Every phone should be able to run personal websites
rohanrd.xyz
rohanrd.xyz
If you want to keep a spare phone plugged in all the time in your closet, connected to Wifi/Ethernet, and hack it to be a webserver, then go ahead. But webservers on mobile devices, being used in a mobile way, are a terrible idea.
You can't hack a web server in your closet to run on port 80 without jailbreaking your phone/unlocking the bootloader and rooting your phone, and I can't really think of a reason why that should be. It's not as it Android and iOS come with important http(s) servers out of the box, why shouldn't port 80/443 be available to apps?
Because they're < 1024, I guess. Anywhere I've seen besides windows needs you to be root, or have some other specific permission to listen on that port.
Not that I agree with it, but it is the existing status quo.
These days, computers are used by one, maybe two or three people. If I, the only user of my phone, decide I want to use port 80, why can't I? Put this stuff behind a special privilege for all I care.
Yeah, IPv6 isn't everywhere, but if you have it on your phone and everywhere you want to access you phone from...
I had some experience getting yelled at by a carrier for something like this. If your “server” is mobile, they get testy.
I have previously used carriers that did expose (IPv6) addresses, though. Port 25/53/etc were blocked but I could host a web server on there if I wanted to drain the 2GB of mobile data I had at the time.
NAT isn't a problem with IPv6 support. Of course there's the network firewall, but adding a rule to accept ports 1714-1764 isn't that hard.
Right now I've solved the problem with a VPN tunnel, but that's not really that permanent a solution.
Even on a phone (that's not a "server" in the traditional sense), e.g. listening on UDP port 5353 is needed to show up in mDNS.
There should be a separate permission for listening on standard, reserved ports (anything in the IANA docs for all I care) that should require manual consent, like with location access. In fact, I think there should be a retractable permission for any kind of remotely accessible port binding. The fact any calculator app can start a VPN server on my phone without my knowledge isn't good! That doesn't mean providing any type of service is inherently bad, though.
For instance, there are tons of phone <=> desktop sync apps (My Phone on Windows, KDE Connect on Linux/Windows/Mac) that constantly communicate between each other. Why should your phone always be the one to initiate that direct connection? Why should we rely on cloud servers when mutually authenticated SSH is already doing every bit of protection we could possibly need? My phone is half a meter away from my computer, it shouldn't need to be this difficult!
Can you tell me more about that?
I know about SRV records from Minecraft (of all things!) for a similar purpose, can you point me towards a reference of what is this about? Wikipedia fails me.
[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/speeding-up-https-and-http-3-neg...
[2]: Current version is https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-svcb-...
FWIW, that's possible today on Android (not necessarily tomorrow, not necessarily on iOS) - I can and do regularly move files around with rsync/scp courtesy of termux, either by running the command on the phone or just running sshd on the phone (which does, in my setup, need to be manually started; I don't know if that's inherent or could be changed) and then running the transfer from another machine.
Otherwise they're competing with a lot of other people interested in what the phone should and should not do.
If they own a hammer, they can do what they like with a hammer, but a phone is not a hammer. It's a complex arrangement of molecules, licenses and competing group interests.
I'm sure if someone found a way to shove ads and place restrictions on the use of your hammer they would.
People make a big deal out of those differences though, go figure!
Otherwise your line of reasoning boils down to “it exists.”
1. When discussing human rights (which apply to technological freedoms) reducing a need to "an edge case" is the basis of marginalization, defined as "treatment of a person, group, or concept as insignificant or peripheral". Therefore, it is never appropriate to rely on such language to prove a point, especially when we are discussing software which had to go out of its way to restrict freedoms.
2. It's an incredibly slippery slope to use "crapware" as a justification for reducing the freedoms of the individual. Criminals will find a way, do not create a hostile user experience.
Since it's inception smart phones have been a consumer platform, used for consuming content. The platform for tinkerers already exists. It's called a PC with Linux installed. Every platform does not need to cater to your needs.
Are you familiar with the false dilemma?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
> The platform for tinkerers already exists. It's called a PC with Linux installed
I would love for you to make the case that a modern touch screen phone is not a Personal Computer. And you fail to address the very real scenario in which companies are conspiring to provide fully locked-down hardware and software ecosystems.
I'm always up for a challenge, so here you go.
I'd argue that a PC is a general purpose personal computer. I wouldn't count a game console such as Xbox, PS or Switch as a PC because it is vendor controlled and locked down. I'd also not consider a car with an entertainment system a general purpose computing device.
Similarly phones are bought with the knowledge that they are more similar to game consoles than general purpose computers. They are bought with the knowledge that they are locked down by the vendor and that your use of the device is going to be limited. The right to install custom software that does whatever you want has never been part of the contract.
I do support the people's right to attempt to hack these devices to do whatever they want, but I do think expecting vendor support for their wacky antics is a step too far.
The Xbox was built primarily from standard components used in personal computers.
The PlayStation 2 and 3 ran Linux as alternative operating systems, officially supported by Sony.
The Nintendo Wii series is heralded as some of the most hackable and therefore versatile consoles in history, not for Nintendo's lack of trying.
> Similarly phones are bought with the knowledge that they are more similar to game consoles than general purpose computers
My phone in my pocket has more capability than my old laptops. Touchscreen interaction and the ability to make calls over a cell network do not suddenly make this thing not a personal computer. The hardware is completely capable of supporting this.
> They are bought with the knowledge that they are locked down by the vendor and that your use of the device is going to be limited.
This is just circular reasoning. The entire point is that this "knowledge" is simply consumer conditioning, and people are being taken advantage of by being fed this bullshit narrative.
> The right to install custom software that does whatever you want has never been part of the contract.
My friend, there is no contract. That is the point. I buy the hardware, and then I have the right to do whatever the fuck I want with it. Full stop. Anything less restricts my right to modify my personal items as I see fit.
> I do think expecting vendor support for their wacky antics is a step too far.
What? My phone runs a heavily-modified Linux and can do literally anything I need regarding personal computing, including hook up to external monitors and make use of peripheral devices like a mouse and keyboard. It is objectively a full-blown computer, regardless of if you can't understand that.
The premise of this thread is simply that, despite all of this, ports are arbitrarily locked down. This requires extra vendor intervention to implement, so your argument makes no sense. There is nothing wacky about using my personal computing device for.... personal computing. It's either disingenuous or ignorant to suggest this is not something which should be considered.
i understand that you want to own the stack on your tech, and i would argue that if custom OSes were allowed, that fulfils that need. it’s not apple or google’s responsibility to let you do anything with their OS, in the same vein that you often are limited by stock router firmware or what’s on your ps5.
as phones are hyper-personal it makes sense people want more control, but most average users do not. and as someone who works closely with smartphone tech, i want it to just work and i don’t want to worry about whatever nonsense is enabled by disabling security or os-level by guarantees.
just get a fairphone or whatever. it’s not a human right to force tech companies to embrace your vision of computing
Now that you have, will you say that it has more merit if discussed in future?
You can argue all you want about what the normal joe shmoe should be able to do but most joes shmoes will use that to hurt themselves more than help.
