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Every phone should be able to run personal websites

rohanrd.xyz

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Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#81

Post by seiferteric »

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…

Actually I thought this was silly, but if your service provider provided and upstream cdn/cache, I think it could work pretty well. So when you are out of service area, they simply hit the cache.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#82

Post by maccard »

quaintdev wrote: post #76
maccard wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I installed https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.phlox.simp... , and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.foxdebug.a... (the first two apps I found) and had a http server with custom html in all of about 5 minutes.

None of them can run server on port 80/443

But you can run a server, register a domain, and send http://quaintdev.com:8000 to your friends and family, right?

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#83

Post by nologic01 »

Unlocking the smartphone will be a singular event in computing history.

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.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#84

Post by ivanmontillam »

I support this idea as well. I remember toying with Bit Web Server (LAMP stack) on my Galaxy S3 about 10 years ago, and I also remember running Tor on my smartphone (and it could run as a proxy pass server for an .onion site). I fantasized with the idea that if I was a crime lord, that's how I'd have my website. Police raid? Nope, I'm on the go as long as I have my shiny EDGE connection!

I never finished the proof of concept setup to do it, but I know I could have done it.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#85

Post by p1mrx »

passion__desire wrote: post #49
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…

Personal websites are info only. Don't change that much. Google can and should cache results. Once synced, the website could be behind Cloudflare to avoid DDoS.

Ignoring the "Cloudflare is centralizing the internet" problem, I wonder if Cloudflare Tunnel / cloudflared could run as an unprivileged Android app?: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections...

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.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#87

Post by dtx1 »

No! The reality is that the vast majority of phone users don't want or need this and are better off with such abilities disabled. If you want to run your own low powered server use a raspberry pi. People have their banking credentials, most of their personal life, their most private images on these devices and most of the people using phones can barely handle the complexity they already involve. I'm all for allowing people to use their devices as they chose but there's a certain level of compromise that anyone should see is reasonable when it comes to phones.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#88

Post by giancarlostoro »

jeroenhd wrote: post #66
giancarlostoro wrote: post #37

I disagree with this, but it is possible with one of those Linux shell emulators for Android, I forget if I tried it on iOS, but I've managed to do it both via Python and Golang.

Without root access you're not going to be able to use port 80 or port 443 on Android. I don't think iOS has the same restriction, but I can't find any documentation about it so I'm not sure.

Not sure what port I used and I wasnt trying to use my mobile IP either, probably just used 8080.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#89

Post by crazygringo »

seiferteric wrote: post #81
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…

Actually I thought this was silly, but if your service provider provided and upstream cdn/cache, I think it could work pretty well. So when you are out of service area, they simply hit the cache.

Then there's no reason to have it on your phone in the first place.

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.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#90

Post by asplake »

quaintdev wrote: post #74
jeroenhd wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not exactly hard, you can download web servers from the Play Store. The problem is that you'll need to set up port forwards and such to get traffic to port 8080 or whatever your web server of choice offers. 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.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think this port issue will get solved with the introduction of new SVCB/HTTPS RR record types. Basically the dns server will include port info along with existing IP info in it's response.

Waited a long time for this – didn't know it was on its way, thanks!

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dnsop-svcb-https...

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