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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
It's already there. The UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) is supported by virtually every consumer-grade "router" out there. For one, it can be used to dynamically configure port forwarding on the router so a server application on the inside of the router would become accessible from the Internet.
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.
(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.
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.
> 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 :-)