Limitiations are essentially OSHA of computing, by making it hard to do the wrong stuff it makes most people least likely to hurt themselves.
Well, it's not reasonably available. The number of android phone manufacturers that still allow bootloaders to be unlocked without significant friction is pretty small, and hardware attestation is slowly killing the whole rooting/custom rom scene since phones with unlocked bootloaders can't run many apps.
The option is there on some phones, and that with caveats; lots of phones don't let you root them, and even if you can they'll artificially break things (like sony degrading the camera, or any app that refuses to run if it realizes it's on a rooted phone)
Personal computers should be able to run a web server > Phones are personal computers > Phones should be able to run webservers.
Is this line supposed to be ironic or something?
I'm sorry, but what are you doing right now if not this?
It's a legit security issue. Not protecting people from these things is far more user hostile.
I've never heard an argument before that the ability to host a personal website on a cellphone is a human right. But, by using this phrase, you seem to be assuming your readers already agree with you that human rights is what we are discussing. As a rhetorical device, that may be effective at getting someone to back down for fear of being labeled as anti-human-rights, but it is not effective at persuading someone of your implied thesis. I'd very much like to hear such an argument connecting cellphone websites to human rights.
Hence, freedom is the default position, the default human right. What needs to be justified is the restriction, not the freedom. Without good justification the restriction should be removed. An example of unjustifiable restriction is "criminals may use it", as:
a) your freedom should not be impinged on by the actions of others, especially malicious ones, and
b) you are presumed innocent (the second, perhaps only in order of mention here, great principle of English law, if not culture. One that is sadly being undermined).
The argument is that individuals must have the right to modify their devices as they see fit, barring some reasonable FTC radio restrictions which are necessary to enable fair use.
You can argue that nothing should compel a company, in a free market, to provide such a device. But the nature of human rights is that they must be defended vigilantly, or the entire industry and government will slowly move to exploit people.
If you do not guarantee freedom of speech, companies will restrict it. If you do not guarantee freedom to repair or modify a device, companies will restrict it. At some point, these practices become inescapable for the end user and they effectively lose these freedoms while entirely skipping due process and the court of law.
Rights must be enforced, not left up to corporate goodwill.
Humans rights pov to this were not remotely part of the discussion. If you have one you think is relevant to the discussion then introduce it. The way you have tried to do so here is in the tone of “I know you think you’re trying to help but clearly your attitude is part of the problem.”
This might be acceptable if phone-hosted websites were already a well-known humanitarian & human rights issue and therefore marginalization a potential problem. As it stand though it just seems like you’re twisting the meaning of “edge case” into something that it is not.
You could argue John Deere shouldn't be required to sell you a tractor which you can repair at home. But if you don't require that, they won't, and you've chosen to prioritize corporate needs over individual needs.
Calling this a human rights issue is like calling your ability to order a sandwich for lunch a human rights issue
Exactly. If we established all law based only on what we currently observe, without considering future implications, then we would fundamentally only be a reactive legislative system and not proactive.
> Calling this a human rights issue is like calling your ability to order a sandwich for lunch a human rights issue
No, that is a gross misrepresentation. The simple fact is that if you don't require the right for a user to modify their general computing hardware, that right will never be awarded systematically, and will in fact be repressed. It's the definition of a slippery slope, because anything can be justified from that point.
Your concern is about an intellectual ideal of full freedom to utilize a device as you see fit.
That is an ideal that I am philosophically attracted to. But… you have to balance harms when dealing with the public. Security risk management for mobile is difficult and even professional practitioners fail badly at it. A billion little servers with a trillion little bugs are a physical safety risk for thousands of people that they cannot effectively manage.
We live in an era where publishing is easier than it has been since society consisted of a bunch of cavemen in a few small bands. This idea is technically interesting but a bad one.
This is a category error. The use is marginal, not the people. You can't just uprate the severity of something because it suits your wants.
Thankfully, nobody will be forcing you to use this feature; it shouldn't bother someone who ignores it. It is a feature of your phone though, unless you're daily-driving a pager or 2G Nokia. Hopefully this helps you make peace with the "utterly cringey" reality of modern computing.
Actually, trying to argue against something that you will not use, but others would use, that has no other effect on you, harms yourself (you might change your mind later) and harms others.
2003:
[Cueball approaches a bearded fellow.]
Cueball: Did you get my essay?
Bearded Fellow: Yeah, it was good! But it was a .doc; You should really use a more open-
Cueball: Give it a rest already. Maybe we just want to live our lives and use software that works, not get wrapped up in your stupid nerd turf wars.
Bearded Fellow: I just want people to care about the infrastructures we're building and who-
Cueball: No, you just want to feel smugly superior. You have no sense of perspective and are probably autistic.
2010:
Cueball: Oh my God! We handed control of our social world to Facebook and they're DOING EVIL STUFF!
Bearded Fellow: Do you see this?
[Inset, the bearded fellow rubs his index and middle fingers against his thumb.]
Bearded Fellow: It's the world's tiniest open-source violin.There's no real difference between a site on a server and a cache on a server from any kind of philosophical decentralization point of view.
Just put the thing on the server in the first place and forget about the phone entirely.
Go install AOSP and see how useless your device becomes. An OS is more than a kernel and filesystem, it's also a basic set of userspace utilities and functionality. Last time I installed AOSP on a device- wifi wasn't even supported. And Google is removing messaging from AOSP. Phone OS my ass, it's useless without 3rd party cruft that isn't available to end users.
That said, office supplies don't make something an operating system. If all it had was a launcher, it would still be an operating system, because you can install the apps you want onto it.
I don't know why your device didn't have WiFi, ut it's not the norm. Standard AOSP images should use the vendor partition to load additional drivers if the ones built into the Android kernel don't suffice.
Under this view, every device should be a standard-issue military-grade turing-machine. There would be no individuality, every device would be the same GPL licensed Free Operating System.
Almost all differences among the various modern phones, laptops are mere software, the software is where the individuality is. Hardware differences exist in degree rarely in kind (megapixels of cameras, gb of ram etc) and even if some new type of hardware or sensor comes out its just a matter of developing a proper interface for the cpu, os etc.
This still doesn’t remove the issue with running a server via mobile connectivity. Especially when there’s free options, or inexpensive options that won’t run up your mobile data bills.
Do phones not have WiFi? Yeah, it's not ethernet but you intentionally made it sound like mobile data is the only option.
And this is a terrible argument IMO. The idea of “It’s my device, it’s my right to do exactly what I want with it” is beyond dead and buried. There are lots of things people want to do with their devices that Apple doesn’t let them do. That’s literally been Apple’s philosophy for decades and at this point it shouldn’t be surprising.
Buy the Pinephone if you absolutely have some arcane use-case you can’t live without.
Also, "I don't need this so nobody should have it" is a terrible take.
Literally the title of the post (every phone)…
It’s not a terrible take. I want the features Apple decides are best for the iPhone because I prefer their philosophy to the idea of some device with unlimited options and settings.
Okay, then you've got me confused. Apple decided years ago to allow applications to bind to port 80 and run a personal website on their phones.
Does that mean you want Apple to change something or not? Because Apple decided their devices should be able to serve anything on "privileged" ports.
