

What Opera is about to Unveil? - techdog
http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2009/06/heres-what-opera-is-about-to-unveil.html

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lucumo
Hmmmm... This fellow's suggestion may sound far-fetched, but if you look at
the source code of the page by Opera:

    
    
      <!-- 	
      We start our little story with the invention of the modern day computer. 
      Over the years, the computers grew in numbers, and the next natural step in the evolution was to connect them together. To share things.
      But as these little networks grew, some computers gained more power than the rest and called themselves servers ...
      -->
    

I'm not sure what to make of it...

~~~
niyazpk

       All computers are having enough power that each of them can become a server now?

~~~
sketerpot
Wimpy little 50 cent microcontrollers can be servers. I have personally done
this.

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boundlessdreamz
I know general guidelines say that titles should not be edited usually, but in
this case a hint that it is all one man's wild speculation would have been
nice and I would have not have bothered to read it at all.

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zandorg
I had the idea of a webserver on each machine in 2002, and they were connected
across the p2p Gnutella network, where searches were contents by substring
(not just filename). I got as far as writing a webserver, which ended up in
Gnucleus (the Gnutella client), got 100 million downloads as part of Morpheus
Preview Edition (same as Gnucleus), but wasn't enabled because the guy who
wrote Gnucleus didn't get it.

In 2004, I did the same with Limewire, but again, nobody included my code.

I've come to accept it as a total failure, and since then I've known that it's
best to get the job done yourself, as otherwise collaboration depends on their
priorities.

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gvsyn
Course, could just leverage opera's built in torrent functionality - sharing
amongst opera users at least. Maybe somehow interoperable with Weave? Although
I think that somewhat goes against Weaves point currently, being to keep your
firefox installs on various machines in sync.

~~~
brfox
Maybe something like this could be used as an anonymizing web browsing service
as well. Just load web pages from what other uses have already loaded instead
of leaving tracks on the original server.

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omouse
So basically Freenet but without all the extra security of it?

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niyazpk
Noticed the "freedom" in the URL? Does that mean something?

The Hicksdesign tweet also says something about the convenience of having "a
connection wherever you are" = Freedom?

I don't know, but here is what I think:

Opera is already serving millions of mobile users through their proxy servers.
I think there is support in the upcoming version of Opera(v10) to connect to
the web though the proxy server. Now they certainly would want to monetize
this traffic. What would they do? Give internet connection for free (using
some USB device) and then serve ads. But how does this USB device connect to
the servers? May be they have made a tie up with some telecom majors.

Of course, this is also a speculation , just as ridiculous as the OP.

~~~
lucumo
Opera 10 Beta has built-in support for Opera Turbo. I think those are the
proxy servers you're referring to. They speed up page loading by gzipping
pages and downgrading the quality of images.

One of my friends suggested it might just be the release of Opera 10.

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jonhohle
I'm not familiar with the author, but I don't see why embedding the server
would change things. Mac OS X has had one-click Apache since it was released
and I would imagine OS X has a larger active install base than Opera. Of
course, Opera has had a lot of innovation trickle into other browsers (tabs,
thumbnails, etc.), so maybe they've solved some other issues involved with
personal web hosting.

The "hard parts" would be reliable dns resolution, finding common ISP open
ports, and security of all kinds.

~~~
ned
Here's an interesting scenario: the Opera installer asks you if you want to
install the "Freedom" service, if you agree, it installs a background server
(always on, launched on start up). This service is a local web server + web
application that provides a user interface to all your local data : your
address book, your music (you can listen to your mp3s with a flash player,
streamed), your calendars, your documents, etc. Of course the access is
protected by default.

The networking issues aren't that problematic : the local app would
periodically update a central database with the computer's IP (dyndns.org has
been doing this for years) and an available open port. So when you identify
yourself on the <http://freedom.opera.com> service, you are redirected to
<http://YOUR-COMPUTER.freedom.opera.com:OPEN-PORT/>.

So basically, Opera would be going against the current trend of putting all
your data in "the cloud". Sounds interesting to me…

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liuliu
This couldn't be true. By embedding a web server, you imply that all
mainstream routers are aware of the web server thing and can route a query to
itself correctly to the desired computer. As the IPv4 thing and all the huge
local network used in family (your wireless router) and enterprise, a
embedding web server can hardly serve anything on the Internet unless you get
router manufacturers' support.

Still, you can achieve the "web server" thing by establishing a client-server
connection to the Opera central server and the Opera central server will act
like a "router". That, is more like what Windows Live file sharing feature.

Opera all these years acts like a good citizen with W3C's guideline. There is
no way for Opera to support two-way ajax because there is no general standard.

~~~
metachris
i think the router-issue is not really a blocker, and you wouldn't need to
establish a connection to a main server either.

for example, any bittorrent client 'drills' holes through firewalls and
routers to receive incoming connections.

~~~
liuliu
yes, you can forward port. But for standard web server, that is 80 port. If
more than one user uses the embedded web server, there are port conflict. At
least, it is not the normal web server.

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huhtenberg
My bet is on a combination of

    
    
      (a) Dynamic DNS client
      (b) UPnP client
      (c) built-in browser
    

I.e. every installation of Opera gets its own unique permanent DNS record,
which is dynamically updated to the IP of the host computer. The UPnP is used
to make the Opera instance accessible from the Internet and the Web server is
used for sharing stuff.

Specifically, if I need to share a file with someone, the Opera will host this
file locally and generate a unique URL that will point at my box and will be
served by Opera's web server. I will then be able to pass this URL around and
the recipients will fetch the file using their browsers directly from my
machine.

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lucumo
If I may speculate as well. I really hope they will open source their browser.
I'm not sure how likely it is, but it would be really cool.

I hadn't heard of this before, but now my interest is peaked.

~~~
Freaky
" _now my interest is peaked._ "

Piqued. Unless this is the most interest you've ever given Opera ;)

Going open source would be cool, but given the nature of the comment on that
page, my money's on something like an embedded webserver, with some
interesting means of finding and sharing things with it. Maybe some
integration with Opera Link, so users can always find one of your running
clients (or even Opera in --server mode somewhere on 24/7; something their
good cross-platform support will help).

Opera do have a very good full text search engine, currently used for email
and to index the content on every page you visit, and obviously has the
ability to easily generate HTML from content it has stored and indexed; if
they wanted to go this route they could easily make some sort of CMS using it.

They also do blogs on my.opera. Maybe an integrated blogging engine, which can
serve content on its own and also upload it to services using some open
protocol anyone can implement (e.g. pushing people to support importing .atom
feeds). Publish content on your browser, push it to any online service which
supports it, and keep it locally accessible and indexable and outside the
control of any third party.

~~~
lucumo
_> Piqued. Unless this is the most interest you've ever given Opera ;)_

:-) Should've looked it up. But I thought "hey, my other option - "peeked" -
is definitely wrong, so this one must be right" :-) Thanks.

As for the open source thing, I wouldn't put money on it, but I do think it
would be very cool :-) I really don't have a clue what it can be. I just hope
it won't be a let down :-)

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entelarust
XMPP is more probable than a full on web server

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estacado
Opera will be the new Kazaa. It's going to be P2P glory all over again.

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mishmash
Don't forget guys, the web likes free. :)

