I'm glad to see Opera working to grow, and try new things...

However, from what I am reading about this new product... nothing about what they're doing sounds good.

As I understand it, Opera Unite turns your desktop into a webserver, and uses Opera's infrastructure to proxy-route other users, to that desktop-webserver.

The security, bandwidth and legal considerations of this idea are absolutely terrifying.

Sadien, Inc's core consulting practice focuses on technology risk, liability and management. Thus, we deal with these very issues, everyday.

Turning desktops into P2P webservers is a horrible, horrible idea.

A. It creates multiple points of access, and failure... to data... to personal information... to financial records... to your local network... to copyrighted material... the list is huge.

B. It, by design, decentralizes virtually all of the security and policy restrictions in a production environment.

C. From what I gather... this will make bandwidth issues worse, not better. How can Opera possibly believe it's better to have 100's users accessing a single desktop, than it would be to upload the files in question to another, dedicated server? That makes no sense.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what Opera is proposing. My first reaction to their release is...

"Opera Unite will never, ever be on any machine we control, ever."

Sadien Staff
Sadien, Inc.
www.sadien.com

This comment contains subjective opinion