The opposite opinion that you seem to advocate is equally terrible -- "I want it so everyone should accept it" (which is the title of the post). How about you go advocate for a phone that supports it, says a Linux phone, and if it takes off and Apple/Google adopt it, then we can have it without this tiresome debate?
Eg if that terminal app is capable of playing audio, it can play silence to keep the app alive forever in the background.
I don't mean to imply that this is practical. Any solution would still destroy battery life.
My use case: I plug in an old phone into the wall, a 65W Thinkpad charger to be precise. The input for the Thinkpad is USB type C which is the same as my ZTE phone. I connect the USB C cable, attach my spicy pillow of a battery (it is removable), wait until the device powers up, and remove the spicy pillow from the phone. The phone stays on.
What I would like to see instead is some way for phones and laptops to work directly off of the wall, not charging or using the battery at all once it is done charging, without me having to physically remove the battery. I thought this is how laptops used to work but I am not an expert. Phones I am positive do not work like this for some reason. I believe one reason is the camera flash. The camera flash requires more oomph (very technical term) than the wall can deliver. I'm guessing that based on a single anecdote that I once tried to use the flash without a battery and the phone rebooted.
I guess the main gist of this comment is to say I'd like to see better thought go into making battery more durable so you can use a phone, connected to the wall for ten years if you wanted to. I am positive that if we could use the phone off the wall without constantly charging and discharging the battery, we would be able to eliminate most cases of spicy pillow.
Most flagship devices already do this. They automatically enter kiosk mode after being plugged in for a few days which eliminates the spicy pillow problem by keeping battery voltage significantly lower than normal. Eg https://support.apple.com/en-gu/HT208710
> I thought this is how laptops used to work
Transients are a problem for laptops and desktops too. Eg:
- Macbooks go into limp mode by asserting PROCHOT when the battery is <10% (or disconnected or high internal resistance) regardless of whether the laptop is plugged in. If they didn't, a sudden increase in power usage would cause enough voltage sag to reset the machine or cause data corruption. See https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/380493/cpu-throttl...
- An RTX 3090 draws only 350W, but transients are often double that. A lotta people with weak PSUs and aggressive OCP had random reboots and bluescreens until they upgraded their PSU. The newer RTX 4090 has a better VRM which causes smaller transients so it can work with a smaller PSU despite having a 450W TDP.
“wHy WoULd YoU wAnT tO Do tHaT aNyWaY¿” -typical Apple fanboy response
Repurposing old hardware is cool too, but when you’re not using it as a phone anymore, you could run a different OS.
When people complain about how Windows (and for that matter also Linux and BSD, et al.) don't lock their environments down, they should remember it's because both devs and users alike appreciate and respect the freedom to do whatever the hell we want on our computers.
Great power begets great responsibility. Android and iOS place next to no responsibility on the devs and users, but likewise also none of the power.
---
But why?
even this low bar is (imo sadly) currently impossible for someone who just has a spare phone in their closet and a bit of html knowledge
looking forward to the unicorn that makes wordpress for ios/android
Termux can install nginx, PHP, and various SQL clients, so I'm sure someone can make a copy/paste script that'll set up a WordPress server on your phone.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dnsop-svcb-https...
So even if you can run it at port 80 you can't really do that without NAT or tunnel somewhere and if you need that you can just NAT to get it visible on 80 from the outside
It's mostly imaginary problem
It took me about two mins, and most of that was because I typed a minimal html page on my phone using vi.
My phone has an apple logo, and the whole point of the article is that android is the one which blocks you from doing this without jailbreak. But on an iPhone it takes like one minute and zero configuration. (I literally just ran `python3 -m http.server 80` with no issues in ish).
This might allow a smartphone to host a publicly-accessible website with caching and DDoS protection for free. You'd still have to buy a domain, but https://gen.xyz/number is $1/year.
Though the keepalive traffic would eat your battery, unless cloudflared were integrated with Firebase Cloud Messaging somehow... seems easier to just put content on Neocities.
Maybe the value of running on your phone would be so people could see that your phone is up or something like that?
Sorry ma, I was in a meeting.
Really, our proclivity for instant gratification over patience is unhealthy.
I'm sure there's all sorts of neat ideas for what could go onto a phone's website, but I can't say that I see the appeal, personally.
That said, when I imagine self hosting from a phone I definitely think the phone + USB drive in a closet approach makes more sense.
In your photo example, my mom, the first time the website wouldn’t work, would demand I just email her the photos from the trip from then on.
The sending client is supposed to retry if the receiving server is down.
But it's still built with the expectation that the recipient host will usually be available, and that unavailability is a transient condition -- a failure to contact the recipient SMTP server is a noisy failure, and, after the first few retries, most servers back off to one attempt every 8 hours. Mail servers which are only sporadically available would require some fairly substantial rearchitecture.
The noisy failure is probably not a part of the standard, more likely a recent trend.
But the article is about a personal website. Websites run over HTTP, which is not designed for anything unreliable.
It's interesting to think about a web that was designed to have lots of intermediary caching peers along the way as part of the protocol, but that's not what we have.
The notion of mobile-device-as-origin-server which can provide either content in a local context (on a LAN, localhost-only), or globally via cache-and-redundancy / cache-and-forward networks has definite and positive use-cases.
Commercial websites typically run on dedicated server hardware.
i.e. when you can't take a call or a text or read a social media notification. Why does this need to be always-available if those don't?
Also, I wonder what the actual "downtime" of a smartphone is. I doubt it's that much worse than a lot of websites. The downtime of a smartphone is also usually completely independent of the phone itself, as it's usually service and/or location related.
We already have crappy written apps waking up devices on OEM software, last we need is random agents on the internet waking up our phones.
We just need a good algorithm for reciprocity-pinning.
Maybe it's because I use LineageOS (and Cyanogen mod before that), but I never even knew that there were problems with being able to run a web server on android. Just recently, while I was bored on a train ride, I used the Fdroid app Lightweight Web Server (LWS) to send some files to a friend on iPhone for which I would otherwise have no easier way of doing (whatsapp upload is slower and filesize is limited). I move the files into the folder, prepare the HTML file a bit, then my friend sets up a wifi hotspot, I connect and tell my friend to enter the IP-Address or scan a QR code. Works nicely for me (although weirdly it doesn't work if I create the hotspot. I need to connect to theirs, I wonder why)
Even if this is something I only use rarely, using a phone that can't do something this simple is unacceptable to me. It's satisfying in itself that I don't want my phone manufacturer to arbitrarily limit what the hardware can and cannot do. Would I suggest running a business website off my phone? No. I doubt it's secure, performance is limited, ddos would be a possible issue. Do I still want to be able to do silly things with the devices I purchase? Absolutely.
Another point, if I remember correctly, a cellphone mesh network of some kind was useful for Hong Kong protestors at one point at least.
most of that power efficiency is based on deep sleep modes and network packet batching. Opposite of what servers do
On their own, they are small and efficient. Proper servers need 10x, 100x, or more power just to boot. Sure, AMD has some amazingly efficient Zen 4 cores now. But cores don't exist in a vacuum. Just spinning the fans on such a machine consumes more power than a phone could even dissipate.
