 10)'s "Unite" feature - the new technology that turns your browser into a web server. He said that Unite's decentralized nature makes it more difficult for hackers to break into computer systems - not easier.
That claim is probably meant to fight back against some people's initial concerns that hosting files on their own PC will leave them open to attack. However, simply addressing security issues is somewhat missing the point about the real trouble with Unite: it's not solving a problem we actually have.
Opera Unite: Just as Secure as Anything Else, We Promise
According to the interview, Tetzchner addresses the concerns of those in the security community who fear this technology that aims to put a web server on every PC. He says, "when you're hacking a single system, if you have everything that belongs to everyone in one location, you only need to break in once. If you have it in different computers it's a little more complicated. If you get into one Web server and everyone's data is in there, that's easier than getting into a million computers."
While Opera and the tech community continue to debate the technology's security or lack thereof, the rest of the tech early adopters have simply moved on. Outside of the Opera fanatics (we know who you are!), most of us either skimmed the news briefly or, at the most, may have downloaded the alpha and played with it for a bit. But did the lot of us switch browsers and start sharing files? No.
Why is that? Shouldn't this be just the sort of thing that has techies all a'twitter? What's going on?
Where's the Geek Love?
When Opera revealed the mysterious (and perhaps overly-hyped) Unite, they probably didn't get the response they expected. After numerous emails and teases about a new technology that was going to "reinvent the web," for the most part, the community response was "huh?"
Oh sure, Opera fanboys and girls got it right away as did web developers and other geekier-than-thou folks, but even within the tech community itself, there was confusion...and a bit of "bah humbug" too.
We remember reading through various blog comments where users dismissed Unite as nothing more special than a browser with P2P plugins - a statement that's only true to a point. While the technology enables P2P between browsers, it does so via a proxy server in the middle at operaunite.com. That middle service could easily be a single point of failure for the Unite infrastructure. Opera Unite's proxy goes down, you go down. Sure, that might not be any different than the cloud services we rely on now: Gmail, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, etc. However, even if one of those was to crash-and-burn, it wouldn't take our whole web of services down with it.
But Unite wants to replace just about every cloud app you use today with its own apps for file sharing, social note-posting, chat, photo sharing, and media playing...and that's not to mention how Unite wants to let you host your own web server, too. In other words, Opera wants to (partially) move the cloud back off the the web to your PC.
They even go so far as to claim that their single point of failure is an improvement on what we do today: "We place our trust in these third parties, and we hope for the best, but as long as our own computers are not first class citizens on the Web, we are merely tenants, and hosting companies are the landlords of the Internet," writes product analyst Lawrence Eng.
Thanks, but we'll take our numerous cloud apps over the Unite+PC combo any day.
What Problem Does Unite Solve?
When we started moving from desktop to web, initially testing the waters with email services, later moving to photo and video sharing services, and finally to social networking sites like Facebook that let us communicate and share media, the solutions being implemented were solving real challenges. Setting up desktop email was hard for non-techies (what's my email server's address? what's SMTP?). There were mailbox storage limits and attachment size limits. Letting grandma and grandpa see our digital photos wasn't easy. Getting in touch and staying in touch with our wide network of friends was downright impossible. But then these web applications came along and made it possible for everyone to use technology. They were simple, straightforward, and fun. And soon a Web revolution was underway. A real one, that is.
What problem does Opera Unite solve that could kick off the next revolution of the web? Are we having trouble with cloud services? Are we concerned that they're so insecure that moving everything via P2P through Opera is somehow better? Is Unite easier than Facebook? Than flickr? Heck, than email? No.
It's not easier for us techies by any means (especially since its tied to one browser) and it's not even close to being easy for the "regular folks" of the online world...you know, the ones who don't even know what a browser is
So security concerns aside, what is Unite doing for us that we can't get elsewhere? Anyone?
If you think we're missing the point, chime in below.
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I do think you've missed the point. Whether or not Unite catches on, it points toward a different way of constructing web applications, one that adopts a decentralized peer-to-peer approach for sharing information.
Will end users care about this? Of course not. Unite is a platform, not an application. Nobody's written a "killer app" for Unite yet. But web developers and software designers should care, because a peer model enables new kinds of services and applications to be built.
