I find the new release of Opera Unite really interesing.
In some ways Opera Unite is the opposite of a Cloud Service. Instead of publishing content "out there somewhere", you publish it right here on your very own PC. It is fast and easy to flip a switch and offer all sorts of content (and processing power) to the world. You don’t have to be an infrastructure architect, human factors specialist, system administrator, or IT professional to publish. You don’t even have to know what DNS is.
Of course it is a Corporate Information Security person’s nightmare personified (less than 24 hours after its release my workplace already blocks even the links to Opera’s press releases on the tool). The obvious concern is that if non-professionals start setting up their PC’s as webservers, there will be a whole new suite of successful hacker attacks on these unsuspecting producers.
Presumably Opera thought of that, and is being careful about managing that risk. Time will tell.
It is fairly easy to imagine an organization leveraging this technology combined with a volunteer model like SETI@Home uses, to build a distributed application hosted on participating PC’s all over the world. It seems possible, with minimal technology investment, and without requiring terribly sophisticated volunteers, said organization could scale their application to millions of computers worldwide. Pretty cool, and you probably could call that Cloud Computing.
Something I’ve thought about, on and off, over the years is: "How would one build an eCommerce infrastructure to support an illicit drug business?" When I first started thinking about this, I was still working as the Information Systems Manager for the police departments in Central Maine. "How would we catch them?" was the angle I was coming from.
Ultimately every webserver has an IP address and is routable. What that means is ultimately, law enforcement authorities can track down and identify the exact location of the server. There are offshore proxy servers and IP anonymizers that can make this very difficult, but it could still be done. I’ve often thought the way to go is to build cheap, disposable web servers. Perhaps ones that only run for a few hours before they self destruct . You toss it in the bushes near a free wifi spot, use dynamic DNS, then spend your energy hiding the back end ecommerce engines instead of worrying about the side your customer sees. By the time the webserver is physically located, it would long since have rendered itself useless.
Well, this could take quite a bit of engineering. Opera Unite, however, makes it all so much easier. You can use commodity hardware and software. You could even use a 3G enabled smart phone. You could still go the disposable server route. This thought experiment, running through design scenarios, is something I find fun to work on when I have idle cycles. The technology keeps changing and getting more interesting.
Opera Unite was released at about the same time as the recent Iranian public uprising. At the time organizers were using text messages to communicate with the members of their movement. My first thought when I was reading about the events taking place was maybe they could use Opera Unite to organize the protests, publish information, videos, and more. The text messages would only simply have to have a URL in it. If the PC’s were moving around, and/or disposable, it could be very hard for the authorities to catch the organizers.
Maybe Opera Unite will fuel a new round of hackers. Maybe it will be the IT solution for a "good cause". Maybe it will become a tool of the underworld. Or maybe, it will be an architecture for democratic revolution. It certainly is an interesting new tool.