Running a web server on a mostly-trusted LAN for 5 minutes doesn't sound like the security risk you're trying to paint it as
As for non-rooted Android not allowing use of port 80, this is just one symptom of the larger problem of not allowing the computer owner to have root privileges. And letting an advertising company have them instead. IMHO.
Unrelated perhaps but it is possible to forward port 80 in Android. For example, I forward tcp/80 to a computer running NetBSD. This can be done using an app, e.g., NetGuard. TLS zealots might want to try this sometime and observe some of the unencrypted egress traffic.
Thought experiment: Imagine you make a salary or other financial gains by applying what you know in the subject matter area of X. Someone comes along and proposes that they want to teach more people about how X works. What is the likelihood you will respond with something like "no one really wants to know how X works". You want to maintain the status quo because you understand that an information asymmetry between people who understand how X works and those who do not must exist in order that you may continue to be paid for or otherwise profit from your knowledge.
Here's an uncomfortable thought: The modern day personal website is someone's tiktok profile page. And it's thanks to the fact that everyone has a phone, and tiktok just works.
There's an opportunity to learn from this model, though I'm not sure what the lesson is.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...
As someone who was just in the hospital for nine weeks in an area where the cell towers didn’t seem to provide anything higher than 3mbit in downtown St Louis with a >2 second lag time, I can verify that at least some Americans in my corner of the world live in places where broadband is just not a thing. And most of America is rural America.
I retweeted it at the time, but annoyingly it looks like twitter doesn't have a way to search for retweets older than 7 days. https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Atheshawwn%20filter%3Anat...
Here's some stats showing that some ~27M households (almost a quarter) don't have home internet at all, and presumably just use their phones: https://www.reviews.org/internet-service/how-many-us-househo...
Frustratingly, I can find the wolfram alpha statistics I was calculating at the time, but not the article itself that I got them from. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=162.8+million+divided+b...
EDIT: Aha, 162.8 million was the magic number that started turning some some search results. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/technology/digital-divide....
The study was from 2018, so I wonder how it's changed in the past five years.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...
> Among all households in 2018, 92% had at least one type of computer and 85% had a broadband internet subscription.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/computer...
> And most of America is rural America
What?
> Despite the increase in the urban population, urban areas, defined as densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas, now account for 80.0% of the U.S. population, down from 80.7% in 2010.
> https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru...
As for those who just use their phones at home, if their phones do get above broadband speeds, would that not classify them as having home broadband?
People could change their own brakes and oil too. But how many folks want to? Not many. It doesn’t provide value to them. Just like a personal website wouldn’t provide value to them. Hence, like you said, social media pages are their “personal website”.
It’s also a practical reality of living in a complex world. Someone using Excel isn’t thinking about how that app was programmed. Most computer programmers don’t have in-depth knowledge of how a CPU works. And they definitely don’t understand the chemistry of a transistor.
The fact is we live in a world too complex to understand it all. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Whereby ;
And this was prior to Cloud BTW (and I met with some goog eng friends in 2006 or so about it, but they said it would never be a thing:
I wanted a cloud based desktop, with your personal encrytped access key being your phone, which you would dock, and then grab an instance of your desktop from the cloud... (a while later motorola tried to launch such a device...)
Anyway, here is my current take:
Every phone should be able to have a way to manage your own APIs such that your links to whatever media buckets you have/sub to - you can very easily just create little widgets that will pull your IGs, HNs, whatever and you can just slide the content-boxes around and organize a page very easily...
Add a content-box (we attempted to build a site around this idea in ~2005 - no bueno - as mobile didnt exist as it does today)
the content box will be [text, pics, audio, links, etc] and you can nest one on top of the other...
So add an element - then drop it on top of another to have the link (think tooltip hover to whatever child box on parent)
etc...
Cloudflare the F out of it - and allow for black/whitelists of content within the profile of the user (never link to FB or Twixxxter, whatever)
You get the gist.;
Sun used to have a desktop product similar to this, it worked with an authentication token like a company badge or whatever. You could go sit at any desk and login and you'd have your own desktop environment including audio.
Of course the whole thing was proprietary and it was server side so you needed heavy servers. Also logging in remotely wasn't possible IIRC cause it required a huge network pipe (aka on-premises). It died a quiet death.
Most of the cool things about personal sites can be replicated without the needless toil of actually messing with hosting yourself.
Even Markdown isn't enough.
I want a site where we can view posts on a calendar, write things in full BBCode, view by tags or heirarchy (Or a hybrid, like #stories.romance), clone your stuff as a git repo and edit locally, etc.
Port 80 is the standard insecure http port assigned by IANA. Whether or not the site is commercial has nothing to do with it.
https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/...
But then there is nothing stopping the user from installing spyware and becoming a botnet zombie by following a video tutorial about "how to install fortnite vbucks generator apk". Most people aren't your average HN reader or techie, they just want a device that facilitates accessing the web and using rich applications/games, all in a safe way that doesn't require them spending hours a week (initially) configuring or playing with their phone to make it work for them.
In a world where every user has root privileges (and doesn't need to go through too much friction to "control" their device), and can't even say "I want to purchase an iPhone because it means I can consume content and use social media without needing to worry about malware", more people get hurt - because the average person doesn't know they need these manufacturer-imposed guardrails until they do something dumb one day and get hacked.
The solution to fixing this and achieving utopia is education - standardized classes focused on proficiency in identifying scams, learning about how typical services operate and reasoning about what motives actors have. But this is extremely hard to do when the United States doesn't seem to care about this, and it'd be impossible to ensure on a global scale.
A website is a computer running an httpd. It's not a "platform" and it's not a means of drawing an audience. Those are specific uses of running an httpd, ones that happen to enrich so-called "tech" company intermediaries, but those are not the only uses.
An httpd is a program that reponds to HTTP requests. There is much one can do with HTTP. Certainly, HTTP is not limited to the uses that so-called "tech" companies have chosen: attracting large audiences, mass data collection and the sale and delivery of programmatic advertising. For example, using only HTTP one can transfer and receive files, messages, audio, video, any stream of bytes, to and from one's family, friends and colleagues, directly, without using a so-called "tech" company intermediary.
This has been demonstrated, for example, by a gentleman in Japan:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37044318
Of course, people that profit from these so-called "tech" companies do not want any discussion of such other uses for HTTP. If the uses do not allow for advertising or some way for certain people to make money, then these people will talk them down. "No one wants that." "I don't want that therefore no one else wants that." "It will not work because..." "We tried it and it failed." We have seen these lame arguments so many times. The more empathic the negative responses from HN commenters to any proposed non-commercial, non-advertising-related uses of the web, the more we can be sure such uses are not only possible but highly probable. Time will show the wiser. It's early days.
I sympathize with this, but disagree. There are a lot a great free options for hosting a website. I personally use GitHub Pages, but Netlify, Vercel, and even Glitch offer excellent free tiers. Heck, if you just want to put some words on the web, WordPress.com offers free blog hosting.
All of these options are using someone else's service, and that may go away without notice. I understand some people wouldn't prefer that. But on the other hand, I value my phone's battery and site's availability over owning the full stack.
