Opera is watching you!

(Photo courtesy of digi.no )

As you know, Opera Mini allows you to save time and traffic (and, consequently, money) due to the fact that all data is processed on special Opera Software servers before being sent to mobile phones. The most powerful Opera Mini server farm is located in Norway and is the largest in the country. Every second, servers process thousands of requests from user phones to view a particular page. The amount of data is huge, but its scale in figures is somehow poorly represented, to be honest. For example, in November last year, Opera Mini servers sent users 82.9 TB of data, while processing more than 800 TB of real content. Here's how to understand, is it a lot or a little? Even if we give data for comparison across the whole Internet, all the same, all these tera- and petabytes will remain just numbers. However, the developers themselves have a way to visually assess the activity of Opera Mini users. The authors of the popular browser themselves call their “all-seeing eye” in a simple way - Opera Mini Globe.

In general, there is nothing complicated here: Opera Mini servers process user requests, while simultaneously sending a signal to a specialized program. And she draws the corresponding indicator on the screen. Moreover, it all happens in real time, and the indicators themselves are placed on a rotating globe - from which the “globe” name appeared. I’ll say right away that despite the physical location of the Opera Mini servers in Norway, each request from the user's mobile phone has an indication of a unique IP address assigned to him at the time the provider connects to the network. It is these data that allow you to track the location of the owner of the phone with fairly high accuracy down to the city. The result is a pretty beautiful spectacle - the globe, on which small fire bursts are visible here — another user decided to read the BASH or check his mail. However - better to see once, right? The link below is a small video showing Opera Mini Globe at work.

Opera Mini Globe does not sleep