P.S. Results of an informal Twitter poll. I asked, "are you using Opera Unite?" Here's what people said: http://www.flickr.com/photos/79756943@N00/3697467697/
Initially I was excited about the prospect of using Unite. However, after just a couple of days, I had to remove it from my system. Why? 2 reasons: 1) Serving files was extremely slow. A friend downloading a file from me had to wait a LOT longer than if he'd downloaded it from the cloud somewhere. 2) The services that were running on my system were making my system become grindingly slow. Even when no one else was interacting with my system, my computer was brought to its knees by Unite. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but ... not.
Indeed as Dean commented, this can mean major news for developers, but not so for end users. Why would an end user want to set up a personal web server? there can be various needs, but if the need is common enough, a specialty service would have long been created, as is the case with blogging platforms. There is also an inherent problem in the Unite approach since any serious killer app development will need Opera end-users in order to leverage it, so there is a bootstrapping issue here.
In any case, Opera did bring it on themselves by announcing an infrastructure product as "reinventing the web", which for today's audience sounds like an end user declaration. But truth be told, "INVENTING the web" back in 1991 was an infrastructure step in the first place...
I really don't see how any one can get behind unite. The services are up and down and something you were using an hour ago is gone because the person offering the service closed their browser or shut of their computer.
If it were to blow out into a fully peer-to-peer, model with strong data replication across the peers, relatively reliable services might be doable, but only the most popular of applications would work.
Once you have a huge peer-to-peer service, then there are the issues of privacy. Imagine if Facebook were peer-to-peer, and your personal data that you had marked to be friends only was being distributed across hundreds of random machines.
Kelly - a p2p approach could be secure, in much the same way that you can securely store data in an insecure cloud - by encrypting the data before transfer.
In a p2p system blocks could be scattered randomly around, such that there would be no full retrievable details on specific machines.
The question is whether people would be happy having other peoples private data sat, encrypted, on their machines (and indeed whether that would even be legal in some countries / what the legal implications are of you storing copyright or illegal material on your hard drive)
"So security concerns aside, what is Unite doing for us that we can't get elsewhere? " - Uh.... nothing. At all. Solution looking for a problem. Unite does nothing for me that I can't do with current P2P apps. The only people using P2P apps regularly are people illegally sharing copyrighted material. I only use P2P when I need to download a copy of some piece of open source software.
Posted by: http://khurt.com/blog/
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July 7, 2009 9:47 AM
One of the issues Unite could solve is personal media hosting. I'm not talking about Flickr or YouTube here, but hosting files that are too large for email. Like that HD video clip you'd want to send to a friend without having it converted to Flash by YouTube first.
One-click-hosting is a pain in the butt, and most of the more user-friendly file hosters have either given up or gone pro. Heck, even companies like HP and AOL haven't figured out how to monetize file hosting and closed their offerings in this space in recent months.
There are a few interesting P2P solutions for personal file sharing out there, but most require both sides to install a client. That may be fine for us, but it's too high of a barrier for most users. And, honestly, I'm sick of convincing my friends and family of services, only to see them shut down a few months after (Allpeers, Tubesnow, Podmailing, ...).
Offering media sharing as an integral part of your browser would go a long way towards mass adoption.
Of course, Opera Unite has its own sets of issues. The proxy server has been completely overwhelmed for the last week or so, and the fact that you need to both commit to a new browser and sign up for an Opera account first doesn't really help either. But it's an interesting idea ...
When I first heard of it, I thought it was a great idea... Downloaded the new version of Opera, fired it up... and was confronted with the "must sign up for an account" message...
What??
That completely defeats the purpose in my book... and lowers the whole "free the web" rhetoric to a simple marketing gimmick.
If anything, Unite lowered my respect towards Opera and what I thought it stood for.
1. Enhanced Extensions API
2. Massive Hype
3. ??? Killer App ???
4. Profit
You should consider researching your articles first. You've regurgitated several common misconceptions like the proxy server. These were debunked weeks ago, the same day Unite was released. http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2009/06/17/responding-to-unite-misconceptions
At first I thought it was over-hyped, but at the same time I see it was more of a marketing failure...they didn't clearly communicate the potential. Which is partially forgivable, because it's a platform. Before the invention of email, it'd be a bit like saying the internet doesn't solve any problems.
Anyway, something that made it clear to me that it is a much more flexible and powerful platform than I originally assumed: http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2009/06/19/in-2007-opera-unite-powered-rc-cars
Be a little more open-minded. You don't have to like it, but you don't have to bash it a month after the beta release before any third party has even had a chance to write apps. Then again, that's pretty much par for course for tech reporters covering Opera.