Do a traffic dump and check how many thousands of requests its handling for all your personal data from every app installed.
It's one of the reasons running standard Linux, or even de-Googled Android, on a normal Android device can absolutely tank your battery life. Waking up the radio is expensive, and packets coming in at random moments means the work put into power saving scheduling goes down the drain.
Not necessarily. About eight hours ago I was having trouble with the GPS on my main phone (I cleared GNSS on GPStest app and it wasn't refreshing fast enough), so I found another in my assortment of phones that was still running and had some charge left in it and used it (it also had GPStest installed)—and I'm using it now to post this comment.
It's a Huawei GR5 Honor from 2017 with original battery that I've de-Googled, and when I picked it up earlier the battery indicated 22℅ remaining which surprised me because I've not used it for some weeks.
When I read your comment I thought I'd ckeck the battery and phone usage logs and I'm now even more surprised. The phone was last used on July 19 (24 days ago) and the battery drain graph shows a very gentle and almost perfectly linear decline from then (until I put it on change and started using it).
Moreover, it estimates remaining battery life in standard/default power mode at 8 days 23 hours (but it's since been on change). Note: the phone was set to standard power mode during those past 24 days. If I switched to 'Power Saving' mode the estimate is 11 days 16 hours, and in 'Ultra Save' its estimate is nearly 33 days (778 hours 44 mins).
Incidentally, the phone has 346 apps installed.
It's amazing what battery life one can achieve when one stops both Gapps and user-installed apps yapping back to Google-Central.
Most people use some kind of app that receives push updates from the internet onto their smartphones, whether that's Facebook or WhatsApp. If you can live without those apps then you'll have a much better time, because the WiFi can actually turn itself off completely and the phone modem can fall back to a state as passive as possible.
You don't need to de-Google your phone for this effect. Just disable all internet access (WiFi off/disconnected, cellular data off) and your phone can last a day longer. Works great for devices repurposed as navigation systems!
True, that's my experience too. As mentioned, I've well over a dozen unmodified and rooted Android phones and some of these have been repurposed including for navigation, remote control of equipment etc.
I'm not a typical user, no social media, no Google accounts, no cloud storage and such, so for phones that aren't rooted Gapps are either disabled or where possible removed, similarly, any running services that I'm not using are stopped (if possible). On rooted phones apps only run when I'm using them, WiFi/SIMs are disabled and or airplane mode is on when the phone is not in use, also no background data is allowed etc. so I expect my phones to last for days without recharging.
What surprised me about this Huawei is that it is six years old and the battery has been abused—left charging at 100% for days on end—yet it still managed 24 days on standby in normal power mode. No doubt it would have lasted a full month if I hadn't used it today.
It's not sad, just sensible. In 2009 it made no sense to host a website on a phone. If you didn't want to use a hosting service, an old desktop or laptop made more sense than a smartphone even then.
A smartphone as a server could be useful for some in-person use cases where internet access is either unavailable or undesired. For example: an emergency neighborhood communication network, or perhaps a p2p shopping experience for swap meets.
However, these use cases tend to be rare (total internet outages usually get fixed very quickly), or of marginal real-world value (at a swap meet you just walk around to see what's available), so there aren't many resources dedicated to developing solutions for them.
"For as little as $0.25, you can set up websites at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, the masters of only pay for what you use hosting since 2002." [1]
Are you telling me people who can afford a smartphone cannot afford some simple static hosting?
1. Service shutdown
2. Price jacked up
3. Your account/instance terminated
4. Data abused
And many more. It's almost guaranteed you'll basically be hold hostage at one point.
So, if you're arguing against people having the ability to host on devices they own, you'd need a better argument, one that specifically show how that would be destructive and harmful so that they shouldn't have this freedom.
Huh, what? The issues I mentioned proceed from using services you don't own or have power over. How can I suffer from such issues on my own device?
> out of range or your phone might be off
and? If the owner is ok with that, where is the problem? Are people not permitted to walk because a car is faster?
Are you arguing I'm not allowed to host because a service can cut me off, so I need to open myself to more services that can cut me off?
I don't know about you, but that seems to me the logical thing to do
Because the entire point of the article is that hosting on mobile should be indeed more convenient and accessible.
By that logic, that's what you are on your phone as well, unless you collected the silicon material, diffused and soldered and programmed it yourself.
Even if you assume 'a physical black box, but at least you hold it in your own hands', that is barely making that position stronger since you're still reliant upon networking which requires both a second party and rights to use it, neither of which you control.
Essentially, you will never, ever be some silly idea of a 'self made server owning person' because without mutual agreements and trusts, you get nothing. Not even spare electrons to flip the bits in the CPU registers.
The best we can do is make a balance between our risk appetite and how we want to spend our time. Turns out random phones that will turn into e-waste faster than you can sneeze is what people accept, and thus that is what the suppliers supply.
I'm lost, how did you come the conclusion that tenants and owners lend the same power?
> unless you collected the silicon material, diffused and soldered and programmed it yourself.
You don't need to build a house to be its owner.
Equating being able to run a webserver on a privileged port to power, and thus ownership is a bad take. That also goes for the other way around where it is equated to ownership first and power second: none of that is coupled to the ability to run a webserver on any port for that matter.
And on top of that, I made the case that even if you could, you're now just beholden to the power of the webserver maintainer, the OS maintainer and the baseband maintainer. You're not suddenly 'free' or 'empowered' by some sort of ideal.
Mind you, I'm not saying it's great that you can't always run arbitrary software, but staking power and tenancy on that seems pretty dumb to me.
Is there a single person on this planet who wants to host a website but can't and will start doing so if their mobile phone supported it? I'm going to guess no.
99.99999% of people want to host nothing at all (and probably don't know what web hosting is). For the ones that do, it is still a lot more cost effective (and reliable/performant) to buy a $5 VPS or a Raspberry Pi than rely on a device and network connection that aren't meant to be used for web hosting. Cell phones have limited battery life. Mobile network connections are spotty, and they allocate the vast majority of bandwidth for downloads because that's what people are using their devices for.
So the ecosystem doesn't support running websites on mobile devices because (1) it is a terrible idea, (2) the demand is non-existent and (3) there are a hundred better options.
While I agree this is true today, people also didn't know they wanted cars or smartphones until good implementations were made. Smartphones existed for many years but were niche before the iPhone. We as an industry have thus far completely failed to show the value of self hosting.
People just don't need or want this. Facebook has a network effect and shows you all your friends' posts. Having to visit fifty personal sites would be a pain.
Which is why RSS (and Atom, but I’m just saying RSS because it’s less to type) was such a brilliant invention, and also why it was “killed.”
Everyone is talking about things like “ActivityPub” and “interoperability” and “personalized algorithms” nowadays but RSS supported many of those features twenty years ago.
Yeah, it didn’t solve the account portability problem (you’d still need a separate account for each forum and blog you wanted to comment on; OpenID almost solved this issue but was a nightmare to work with, Mozilla Persona (which is not the same thing as Mozilla Personas, wow that company is bad at naming things) would have definitely solved this issue if that company had spent more than twenty minutes promoting it), but it did solve the actual fundamental issue that most people seem to be getting at with these modern systems: it offered a way to collate and display updates from a wide variety of mutually incompatible Internet sources all together in one place.
