Opera Unite Review – Potential Not Fully Realised

Now what do you do with it?

Unite comes with several built-in services that, at this point, are pretty basic in design and exist mainly to demonstrate the potential capabilities of Unite. These include a media player that lets you listen to music from one system on any other system; a standard web server; a system called Fridge that is essentially a virtual Post-it note; a chat application; and a file sharing application.

If you focus too much on these services, Unite doesn’t seem to be such a big deal. After all, we’ve all seen similar and better developed services that do the same thing, such as the Orb online music player or any number of file sharing applications that can run in the browser.

But if you expand your thinking to imagine what types of Unite services we might see from developers in the future, Unite sounds a lot more intriguing. Done properly, such applications could make it as easy to send data and content to colleagues, social networks and businesses as it is to download that content.

However, in the current state of affairs, this early vision has not been realised, and in fact, the Unite concept brings up some very serious security issues.

The Down Side

The biggest is the very high risk of putting an always-on web server on users’ computers. Once enabled, Unite is by default always-on when Opera is running. It is possible to change this setting within opera:config.

In the security world, running a web server is generally seen as a high-risk proposition, and, for hackers, getting control of a web server is a key goal. Whenever a system gets compromised by an attacker or trojan, typically the first thing that happens is that a web server from the attacker gets loaded onto the system. Unite could potentially save the attacker this step.

Of course, Opera is aware of these risks and is taking steps to make Unite as secure as possible. Unite has a sandbox model to prevent attacks from leaving the confines of the browser, and there are many safeguards built into the process by which the app accesses the file system.

But anyone who follows security knows that nothing is completely secure, especially a service designed to be used by novices and to facilitate sharing among many users and sites. Just like every browser, Unite will have security holes, and there will be cases where people’s systems are exposed because of it.

Other Potential Caveats

There are other issues, for example, it is possible that running Unite would be a violation of the terms of service set out by your ISP because many terms of service forbid running a web server (though these tend to be focused on running a real web site and not on a more temporary service like Unite).

Unite also has a way to go in terms of usability. It doesn’t have the detailed advanced user controls that one would expect from an Opera product, and I’d like to see more benefits from using the operaunite.com proxies and URLs, such as a temporary page that displays when a user’s Unite services aren’t live. (Right now, you just get an error.)

I do think that Unite is an interesting new service, and I recommend that developers and power users give it a try. However, I wouldn’t recommend that novice or even average users load it on their systems, as there are still too many questions to be answered by this new service.

Jim Rapoza is chief technology analyst at eweek.com