Feanor

Yes, that thing about accessing the webserver is technically wrong. But you know, people who know what a DNS is, or even the public IP address, probably don't need "Unite", while most "Unite" users will be Opera / MyOpera users that will use it like that:
"Typically, to connect to a service running in Opera Unite, you use a domain name assigned by Opera, based on your My Opera username and the name you chose for your device, for example:
home.lachlanhunt.operaunite.com
This will connect to your services through Opera’s proxy servers."
So, I would say that "typically" using Unite requires to use Opera the browser, create an account over Opera servers and route through Opera's proxies.

About "control" over your data, I guess this is a little nonsense, you just think of the Web mail services like Gmail, without speaking of the "cloud".
Anyway, as soon as you publish whatever on the Internet, with any system, you don't have any control over it, either any privacy. I guess people aren't concerned, or they don't know, otherwise nobody would connect to the Web.

On a side note, the "Turbo" feature in Opera is again a proxy server. You don't worry of owning the contents there but about Opera tracking all your Internet traffic.

Personally the major issue with the whole Unite thing is my PC IS NOT a server. It is not online all the time, it is not safe by any means, it is not connected with enough bandwidth.
So whatever "service" I need to provide, either I buy hosting/housing from some provider (of course the preferred solution) or I use some "free" service like those from Google or Opera itself (with all the known drawbacks).

Last thing. We must agree what the Internet is. Like I said, I don't care of the technicalities of Unite right now. What did upset me is the "reinvent the Internet".

Yes, I got you about "control".
But see, that makes no sense. Once you share your pictures over the Internet, no matter how, they don't belong to you any more. I can grab them and re-publish elsewhere or modify as I like.
"rights" means almost nothing, unless you are a big firm with an office full of lawyers. Yes, if a newspaper from your own country uses a picture made by you, you can MAYBE ask them to remove it or to pay some money for using. Even if it is not easy given the fact that you don't have much money to spend in lawyers and time. But if the "user/abuser" is from some other place things get almost impossible.

The EULA is born from the basic issue that the remote service usually is hold responsible for what is published over/through their servers. For example Mediaset, an italian big media corporation, opened a lawsuit against Google because users published video clips from their TV shows. It is not that Google cares of the video about your weekend but they must be in control of what is published.

And again, this all comes from the obvious contradiction of a Net where you SHARE things and "rules" (written and unwritten) that create a value from the fact that those things are kept "private" and/or sold for a fee. For example, you are a musician and you make a song. If the Net did not exist it could value X but since it can be shared in practice it values Y.

You consider all the GPL and alike software. The Net makes it possible to create software through collaboration all around the world but the result is nobody owns it. In theory there are "credits" but again, in practice after some rounds it becomes very difficult to track everybody who contributed. And the point is not who "controls" but the fact that software is accessible. Being accessible, its "value" is zero. While firms like MS and IBM base their "value" on patents and copyright, which of course is the opposite of "sharing".

You are welcome.
Since we are speaking of it, what happened in France about the Internet?

It is fun. Politicians can't accept that the Internet is not under their control. It is not about P2P only. I told you here in Italy they proposed a law so every blog owner should have been registered as "editor" in a official list.

I would not say it is practically useless but that it is useful only for some people, while useless for many others. That is the reason why I got annoyed by the "we will reinvent the Web" slogan. About security, of course, when ever you run a "webserver" on your PC and you allow incoming connections you are opening an hole in the perimeter. But browsers are already quite insecure, especially that part about executing remote applications (JS, ActiveX, Flash, etc). Any plugin is potentially dangerous, any FF extension, etc.