It’s an incredible simple pitch, even to non-technical people: display your YouTube subscriptions, Twitter follows, blogs you’re interested in, and news sites that you read all in one place, in software that you control.
The problem is that operating a “platform” rather than a website got to be too profitable, and suddenly the goal shifted from serving useful content to make you want to come back to a site to serving enough content that you never want to leave to begin with. Many people believe that if Google had made Reader the center of their social strategy rather than killing it to pursue a short-sighted attempt to compete directly with Facebook, we could be looking at a much healthier Internet today (and Google probably could be earning a lot more money than they currently are, considering the abysmal adoption rate of modern Google services is often argued to be directly linked to fear of shutdown).[1]
Personal websites died for the mainstream because Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offered a better interface for the average consumer. But they could be brought back by a system that made the good parts of those sites interoperable. Frankly, this is the kind of thing that I want to see Mozilla pursuing again, not...whatever the heck they’re doing now. (You go their website and they’re selling Pocket, which is basically a bad centralized version of what I’m talking about; a rebadged VPN service; an email alias service; and Firefox. What happened to the people who tried to do things like Persona?)
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-r...
RSS is read-only, ActivityPub allows back-and-forth interaction between servers. The two are not comparable.
Like if you ask a cashier at McDonald’s, will they have any clue what you’re talking about?
Walk into an office. Ask the receptionist, are they going to care at all?
Do commenters on hacker news ever have conversations with the bulk of humanity in order to have any perspective?
But most family and friends forget to visit it, because Facebook is not promoting my website.
The internet activity of younger generations today is increasingly centered around use of only a handful of websites, mostly provided through dedicated phone apps. Unless a person’s own website gets promoted by a social-media site’s algorithm, or comes up at the top of a Google search, no one is going to visit that URL.
~$5-7 a month for a web server via various platforms. A better one than your phone would be, most likely—certainly more stable. I don't think that's what's stopping people, I think most people just don't have a use case for hosting a web site.
In my 90s dream of the technohippie utopia they would all have extensive and idiosyncratic personal websites about various things they've soldered together, but that didn't work out. Turns out most people want to watch videos of other people doing things, and that is most efficiently hosted in a centralized place.
I think this handily explains why the “personal website for every human” utopia never came to pass.
(Yes, I know some people will produce great content purely for the joy of doing it, and don’t care if anyone consumes it. I think that’s an edge case, not the operandus of every living person)
P.S. You’re completely right about the $5-7/mo hosting. I used to run a server in my home, but discovered I was spending more on electricity than the cost of leasing a small VPS. Centralizing has fantastic economies of scale.
The cheapest PHP/MySQL hosting in my country is $18/year
Even assuming it would be doable, it would be a security nightmare, and we'd end up relying on some centralised systems anyway lest we burden the internet with absolutely insane amounts of continual p2p discoveries.
If you want a personal website, why not use a service like neocities? It's free, and just lets you go ham with static content. Don't feel like writing HTML pages manually? Make a TiddlyWiki and upload that.
There's a risk of kernel exploits, but I can't remember the last time the Android kernel had a bug that could be triggered by simply sending packets to it. Privilege escalation works, maybe, but getting root on Android is a lot harder than most Linux servers because of the very strict and isolated SELinux contexts.
I've installed termux on my phone and I can install nginx with a single command. Downloading a Debian chroot and launching a full, maintained Linux distro is two commands away.
Until remotely triggered Android kernel exploits become a thing, I don't think the updates are the problem here.
RCE from Bluetooth packets has happened uncomfortably often - CVE-2017-0781+2 (BlueBorne), CVE-2020-0022, CVE-2022-20411, ...
I'll add that Resilio Sync + singlefile Tiddlywiki (I think most people would be surprised what TW can accomplish) from a phone is quite workable (a filewatcher with ratox or may toxic, or IPFS, would do as well, but they aren't as performant or turnkey). You can automatically push with custom conditions (or manually do so) to those listening (the burden has to be shifted away from the phone to some degree). If you have persistent seeders in the mutable torrent swarm, it's even better. That would serve a very large number of people on the planet pretty well, imho. This is harder to anonymize on a phone, but also doable.
It's reasonable to do both, too.
Add a proper USB to boot with, and it would sometimes be easy enough to walk up to a random machine when you need more than a phone to work on your Tiddlywiki or other infrastructure. I admire trying to find ways to make sure almost anyone can participate in The Great Conversation with minimal material; it's an important problem.
I took it to mean he was discussing phones that are on IPv6 only networks.
I think the bigger issue is the number of mobile devices behind CGNAT.
I responded to this earlier: wouldn't dynamic DNS make your website unresolvable for at least a minute or two (or much longer if your TTL is longer) every time your IP changes?
> I think the bigger issue is the number of mobile devices behind CGNAT.
Yeah I agree on that, they already mentioned that part.
But what if instead of hosting an index.html file over HTTP(S) we could all host via BitTorrent?
A website could be a bunch of files that are referred to by a DHT hash file.
That way everybody who visits the website will also temporarily support the site by hosting it. If your self hosted site is Slashdotted/HNewsed than hosting would still not fail: after all, all the new visitors are temporarily also seeders of the file over BitTorrent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_%28peer-to-peer%29?wprov...
It's considerably more flexible, more easily embedded than node or Go.
Sounds more like a massive duplication-effort to me ...
And you can already look at various projects and see the positive impacts.
I'd elaborate on why, but we've all heard it a thousand times and the folks that don't want to believe anything they hear about Rust still won't hear it.
Running a personal website is a metaphor for actually using the device fully and with agency.
It cannot not happen. The drivers are the ever increasing commoditisation of quality hardware, the slow but steady maturity of open source software and the fact that it takes machination at planetary scale to prevent it from happening (ie keeping these ever more powerful devices locked for scrolling down social).
Ofcourse the timing and manner the revolution will happen is unpredictable.
> It cannot not happen
It has already happened: GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone, are already available.
Demonstrating that this freedom offers radical new opportunities (the infamous killer apps) is not yet done though.
We need to think outside the confines that locked down devices have forced us to think. Swarms of mobiles acting as both clients and servers are a new unexplored territory.
Pythonista: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1085978097
Symbian was a terribly quirky platform to develop for, but there were some quite cool things.
You'll have to use port 8080 or some other high port number because of privileged ports, but for just temporarily sharing your camera roll that shouldn't be too much of a problem.
and i live in vim on a computer. this tech-centric “i need a terminal and full access to the shell for it to have any worth” is pretty juvenile. phones are real tools for millions of people— the greatest technological innovation of the century.
I was likening it to something like a screwdriver. I often describe what we do as making tools for others to live their lives and spread culture and civilization, so I understand your sentiment (although I think you are grandstanding a little). My comment, however, was personal and about what makes something a tool for me.
I'm also a fan of what phones do for people, and software in general; one of my fondest times working in software was developing communication/chat software and knowing a number of people who met on it and became partners for life.
