Regarding the cost of inconvenience, I expect that there are significant corporate interests that oppose measuring such things. Imagine if all the inconveniences of DRM, toll roads, and other anti-features were assigned costs. It would probably inspire legislative changes…

Speaking as a customer of an ISP who does this (at work), have to say that sometimes you suddenly become aware of them.

But as I suggested I’d be less concerned that someone bad might do something to them, but that they might disappear for other reasons. I mentioned bankruptcy, but administrator cock-up is probably just as likely. Indeed you only need a key site, like urm Google, to start using a feature the proxy doesn’t support, or doesn’t support well, and lots of people will be inconvenienced.

I think part of the issue is we don’t yet have in place ways off assessing cost of mass inconvenience. I saw a study recently pondering how long a traffic jam needs to be before you are stopping someone on a life saving mission – what with Ambulance going to car accidents and such like apparently it isn’t that long. I wonder what the “cost” of stopping a browser working on a million cell phones is?

If it is to be used by someone like you or I then they could decide not to take any excess risks and use it for things that don’t matter much while another (slower) browser could be used for online banking, credit card purchases, etc. If it is to be used by a typical user (who in my experience can’t tell you which browser they were using when they file a bug report) then this is more of a problem.

The same thing applies to phones. If I had a real need to update a phone then I know I could get it done, but my parents couldn’t even apply to a telco to have a phone unlocked at the end of it’s contract without my assistance.

Then there’s the issue of application design. The programmers at LG and other phone companies are spending time on menu systems that the owner can’t bypass (without a base firmware update) instead of spending time on improving the security of the device.

The discussion of this started with a blog post on the topic of whether Apple would approve Opera. I’m sure that whether people like you or I can use Opera properly isn’t an issue that Apple cares much about, it’s the millions of people who don’t even know which web browser they are using.

It is handy to know that you can download software to re-flash phones. I may check that out some time when I have spare time and a phone that’s old enough that I don’t care much if I brick it.

Reddit has some discussion of this post at the above URL.

Good point about Opera going bankrupt.

Regarding proxies for security, there are some products that do such things. I wonder whether Opera is doing any such things, they could, but presumably they would have announced it if they did.

Gregory: I’m using a phone that’s just under 2 years old right now. I know that there are a variety of services that charge moderate amounts of money to unlock phones. I haven’t tried them because during the contract period I don’t want to risk doing something that had the potential to cause expensive problems and after the contract period the phone wasn’t worth enough to justify the expense. I can buy a new Viewty now for $150, when my current one comes out of contract I might be able to buy one for less than $100 – which would be better than paying $40 to unlock and old scratched phone.

I agree that Opera’s proxy is a giant MITM attack vector. But then I’ve worked for ISPs that had arrays of transparent web proxies for non-https traffic that could have been good for MITM attacks – and the customers of those ISPs didn’t know about them…

For all I know my Telco could be proxying all the http traffic that originates from my mobile phone or 3G network device. When they assign me an IP address in the 10.0.0.0/8 range I know that they are at least doing NAT.