There, I said it.   Are you listening, Mark Cuban?

Dot-com billionaire Mark Cuban recently said the Internet has “evolved to the point where you can count on it and develop applications for it without much fear that it’s going to change.”

Enter Hewlett-Packard and Opera, with two announcements that are big, bold, and all about change.   It’s  a bit of an Internet Revolution; HP and Opera are  looking to give power and control to the people, an opportunity for self-rule, a chance for independence.   Side note: The role of Paul Revere is to be played by Twitter.

On the privacy front, two researchers from Hewlett-Packard have a new way for people to communicate privately over the Internet.

The researchers, who previewed their concept to Forbes, say their model works like a private Internet on top of the existing public one: People can share information like files and messages via the Internet medium, but without the kind of public-facing personally identifiable information that Internet protocol addresses provide.

“What we’ve done is taken the idea of a darknet and moved it into the browser platform,” says Wood, the HP Web security researcher who developed the idea over the last several months. “This is really like a darknet for everyone. If you can use the Internet, you can use a darknet.”

The model Hoffman and Wood are previewing is notable in that it uses the latest in rich Internet technologies to make using a darknet as simple as browsing a Web site. That innovation should drastically reduce the barrier to sharing secure information over darknets.

via Your Own Private Internet – Forbes.com

At the same time, Opera today unveils Opera Unite, a version of the Opera browser with a built-in web server.

[It is] a new technology that shakes up the old client-server computing model of the Web. Opera Unite turns any computer into both a client and a server, allowing it to interact with and serve content to other computers directly across the Web, without the need for third-party servers.

Opera Unite makes serving data as simple and easy as browsing the Web. For consumers, Opera Unite services give greater control of private data and make it easy to share data with any device equipped with a modern Web browser.

For Web developers, Opera Unite services are based on the same open Web standards as Web sites today. This dramatically simplifies the complexity of authoring cutting-edge Web services. With Opera Unite, creating a full Web service is now as easy as coding a Web page.

via Opera Unite Reinvents the Web – Opera

So what does this mean?  We’re entering a phase of increased user control and interoperability, where you can ultimately access your information with your privacy settings from any device.  Are we there yet?  No, but these advancements make it possible for us to get there.  Technologizer’s Harry McCracken gives a specific example of what Opera Unite can do today:

Once you’ve enabled Unite on a Windows, Mac, or Linux computer running Opera 10, the apps are available from any browser on any Internet-connected computer. (You can choose to password protect them, or to leave them open.) Here’s a copy of Firefox accessing the Opera Unite music player–and thereby letting me listen to my music back home from any computer.

via Opera’s Web-changer: Unite, a Web Server Inside your Browser – Technologizer

While we obsess (and obsess and obsess) over newspapers dying,  the technology landscape is alive and well.  Thriving, in fact, and still very much in its formative stages.  The fun part is thinking about how it will all merge and blend together.  Dead?  Nope.  Boring?  Double nope.  As George Jetson’s boy Elroy said, “I’m onto somethin’ real big here.”

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