However, a server is such a specific + utilitarian thing. And on a phone it really serves very little utility. Some kid would get a kick out of making a website their friends can visit, but beyond that, not being able to run a server is more a symptom of how locked-down and uninspired phone OSes are, rather than a thing that specifically NEEDS to be implemented.
> The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites. The privilege of self hosting that early Internet users enjoyed was never given to the new Internet users.
If you actually have the technical chops to self-host a personal website in your house, why on earth would you want to do it on a phone? A Pi, Nano, Jetson, NUC, any kind of small form-factor mini PC is a far cheaper and better option if the limiter is seriously that you can't afford a hosting service. A web server does not need a camera, a touchscreen, a gyroscope, a GPS chip, a radio transceiver, an accelerometer, a fingerprint reader, or any of the many other hardware features that cause a phone to cost so much.
You may as well ask why your thermostat, printer, microwave, smart lightbulb, or television can't run a web server. There is nothing technologically stopping them. If they can run a stored program and connect to a network, they can bind to a port and listen for incoming requests. But running a website on them just isn't the purpose for their existence. General purpose computing devices exist and are cheap. If you want one, get one. There is no reason every single device that can do any form of computing needs to be a fully general-purpose computing device.
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/Previewing_Noki...
https://jpmens.net/2007/05/03/mobile-web-server-apache-on-a-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Web_Server
Heyday: https://web.archive.org/web/20090214014049/https://mymobiles...
2010 Goodbye (via redirect): https://web.archive.org/web/20100621023623/http://betalabs.n...
The ios/android app literally spin up a HTTP server run on the phone, the device just hit it to download file up to 20MB. I was dumb and didn' think much, and it just works. It works so well I never pay attention to it. Eventually the app evolve where the entire config is push this way, one can open the app, edit config, and it save these into XML file. The setipbox will download that XML file.
Then even better, there is a webserver run on the phone, where one on the same wifi network can hit it and edit all the config on a very simple website instead of using the app UI. Such as upload file from your desktop into the phone(the song book).
Of course, the app needs to be running for all this to work. When the app close, the webserver is also shut down.
So yes, even in 2012 on those cheap devices, one can run a full feauted webserver on the web server.
Even though I'm not idealistically aligned with the locked down App Store approach Apple takes, their ecosystem just works well for my needs.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/host-a-web-...
I think the name has you confused. The vast majority of people here are not self-styled hackers. Actually most are against hackers and the hacker ethos. Just because north korea calls itself the democratic people's republic of korea doesn't mean it is democratic or a republic. The same applies here.
> Our image of what the web is and should be has been poisoned by 99.999% uptime cloud-hosted tat.
No. It's been poisoned by greed and power.
It would be way more efficient for the phone companies to simply give a free small VPS to phone customers who want one rather than allow them to host it on their phone.
'Personal website' doesn't have to mean running Google in your pocket.
Aside from the phone use case, the concept of "privileged ports" is pretty silly on any device operated by a single user or used for a single purpose. In an age where any device on a modern network can reserve hundreds of IP addresses without any risk of address space exhaustion, concepts such as reserved ports are next to useless.
One day I'll get myself to waste a few weeks writing an Android mod that gives every app on the system a separate (ephemeral) IPv6 address. The challenge will be to generate enough virtual interfaces for network namespacing to do its thing while assuring it only does so on IPv6 enabled WiFi networks, but I think it can be done.
But then you’re kinda using a host aren’t you… and you may as well just cache it…
But if this is a WWW page doesn’t it open up individuals to D/DoS attacks? What happens when an angry ex nukes your battery on a Saturday night? I don’t see why hosting from a phone should (or even could) be a thing.
The article doesn’t convincingly establish why phone hosting is important. If it’s a cost issue then wouldn’t it be a competitive loss-leader for an ISP add-on like we had in the past? ISPs used to provide web hosting, email, newsgroups, etc. Those all went away in favor of dedicated providers, which seems like a better model.
I want a firewall from my ISP about as much as I want a carwash from my public utilities.
You can have a very usable web server and have custody over your own data/website.
Couple it with a Wireguard VPN to an IPv6 tunnel broker and you're golden.
What I think we really need is more stuff like ngrok and cloudflare tunnels, in easier to use form.
If it has to go through centralized infrastructure anyway, I'd rather someone else process all the traffic first, maybe even keep DoSes out, handle the SSL, etc.
If self hosting is ever going to be a thing again, I think we either need that, or full P2P(I've written before about why we need to have something like .onion service URLs but without the anonymity, and even used a DIY implementation of the idea for a while).
But at the moment, without adding anything new to browsers, hosting through a cloud portal seems to be the most practical.
I dont think (as the author suggests) that IPv6 everywhere is happening anytime soon.
> The private share is identified by a share token. The accessing user will use the share token, along with the zrok access command to create a local endpoint on their system, which lets them use the shared resource as if it were local to their system.
That's really awesome both in terms of function and documentation. Clear and concise about exactly what it's going to do, and exactly the functionality I was hoping to see, especially in something that also has a SaaS web portal.
Will there ever be an Android client? I always thought that what the IoT really needs is some way to just plug in your IoT thing to Ethernet, scan a code on its crappy little LCD, and have them instantly paired.
It looks like OpenZiti doesn't do P2P yet but they're thinking about it? That will definitely be a big deal, but at the moment it seems like it's already 100% ready for the use case of doing a personal site.
One of the great things about zrok is that its built on OpenZiti, so we use Ziti's components as part of zrok. Ziti has an Android client (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.openziti.m...).
Do you have an immediate need? If yes, I can check with the dev team to bump priority... particularly if the use case deploys into production.
Correct, Ziti has an overlay fabric with smart routing. This allows all connections to be outbound at source/destination for better security and simplicity. The smart routing potentially allows us to deliver better performance too. We do have P2P connections on the roadmap for use cases which would benefit more from that type of approach.
It looks very promising! Maybe even something that could make self hosting worth it for DIYers!
if somebody wants to have a website, they can. there's plenty of free options that don't involve a device that has intermittent connectivity, runs off a battery, and that you probably don't want to enable remote access to for security reasons.
the reason people don't set up personal websites is that they don't want to. not becauase they can't host it. facebook does a better job of serving the "personal website" niche than personal websites do. the dream of every person having their own website is a thing that tech nerds want from others, not a thing that most people want for themselves
I have a great reason to host a website on my phone. I want to. It's my phone. I'm paying for the service. You can do what you want with your phone, but please, don't tell me what I can and can't do with my property.
I took a product that was "required" "minimum spec" to be run on a c5.2xlarge, fixed it and ran it on my phone, with a load test.
It achieves showing how wasteful their approach to resources was, and how powerful smartphones have become, and a cool way to show off.
If someone wants to know how resource intensive something is, if you can say I can get X Tx/QPS on my phone, it's probably not that complicated, and not that hard to run/maintain.
My phone can use ai to generate images locally[1], process video or camera raws, run better games than my laptop and likely more.
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/draw-things-ai-generation/id64...
I never finished the proof of concept setup to do it, but I know I could have done it.
