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This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

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Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#181

Post by kelnos »

jerf wrote: post #92
caslon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A static site is really easy to host and HN's hug of death isn't actually that intense; the site itself only gets like six million views a day, a fraction of those click on every link, and no syndicated page has much reach.

People badly overestimate what it takes to serve a website nowadays. I don't know whether it's just because we're all used to 10+ second website loads as our browser groans under the weight of all the trackers, or if we all have too much experience with web pages that run multiple 10ms+ unoptimized queries against databases that pull way too much data back, etc. and so we all think web pages are some sort of challeng…

That's 10 mega bits per second, not bytes.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#182

Post by kelnos »

Nextgrid wrote: post #37
scoutt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really wonder why modem manufacturers feel the need to encapsulate everything so much. The alternative would be using an RTOS of some sort, implementing a full network stack (with > 100Mb throughput) and a USB device, as the bare minimum. Then you also have I2S audio, GNSS, etc. It probably makes more sense using an entire OS at some point. BTW, this is typical Qualcomm, that makes the chipsets for these modems.

Why not offload all that to the driver running on the main application processor? The risk of having a second, black-box running Linux is that it’ll get outdated and/or compromised and used as a persistence mechanism for malware.

Most of these can probably receive updates from the host OS if it's really needed, but I think what it boils down to is that the manufacturers just don't care, unfortunately.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#183

Post by Matthias247 »

bogwog wrote: post #80

So a modem on a pine phone can survive the HN hug of death (and the number one post no less)? Am I missing something here? Because there's no way I believe that!

See the first two words in the post: "No, really."

It was just used to catch attention.

But with a CDN in front it might likely work out.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#184

Post by t0mas88 »

mod wrote: post #45
taneq wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid we had a BBC Micro. In university we had CD burners but if you bumped the computer or did anything else while it was burning the CD, the disc was ruined. :P

I splurged in high school for a 4x cdrw drive by Sony. I had to kill all extra processes or else the machine (maybe the fault of the HDD) couldn't keep the buffer filled and the write operation would fail. I made a lot of coasters, but that was my favorite time with computers (1999 or so).

Oh yes and then right around the time 8x became possible (but cd-r only, cd-rw was still 4x initially I think) someone invented a way to continue after a buffer underrun instead of throwing away the disc. I think that really sold the faster burners because otherwise they were kind of useless for the increased risk of having a buffer underrun skmewhe in the process.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#185

Post by a1369209993 »

bmcahren wrote: post #165
dcposch wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do esims fix this problem? Increasingly the norm, no physical sim card at all.

No https://www.hologram.io/blog/what-is-an-esim-and-how-is-it-u... . > The eSIM (embedded SIM) is a small chip soldered directly to a board inside a device

TBF, eSIM as you describe it is not "no physical sim card at all", so they might be confusing it with something else. (I assumed, based on their phrasing, that they were talking about a virtuallized SIM card running in a (hopefully suitably locked-down) VM.)

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#186

Post by retrac »

olyjohn wrote: post #144
anthk wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Pentium II was more than enough to decode MP3's in parallel.

What's interesting is, I used to have this old 486 laptop. With Linux on it, I could run XMMS playing my MP3s and do other things and you could barely tell it was there. In Windows, playing an MP3 file with WinAmp took up so much CPU, you were stuck running only WinAmp.

Windows 9x had preemptive multitasking bolted on as an afterthought. Same engineering flaw that made it so crash-prone, with much of the kernel exposed read/write to the application for backwards compatibility with Windows 3.1. And Windows 3.1 did not have preemptive multitasking at all. Everything was cooperative running in one address space. If an application used anything from that era, the kernel could end up wasting way too many cycles handling the request. This made multitasking under high load dicey at best.

Linux is a fully preemptive OS with a kernel designed to return from system calls quickly, without blocking all the processes in the system. No surprise it fared better.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#187

Post by t0mas88 »

stadium wrote: post #114
caslon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A static site is really easy to host and HN's hug of death isn't actually that intense; the site itself only gets like six million views a day, a fraction of those click on every link, and no syndicated page has much reach.

I recently migrated a personal blog running on a hugo static site to digital ocean with automated github deployment, SSL certificates, CDN, and a custom domain. It took all of 15 minutes including updating the DNS on my custom domain registrar.

The same but with AWS S3 instead of a VPS is even simpler and avoids any maintenance / software updates. The bandwidth is more expensive but for a small personal site it shouldn't make much of a difference because you also save the price of the VPS.

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#188

Post by adamnew123456 »

rsync wrote: post #145
marcodiego wrote: post #142

These modems are way powerful. This reinforces the need of open source firmware for them. They run their own OS and can stay on independent of the rest of the hardware consuming very little power. Imagine putting your computer to sleep while downloads continue and can survive geographical network migration. A fully open source firmware for GPS/LTE modem is badly needed.

"They run their own OS and can stay on independent of the rest of the hardware consuming very little power." It's worse - there's a second, independent computer inside your phone that you have no control over: the SIM card. The SIM is a standalone computer with its own processor and memory which your carrier can communicate with and upload programs to run on it without your knowledge ("OTA updates", etc.) https://osm…

Seeing the ShadySIM project mentioned on that page reminded me of this DEFCON talk, which talks about some of the capabilities of the SIM OS (some of them run Java!) and what power they grant you over phones if you have control over the underlying cell network (legitimately or otherwise).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31D94QOo2gY

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#189

Post by folmar »

IgorPartola wrote: post #91
bogwog wrote: post #80

So a modem on a pine phone can survive the HN hug of death (and the number one post no less)? Am I missing something here? Because there's no way I believe that!

Currently can’t load the site. But also, serving static content is more or less a matter of network connection speed. You can cache everything in RAM and write data to a socket very quickly. HTTPS makes things a little wonky because you can’t just sendfile() files directly into a socket but the overhead is still pretty minimal.

I think you can now. You can have TLS handled by the kernel

  setsockopt(sock, SOL_TCP, TCP_ULP, "tls", sizeof("tls"));

Re: This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem

#190

Post by puzzlingcaptcha »

adamnew123456 wrote: post #188
rsync wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They run their own OS and can stay on independent of the rest of the hardware consuming very little power." It's worse - there's a second, independent computer inside your phone that you have no control over: the SIM card. The SIM is a standalone computer with its own processor and memory which your carrier can communicate with and upload programs to run on it without your knowledge ("OTA updates", etc.) https://osm…

Seeing the ShadySIM project mentioned on that page reminded me of this DEFCON talk, which talks about some of the capabilities of the SIM OS (some of them run Java!) and what power they grant you over phones if you have control over the underlying cell network (legitimately or otherwise). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31D94QOo2gY

I think they run Java Card, which is not quite the same thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card
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