Opera cures cancer->people whine that the cure gave them a headache->Firefox/Google steal cure and add aspiring to drug cocktail->sites report about Firefox/Google's awesome innovation
Great post Sarah.
The only way unite would be worthwhile is if they had added several P2P technologies (p2p stream, p2p caching, etc,etc) into Unite. otherwise is close to worthless unless you have at least 10mb of upload speed.. What % in North America got those upload speeds?. 1%?, 10%? (doubtful) = i rest my case. Unite would be something great if it was not already been done by another company (tonido) and if it didn't commit some of the very same mistakes similar solutions had in the last 15 years.
I'm interested in anything that is peer-to-peer and doesn't depend on stealing Hollywood's music and video as its reason for being. Opera Unite is anti-cloud (or at least non-cloud) and I think that is a very good thing. I would prefer to keep my data in my own hands.
As with any new platform, it will take other developers and pioneering users to determine if this has legs. If it makes it easier for users to develop their own applications and if it counters some of the frailties of cloud-based services, then Opera Unite has a future.
Keep an open mind. If you hear tell of interesting developments in Opera Unite, let us know.
Unite is in fact.... interesting. And I am appreciative that the effort has been made to decentralize the net which is beocming more and more commercialized.
Look, it might not work perfectly. It might now make total sense. And it's not the most practical technology. No shit.
The marketing was flawed. It should have taken a low-key approach to releasing Unite as part of thewir next-generation broswer. They should have let it be discovered and hyped by real people, not a marketing campaign. But at the same time, they are truly excited about what they are doing and they wanted to express that excitement and hope that others would see it the same way. That did'nt happen. Opera is like Ralph Nader. Idealistic and 100% logical and necessary. But can;t get the mass appeal. Why? Because we the people are so used to being used as little entities that help larger entities massively succeed while giving us grand illusions.
Is Unite a cloud killer or a cloud expander? Does it put everyday users into the cloud as servers or does it remove our dependency from the cloud? If you were to look at the borader view... I'd argue that the cloud itself does become larger and more decentralized as more peers start serving digital content. If the cloud eventuallly equals a small set of mega-companies (Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo)... then is this cloud properly representative of the Internet that was invented? Is it a bad thing to maintain self-hosting entities and peer hosting entities? Absolutely not. It needs to be encouraged, despite the flaws. We need to encourage people to independently pay for traditioanl web hosting and leverage those services more than they do today.... and have less dependence on commercial ventures looking to monetize your everyday existance and exposure on the net.
I am not against the mega-companies that are succeeding and providing great services to our culture. But I am concerned about the lack of balance moving forward... about the attitude the people have who want what they want at whatever cultural cost. The easy road. The illusion of freedom. While you are being farmed and brainwashed by corporate influence and absorbed by modern day data colleciton and analysis technology.
Thats fine. No need to be paranoid. Its all for the better... to get you properly targeted by services that can improve your life etc etc...
But look... if we shun every new approach to the internets... that is in truth, an original approach at the beginning... then what are we going to have in the future?
The internet will just be another controlled closed expensive broadcast pipe feeding us data that mostly we can happily consume but not so easily distribute our own ourselves.
Even if this does not ever come to fruition in our lifetimes... it is the sheer possibility that is written into the terms and conditions of the corporate Internet that we will be forced to use...that will be enough to let us know that it has been lost. Because people wanted conveniences and did not have interest in open technologies that tried to balance the state of the Internet... as that would be too inconvenient and its much easier to taint it and complain about it and mock it. Like this blog post, in fact.
sull
You can tell that there's real negative sentiment out there against this company for a lot of reasons other than it's products. Comments are always emotionally colored when it comes to our software, but they get especially so when the talk turns to Opera (lol)
Here's the thing, 'the future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed yet' while you guys are debating whether facebook has hit it's peak or not, and what the next facebook is, tools like Opera are making it easier for people - individuals - to make the next facebook.
Is it as easy? Absolutely not. But is setting up a LAMP stack or Linux Home Server?? Not even close. Now, Mac's are have the capacity to be servers right out of the box too...this is great.
the point is, the idea. the core technology behind unite is actually really impressive. It's damn server writen in javascript running, hosting a functional chat on your laptop, like in a browser tab. That's a big deal.
Maybe I'm getting old, but that would have been unfathomable, not all that long ago.
O My God! This is a bunch of negativity just to start a flame war!
I mean, the software is still in beta and has not been released in afinal state to all users, you can't expect to have al the end user having adopted a beta of a service that's not totally ready.