Rather than the phone hosting the website, the service hosting the backup of the phone should act as the webserver. Would solve uptime, and security. To solve the webhosting hostage situation will require an act of congress to make phone providers and manufacturers liable for loss of data for the phones complete with fixed rates for hosting. The act should also stipulate that webhosting with open standard api and servers is an absolute non-negotiable necessity subject to substantial penalties for failure to comply…. Seems harsh but it would cause an open market of third party sites to provide for the offloading / hosting / storage responsibilities while usurping the walled garden strangled hold. In addition would open up a huge search industry where the ticktock/ instagrams of the worlds are reduced to search algorithms rather than divine dictatorships.
Recently, since I often now leave my phone at home and just wear an Apple Watch, I am thinking that a smaller device than a phone would be good.
I am assuming the kind of infrastructure where my one device could privately and securely use ambient peripherals.
I think that too much of our life is spent maintaining and fooling around with digital devices. I think that a one device capability would let people make full use on digital infrastructure while freeing up time.
Popularizing dynamic DNS seems like a good idea, but may require new protocols altogether in order to support all the IP address changes. But yea, more edge compute; owned by the source. Sounds good to me.
What is the problem you're trying to solve? Is twitter... er... I mean X not unreliable enough for you?
Imagine someone depending on a resource that's on a device that moves in and out of service as you lose coverage or have to reboot to get bluetooth pairing to work right.
And what if you wanted to support TLS. Try explaining to normal people why they're getting security warnings because your CARRIER doesn't support dynamic DNS so your cert SN or SAN doesn't match your FQDN.
And proxies. I don't even want to think what carrier data teams will do to proxy requests.
I really like the idea of a carrier / manufacturer neutral protocol to get data (pictures, contact vCard, call logs, music, etc.) on and off a phone.
But it's not HTTP(S).
To handle the issue of ipv6 addresses changing frequently (daily?) I have ddclient update my AAAA record to my domain on cloudflare. I don't set a A record. Then cloudflare just proxies any ipv4 traffic to the ipv6 address so anyone with my URL can load the page.
I don’t want it on my device. Battery, connectivity and uptime aren’t suited to hosting. But it should be something I can delegate to a service (or set of services) and only care about the hosting details of if I want to.
Problem is, every time I see anything on decentralised identity or hosting, it ends up as an unusable dogs breakfast. We’re not there yet, but it’s worth pondering as a possible future.
One of the reasons the Internet is (was) so good is that it was a communication mechanism with a filter.
It used to be that you had to work hard (and pay more) to host anything on the Web and get your content seen. That meant that the Web had more high-quality content, written by high-quality people.
Inaccessibility on the content authoring and hosting side is a feature, not a bug.
Now that anyone can easily and cheaply host or dump out content, the quality has gone down. Internet content will continue to go down in proportion to how easy it is to get your content out in front of people.
Is this a new theory? Or am I repeating what is already a widely shared theory?
Fwiw, I disagree. To me, the best sites on the old internet we made by generous people donating their time and energy to make something cool, and nowadays
1. The internet is no longer cool in the same way,
2. The community is different
& most importantly
3. The vast amount of ad-based commercial websites.
Adding a financial barrier would just make it more dominated by commercial entities, and people wanting to share their stuff for fun would be more likely to post in a silod social media app instead of a website.
Additional theory: Online payments weren’t initially possible / trusted and that meant lots of content online was put there out of passion rather than to derive a profit (another filtering criteria).
Ref: http://npds.free.fr/
We should be chatting p2p through wifi/bluetooth by just letting our friends scan a QR code that links to our phone's web server that serves a p2p client for real-time chat in the middle of the jungle
In that same way, we should be playing games, take notes, run fair micro elections / lotteries, and hundreds of other coordination apps
It wasn't just about the number, size and frequency of requests: the cellphone protocol at the time also required the transceiver to be in a state of readiness for a time interval in-between requests, during which it drew more battery. And the software was not in control of those time intervals — the network operator was.
(If I had signed an NDA I don't remember, it should have expired by now)
What? You can host a personal website for free. People are just not interested in it
In the abstract, I feel like editing a file on your phone vs. editing a file somewhere "in the cloud" isn't so different if the interface makes it indistinguishable, so I don't know if you get any real benefit to toting around your webserver...
but I like the notion of a homegrown, self-managed webserver that you keep in your pocket.
Out of curiosity, I also tried hosting it on an old LG G2 phone I had around, and it worked great, even though this is a 10+ year old phone (currently running the last version of LineageOS that was available for it, Android 11)
This is the kind of thing that I'd like to see.
I think hosting services for Internet doesn't make sense, but does for local network. I have thought how could have disaster response server on local network. Instead of Raspberry Pi with battery, could have phone which is has own battery, and more likely to have one available.
Found that Samsung Dex mode with termux x11 (ubuntu) inside is so native and smooth.
No… we don’t want phones to be webservers. What a weirdly specific request. When is the last time you met someone in the real world who hosts their own website?
Webhosting is like £1 a month for the kind of thing you would be able to host on a phone. That makes infinitely more sense than this nonsense.
Unless you're relegated to IPv6-Never ISPs (eg:Frontier) which doesn't matter to IPv6 advocates because IPv6 is already awesome! and everywhere that counts!
First, nobody is stopping you from doing this. I just spent 30 seconds installing the first app I found on the Play store and 1 minute configuring my router, and now I have a static web server that I can hit from anywhere in the world.
But the real issue is that it's the wrong way to build a personal web server for your phone. The right way to do this is to host a server in a datacenter and install an app or service that pushes content to that server. Other users can hit that server to see that data you push. Tons of advantages of doing it this way (reliability, battery life, capability, throughput, cost, security, support for multiple devices, support for multiple kinds of devices, ...)
The reason that people don't build things like this isn't because they are evil or protecting their "walled gardens", it's just a bad design.
WHY must people again and again insist on this? This is not the way for 99.999% of people
Why not insist on extending the abilities and security of the one device 99.999% of people already have, before insisting on the acquisition of another, special-purpose device, requiring its own intricate setup and maintenance and power and space and connectivity? I just don't get it.
However, one of the last topics was the problem of routing for mobile servers and how to find optimized path if both the client and the server frequently change physical locations. And I remember the professor saying how this is a big unsolved problem for the industry. I think it is just not something that many people would use in practice.
Personally, I think the future of self hosting is going to happen through IPv4 tunnels[0] with SNI routing. You also get the added benefit of not exposing your actual IP address, and dealing with things like DDoS become the tunnel provider's concern.
See also content-centric networking, IPFS, Freenet 2023, etc.
May soon be commercially viable.
Nobody should be running their personal website on their cellphone. When I read this type of diatribe, I hesitate to agree with it. Abstract considerations of freedom lose out to "you're going to tell people they should do this, and that is a bad thing".
No, it’s just a bad idea because few people want it, and even if you did want it, you can, and even then it open a up issues of battery life, reliability, etc. we can barely get actual software makers to care about personal websites, let alone normal people. And then we want to argue people should be able to host on their phones? Good gravy.
I don't think iOS has the same restriction, but I can't find any documentation about it so I'm not sure.