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Every phone should be able to run personal websites

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Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#11

Post by necrophcodr »

necrophcodr wrote: post #10

The article doesn't make sense. It can technically work with a bunch of dynamic DNS systems. An IPv6 address isn't fixed to your device like a MAC address is. 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…

To be clear, I am all for self hosting stuff, but it needs to be in a proper, affordable, standardized package that can be kept secure and useful. A phone is NOT that.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#12

Post by jeroenhd »

crazygringo wrote: post #5

Please no. Phones go into tunnels, run out of battery, and go indoors where there's a poor signal or none at all. They make terribly unreliable servers. Not to mention how much faster this would chew up battery life. 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 mobil…

Nobody is saying that everyone should host websites on your phone. The author is saying you should be able to, if you so choose. Android and iOS put restrictions on what applications on a phone are able to do, often for arbitrary reasons.

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?

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#13

Post by mcpackieh »

crazygringo wrote: post #5

Please no. Phones go into tunnels, run out of battery, and go indoors where there's a poor signal or none at all. They make terribly unreliable servers. Not to mention how much faster this would chew up battery life. 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 mobil…

For most people it doesn't really matter if their personal webpage of gundam facts and cat pictures only has one 9 of uptime.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#14

Post by jeroenhd »

necrophcodr wrote: post #11
necrophcodr wrote: post #10

The article doesn't make sense. It can technically work with a bunch of dynamic DNS systems. An IPv6 address isn't fixed to your device like a MAC address is. 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…

To be clear, I am all for self hosting stuff, but it needs to be in a proper, affordable, standardized package that can be kept secure and useful. A phone is NOT that.

Why not? I download updates to apps on my phone every day. I fact, my old phone that has long stopped receiving updates still runs the latest browsers just fine. The problem isn't keeping the applications up to date.

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.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#15

Post by extraduder_ire »

jeroenhd wrote: post #12
crazygringo wrote: post #5

Please no. Phones go into tunnels, run out of battery, and go indoors where there's a poor signal or none at all. They make terribly unreliable servers. Not to mention how much faster this would chew up battery life. 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 mobil…

Nobody is saying that everyone should host websites on your phone. The author is saying you should be able to, if you so choose. Android and iOS put restrictions on what applications on a phone are able to do, often for arbitrary reasons. 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 wh…

> why shouldn't port 80/443 be available to apps

Because they're Not that I agree with it, but it is the existing status quo.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#16

Post by jeroenhd »

predictabl3 wrote: post #4
janandonly wrote: post #2

Limited data plans and connectivity issues make this infeasible. Also security issues on having incoming ports open, of course. 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 si…

You more or less described IPFS. Of course, IPFS grinds my gears because despite oodles of money and time, they still don't have a cohesive ecosystem SDK, haven't rebased on a Rust base, just squandering attention in the space, imo.

I don't see why they'd need to rebuild IPFS in Rust. Go is plenty fast. The problem is that the current IPFS network and design just don't scale very well.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#17

Post by FireInsight »

jeroenhd wrote: post #12
crazygringo wrote: post #5

Please no. Phones go into tunnels, run out of battery, and go indoors where there's a poor signal or none at all. They make terribly unreliable servers. Not to mention how much faster this would chew up battery life. 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 mobil…

Nobody is saying that everyone should host websites on your phone. The author is saying you should be able to, if you so choose. Android and iOS put restrictions on what applications on a phone are able to do, often for arbitrary reasons. 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 wh…

Unrestrained webservers on phones is an edge case that would certainly be abused by all sorts of crapware while being a very uncommon usecase for mobile devices at all.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#18

Post by jeroenhd »

sho_hn wrote: post #8

On my Nokia N90i, I used to run Apache and PHP and a gallery web app to serve up the phone's camera roll on the wifi interface. Was quite useful at times. Symbian was a terribly quirky platform to develop for, but there were some quite cool things.

You still can on modern phones: https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Termux-services

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.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#19

Post by GavinAnderegg »

> The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites.

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.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#20

Post by jeroenhd »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #15
jeroenhd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is saying that everyone should host websites on your phone. The author is saying you should be able to, if you so choose. Android and iOS put restrictions on what applications on a phone are able to do, often for arbitrary reasons. 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 wh…

> why shouldn't port 80/443 be available to apps Because they're Not that I agree with it, but it is the existing status quo.

I know about privileged ports, they just don't make sense anymore. They were a good idea on a timeshared system with groups of students logging into their own shells because equivalent personal computers were unaffordable.

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.

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