Moreover, Unite will be fully powered the day spme dev begin to devellop services for it, as for now, only few have been released as a showcase.
Concerning th esecurity issue, it has been stated that services are just widgets integrated into the browser. So they have the same security force/issue, but no one complained for the widget.
Strange World, Strange People...
"While Opera and the tech community continue to debate the technology's security or lack thereof, the rest of the tech early adopters have simply moved on."
Says who? Based on what?
"But did the lot of us switch browsers and start sharing files?"
It isn't even a finished product yet, duh.
"After numerous emails and teases about a new technology that was going to "reinvent the web," for the most part, the community response was "huh?""
Really! And you say that based on what, exactly?
"While the technology enables P2P between browsers, it does so via a proxy server in the middle at operaunite.com."
Only if UPnP fails.
"But Unite wants to replace just about every cloud app you use today"
It does? Says who?
I thought it was meant to be an alternative
"Is Unite easier than Facebook?"
Is Unite supposed to BE Facebook?
"So security concerns aside, what is Unite doing for us that we can't get elsewhere? Anyone?"
Your own web server which takes 5 seconds to start, and lets you do all sorts of stuff that you used to have to rely on other services for.
Oh, and Sarah Perez "also writes for Microsoft's Channel 10". Not biased at all, are we?
This article is nothing but nonsensical drivel.
@http://khurt.com/blog/
"Solution looking for a problem."
So you don't want to control your own data and be able to server content right from your computer?
"Unite does nothing for me that I can't do with current P2P apps."
Can other P2P apps be accessed with any browser? Can they be used for anything from file sharing to music streaming to controllin RC cars?
Maybe you should educate yourself about what Unite is before spouting nonsense?
@Yann
"Downloaded the new version of Opera, fired it up... and was confronted with the "must sign up for an account" message...
What??
That completely defeats the purpose in my book... and lowers the whole "free the web" rhetoric to a simple marketing gimmick."
Uh, you don't have to sign up. You only have to do it if you want a pretty operaunite.com domain name for yourself. You can choose: Sign up anonymously for Opera's domain name for free, or sign up with your personal information for a real domain name, and pay.
"If anything, Unite lowered my respect towards Opera and what I thought it stood for."
Crazy talk.
@Avatar X
"The only way unite would be worthwhile is if they had added several P2P technologies (p2p stream, p2p caching, etc,etc) into Unite. otherwise is close to worthless unless you have at least 10mb of upload speed.."
Nonsense. The whole point of Unite is to access stuff from your own computer with any browser.
"Unite would be something great if it was not already been done by another company (tonido) and if it didn't commit some of the very same mistakes similar solutions had in the last 15 years."
What similar solutions?
This article is nothing but FUD, and the comments are misguided nonsense.
My 2 cents.
Tonido is light years ahead of Opera Unite. Unlike Unite Tonido is a true P2P solution as well as a personal web platform. It offers a powerful SDK unlike Unite's defined javascript api's. Even though it is getting good traction among users, when will the bay area tech media shower its precious attention to Tonido remains a big question mark (sucks to be a small guy).
My 2 cents.
Tonido is light years ahead of Opera Unite. Unlike Unite Tonido is a true P2P solution as well as a personal web platform. It offers a powerful SDK unlike Unite's defined javascript api's. Even though it is getting good traction among users, when will the bay area tech media shower its precious attention to Tonido remains a big question mark (sucks to be a small guy).
Why did dyno and AzizBey post the exact same comments about 2 weeks apart? Post bot? Spam?
I don't believe opera unite will ever replace, or even compliment social networking sites. And nobody in the right mind would host a legitimate website from their one computer. But I do find it useful as a kind of amped up widget. I have used it to share a couple of pictures and files that I only want to send to one or two people, but do not want to take the time attaching them to e-mails or uploading them to a server, then deleting them right after. Plus its nice when I can upload a file from anywhere, directly to my computer without having to install any special software on the other computer. I keep a folder with files that I wish to share with people, and a folder that anyone can upload to with a 100Mb Limit on it. I like it this way because I can share files with anyone with any browser directly from my computer, and the files simply disappear when I'm not around. So nobody can see or messes with my stuff when I'm not there.
Unite has already replaced social networking sites as a way for me to share photos. It's much easier to just share a folder on my PC than to upload stuff to other sites. Besides, I won't have to worry about those sites stealing my pics either.