What about Macpup Opera Unite?

[aahhaaa]

I'm intrigued with Opera's new Unite vision, and the ability to run it off a LiveCD would seem to answer some of the security questions.

There is an interesting mission statement over at Opera, it says in part:

Our computers are only dumb terminals connected to other computers (meaning servers) owned by other people — such as large corporations — who we depend upon to host our words, thoughts, and images. We depend on them to do it well and with our best interests at heart. We place our trust in these third parties, and we hope for the best, but as long as our own computers are not first class citizens on the Web, we are merely tenants, and hosting companies are the landlords of the Internet.

http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/06/16/

To the extent that Opera Unite would make any computer a browser-based P2P server, this is a completely different angle than that of re-terminalized or cloud computing.

Not the technical side, I'm sure you guys could make that work; but what do yoiui think of the concept itself?

[Lobster]

I'm intrigued with Opera's new Unite vision

Me too. This is a curveball.
It is a serious challenge to cloud based (revenue generating) models
from Googles Chrome/Wave and Microsofts IE
http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/go ... _wave.html

Will Firefox do similar?

[aahhaaa]

Lobster- yeah, that's a very interesting article!

A point somewhat lost in the comments is that content does not need to pass through Opera's own servers...
Opera only uses a proxy when a direct connection is not possible through UPnP.

I've noticed that we've already had a couple of brushfire cyberwars (not to mention the Great Firewall of China), and my view of our preparedness for something like a real knockdown fight, well its a Katrina scenario.
Re-distributing the web services like Lawrence Eng envisions would make it nearly invulnerable.


ps
Opera is asking people to build new apps; I wonder if they know about this'n:
http://www.gov2expo.com/gov2expo2009