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Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#31

Post by Indyan »

jarek wrote: post #22
Indyan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"With the technology they have right now, I'd take interactive-javascript-capable Opera Mobile over proxying Opera Mini any day." Take a look at the Turbo feature in Opera Mobile. It's similar to the Turbo feature on desktop. Once again, data is being sent through the server and it is being compressed. However, Turbo is capable of handling interactive-web-content (JavaScripts) because the rendering part is still bein…

To be quite frank, I found that Opera Turbo rarely sped me up noticeably, and sometimes slowed me down. Just one user's experience in North America today, but there's definitely room for improvement.

If your net speed is more than 512 KBPs you are not going to notice any improvements whatsover, rather (as you said) you might notice delays due to the increased overhead. However, on slower connnections the effect is marked. This is because a 100 KBps connection can download 100KB in 1 sec and 200 KB in 2 sec. On the other hand a 10 KBps connection will require 10 sec and 20 sec respectively. And, in this case, the effect of Opera's compression becomes noticeable.

P.S. What Opera is doing is similar to what www.onspeed.com does. I used to use that during my dialup days, and it was a big big help.

Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#32

Post by pmjordan »

jarek wrote: post #30
pmjordan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't play MITM to https sites for the Turbo feature in Opera Mobile or Desktop. No idea what they do for Opera Mini.

Opera Mini is required to MITM by its design; it can't render HTML, only OPML fed to it by Opera's servers. I don't know what exactly the security implications are.

Yeah, the best I can come up with is that you have to trust them that the data never makes it to the disk. But then they don't seem to be disk caching anything at all.

Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#33

Post by Indyan »

stygianguest wrote: post #5

But what to do with such a cache? Build a new search engine to compete with google? I sincerely hope they will do that, but it cannot be easy. That said, if you have the cache, you might as well try. By the way, what about online banking etc. They are introducing yet another weak point by playing the middle man.

Quote: "All communication between the Opera Mini servers and the Opera Mini client on your phone is encrypted?" Source: http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2010/04/15/public-wifi

So basically, as long as Opera's security is ok, we are ok. However, if someone manages to find a hole, we might be screwed. But, how practical is it to launch an attack on a mobile webbrowser that is possibly using encrypted WiFi along with a encrypted communication channel? May be someone else can shed more light on this.

Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#34

Post by ohyes »

alex_c wrote: post #24
ohyes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You build an ad network that 'performs arbitrage on competing ad networks'. Opera makes money on the margin that potential advertisers save. This works because Opera controls the pipeline from web to phone.

I might be particularly dense today, but I don't get the link between controlling the pipeline and building an arbitrage ad network. Why can't you do one without the other? Edit: to spell out my confusion. If you want to arbitrage ads, content providers would (presumably) need to include your ads in their content one way or another, so I don't see what advantage controlling the pipeline gives you. If you just want to…

I think a key point of arbitrage is that you do both of the transactions (the buying and the selling) at the same time.

This insulates the person doing the arbitrage from losing money because one or both of the markets changed (it is 'theoretically risk free').

So they would be theoretically be trading page impressions as they occur, to the highest bidder. Compare this to AdWords, which offers 'some amount of Cents' per impression.

You sell your adspace to opera, opera sells that AdSpace to someone else, dynamically based on market prices. (They could even sell it Google or whoever). Its like an ad stock market.

At least, that is my (very) speculative understanding.

edit: The key point is that they control the cache, so if you sell them ads and your page goes through the cache, they can insert it (whoever's ad it is) quickly. Otherwise it would be an extra level of indirection loading the ad.

Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#35

Post by yread »

guns wrote: post #14
JoachimSchipper wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web requests would allow Opera to do some serious data-mining to sell advertising.

More especially since they hijack HTTPS sessions. I always thought that playing MITM and caching secure sessions created a strong incentive to behave badly.

They don't do that:

from

http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/03/13/

Your privacy is important

Even when Turbo is enabled, encrypted traffic does not go through our compression servers. This means that when you are on a SSL site, we bypass these traffic and let you communicate with the SSL site directly. Opera generates statistics of the usage of Opera Turbo, but these are aggregated numbers and no information can be linked to a single user. Opera does not store any users’ private information.

Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#36

Post by iwr »

stygianguest wrote: post #5

But what to do with such a cache? Build a new search engine to compete with google? I sincerely hope they will do that, but it cannot be easy. That said, if you have the cache, you might as well try. By the way, what about online banking etc. They are introducing yet another weak point by playing the middle man.

Your ISP can act as a MITM and they can even poison DNS requests.

Other than that, governments can corrupt the certificate-issuing authorities and present you with forged SSL credentials.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/03/researchers-reveal-like...

Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#37

Post by anonymousDan »

axod wrote: post #3

In summary, Opera does proxying and caching for its mobile browser. The article does very little to tell us why that's 'valuable' or indeed a secret.

Yes it does. Basically it says that opera intends to strip out ads from the pages it serves and replace them with new ads. Which new ads? Opera will simply auction the space to the highest bidder. Obviously this will only work for ads that go through its servers, but apparently it controls a large proportion of the mobile proxying/caching market. Sounds nice in theory, not sure whether it will hold up in practice. Note they state explicitly they will NOT perform behavioural advertising.

Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#38

Post by iwr »

jarek wrote: post #30
pmjordan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't play MITM to https sites for the Turbo feature in Opera Mobile or Desktop. No idea what they do for Opera Mini.

Opera Mini is required to MITM by its design; it can't render HTML, only OPML fed to it by Opera's servers. I don't know what exactly the security implications are.

Not to confuse OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language), used to aggregate RSS files with OBML (Opera Binary Markup Language).

I was confused why or how OPML would serve Opera's purposes in this instance.

Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#39

Post by guns »

yread wrote: post #35
guns wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More especially since they hijack HTTPS sessions. I always thought that playing MITM and caching secure sessions created a strong incentive to behave badly.

They don't do that: from http://labs.opera.com/news/2009/03/13/ Your privacy is important Even when Turbo is enabled, encrypted traffic does not go through our compression servers. This means that when you are on a SSL site, we bypass these traffic and let you communicate with the SSL site directly. Opera generates statistics of the usage of Opera Turbo, but these are aggregated numbers and no information can be link…

Presumably that is a feature of the desktop version?

http://www.opera.com/mobile/help/faq/#connection

"Is there any end-to-end security between my handset and — for example — paypal.com or my bank?"

"Opera Mini uses a transcoder server to translate HTML/CSS/JavaScript into a more compact format. It will also shrink any images to fit the screen of your handset. This translation step makes Opera Mini fast, small, and also very cheap to use. To be able to do this translation, the Opera Mini server needs to have access to the unencrypted version of the webpage. Therefore no end-to-end encryption between the client and the remote web server is possible.

If you need full end-to-end encryption, you should use a full web browser such as Opera Mobile."

Re: Opera holds the web's most valuable secret

#40

Post by SkyMarshal »

flawawa2 wrote: post #25
chrislloyd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Behavioural advertising". Opera could potentially collect information on mobile users' browsing habits/history. Should it decide to sell this information to third parties it would be worth a lot. If Opera decided to act on this it could be the most valuable part of its business model. GMail etc. have shown that people are willing to pay with their privacy. Disclaimer: I'm interning (so I don't know anything special)…

I was using Opera Mini on my mobile under the assumption that they value my privacy and do not store any data. If they would start doing this, it would outrage me enough that I might potentially even go back to Firefox on my desktop.

The article also says Opera is aware that doing this could destroy their business, for the reasons you give, so they plan not to.
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