CloudNavigator

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.

 

 

 

Two or three years ago I purchased a Zonbu mini.  This was a little, relatively inexpensive, small form factor, ITX based system.  It consumed very small amounts of power, was easy to set up and use, and satisfied an immediate need in my household for another web access point and general purpose system.  The main selling point, however, was that none of the storage (except for a compact flash based cache) was local.   I wouldn’t have to worry about backups.

In fact, I can do backups of important files from my other systems by copying them to my Zonbu and saving them there.  (wherever "there" is)

The term "Cloud Computing" didn’t really exist when this product emerged.  Zonbu was pioneering consumer cloud storage before it even had a name.  They haven’t been standing still over the past couple of years.  They added a laptop, and then higher end systems.  Now they even have a software only solution.  And you can try it out, without the personal storage space, of course, for free.

The Zonbu system includes a handful of simple games, the Open Office productivity suite, a browser and a few other utilities and tools.  It is all pre-configured and easy to use.

And they take care of your backups for you.

Your data is safe, stored in an encrypted format somewhere in their cloud.  You have the option of storing the data without a recoverable password, or with a recoverable password (meaning; do you want the folks at Zonbu to maintain a ‘back door’ to your data, or do you want to have the only key?  It is up to you.)

They also added a storage area that is accessible over the web.  You can easily publish web pages and other content, or use it as an interim waystation when to copying files from your Zonbu to somewhere else.  

There are mechanisms to obtain root on your Zonbu if you really want to customize the installed software or just hack it.  I haven’t had the need.  It works well enough as-is, out of the box.  It would be nice to have a newer version of the Firefox browser, or maybe have the option to use Opera or Google’s Chrome for a browser sometimes.  Otherwise it does everything it promised and I haven’t felt the need to have it do more.

Zonbu customer support is great!  They’ve been very responsive and helpful the few times I’ve needed them.  They even took care of a hardware issue I ran into with my wireless interface with minimal fuss and remarkable turnaround.

If you are looking to spend some money and go with the herd, then a Microsoft solution is probably better.  If you are looking for a high quality (and pricey) solution, then go for a Mac.  If you are looking for a flexible desktop solution with many options, then maybe try a PC with Ubuntu.  If you are looking for something that is simple, doesn’t require a lot of maintenance, is inexpensive, and just does the (basic) job, Zonbu may be the right solution.

I think over the long term this is the future of basic desktop computing.  You can personalize your environment, and yet the bulk of the hard part (security, integration, & backups) are managed centrally by professionals.  This is a slightly different model than the web based application suite [ accessed from a full fledged PC ].  At least until HTML 5 is ready, programming complex desktop applications for the web is much harder than programming for the desktop.  There are significantly more desktop applications already available than web based ones.  The Zonbu-like solution will work with lower bandwidth and higher latency environments, something which can be another challenge for successful web based "desktop" application implementations.   Desktop based (cached) applications with encrypted (cached) storage seem easier for an organization to contain entirely "inside" their virtual borders, and to license, and therefore may be much more palatable.  

This is basically the ‘thin client’ model, which has waxed and waned in the world of system architecture over the years. What makes this model really work is the technology has finally caught up with the idea.  The synergy of being able to leverage the breadth of applications already available on the Linux desktop platform, with the cloud storage technologies, on low power, inexpensive, consumer friendly small form factor hardware bears at least watching.