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Every phone should be able to run personal websites

rohanrd.xyz

241–250 of 432 posts

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This entire thread should be saved in the Smithsonian. It’s the most epic bikeshedding about the stupidest idea, with people emotionally tying it to their pet peeves. Capitalism! Walled gardens! Free software! 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 a…

Who are you to say what people want? Why limit your imagination? Why not think about the possibilities first? Why presume that things must be difficult?

I'm so excited to use a spatial computer (a mobile VR headset computer) that can connect to my phone with my friends. We can host and create AR apps like that.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#242
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I change the provider? 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?

right, just like you can change the provider of your hosting.

Why not work instead on reducing the number of roadblocks and services that you need to manage, rely on, hand over your rights to, and entrust them with your personal data?

I don't know about you, but that seems to me the logical thing to do

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting, thanks for the information! Refreshing to see Apple provide to be the less restrictive app platform!

Even if you run the server, it will die if the app goes to background or the screen turns off. Hardly practical. Just because a port is open does not mean it’s “less restrictive”.

I apologize in advance: 'cat /dev/location > /dev/null & python -m SimpleHTTPServer 80'. Totally crude but works, even when turning off the display.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#244
post #183

If it was lan/wifi/bluetooth/local only then I could see it being kinda neat. Could have a little personal profile page for the people in your immediate vicinity. Could even update it by location. Like a kind of hyperlocal Tinder. 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…

I have always thought that we need a way to add firewall rules on ISP side so that we can block abuse at the origin without impacting the last device.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting, thanks for the information! Refreshing to see Apple provide to be the less restrictive app platform!

Even if you run the server, it will die if the app goes to background or the screen turns off. Hardly practical. Just because a port is open does not mean it’s “less restrictive”.

There are workarounds for that: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/configuring-...

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.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm assuming the best intentions from you but I'd like to point out two things: 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 sof…

Everything that might be useful to a marginalized population should not automatically be used to rhetorically beat someone over the head in this sort of discussion.

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.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#248
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw some statistics showing that the majority of people in the US don't even have broadband (speed) internet, let alone a second computer. 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.

I don't think you saw those statistics in the last decade. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-bro...

It was actually a few months ago. They specifically took issue with the methodologies of broadband companies in measuring home internet usage speeds. When they conducted their own tests across residential America, they determined that most people were unable to connect to the internet at speeds that we’d consider broadband.

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.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#249

With respect to the idea of hosting personal websites without using hosting companies, why does it have to be port 80. Port 80 is what commercial hosting uses, but this proposal is fundamentally different from commercial hosting. I'm not sure I understand why using an agreed-upon high port would not be an acceptable alternative. As for non-rooted Android not allowing use of port 80, this is just one symptom of the la…

I saw some statistics showing that the majority of people in the US don't even have broadband (speed) internet, let alone a second computer. 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.

I think your take hits the nail on the head. Most people have zero interest in running their own website.we live in a world where people have no clue how things work. They just want it to work and not have to understand how.

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”.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm assuming the best intentions from you but I'd like to point out two things: 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 sof…

Almost comically hyperbolic. Today, you do have a right to host anything (within reason) you want on anything you own. You can’t be arrested for jailbreaking your phone, and you have every right to buy alternative devices if those don’t suit you.

Calling this a human rights issue is like calling your ability to order a sandwich for lunch a human rights issue

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