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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

#271

Post by eternityforest »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #194
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #178

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 the lesson is that stuff that just works is awesome, and it would be really cool if we had a platform with the expressiveness of raw HTML, with the ease of use of Tumblr, and the portability and backup-ability of GitHub.

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.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#272

Post by _xivi »

oneplane wrote: post #252
_xivi wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, you don't own or control any of these sites or services. You're merely a tenant without any power. You're open for many threats outside your control: 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, yo…

> You're merely a tenant without any power. 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 u…

> By that logic, that's what you are on your phone as well

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.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#273

Post by cdogl »

hunter2_ wrote: post #231
_Algernon_ wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A raspberry pi certainly fits the definition of a "Personal Computer".

The whole "Mac versus PC" thing somewhat solidified the notion that PC refers to x86. Raspberry Pi uses ARM.

I have an X86 MacBook Pro.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#274

Post by nomel »

TZubiri wrote: post #146
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…

Proposal rejected. Websites run on web server. Phones are not servers.

Technically, they become a server once they start serving a webpage.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#275

Post by skybrian »

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 run a website on your phone when you could get a Raspberry Pi instead? This idea that computing devices should be general-purpose is left over from when computers were expensive.

Repurposing old hardware is cool too, but when you’re not using it as a phone anymore, you could run a different OS.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#276

Post by nomel »

_xivi wrote: post #242
somsak2 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Convenience of course.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#277

Post by mappu »

jeroenhd wrote: post #14
necrophcodr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I can't remember the last time the Android kernel had a bug that could be triggered by simply sending packets to it.

RCE from Bluetooth packets has happened uncomfortably often - CVE-2017-0781+2 (BlueBorne), CVE-2020-0022, CVE-2022-20411, ...

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#278

Post by murphyslaw »

samstave wrote: post #259
sillysaurusx wrote: post #194

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've actually thought a bit about this over the years, and wrote a whitepaper in ~2002 on such... (sorry that file evaporated a decade+ ago) 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 insta…

> I wanted a cloud based desktop, with your personal encrytped access key being your phone

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.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#279

Post by acyou »

Here's my theory:

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?

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#280

Post by oneplane »

_xivi wrote: post #272
oneplane wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're merely a tenant without any power. 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 u…

> By that logic, that's what you are on your phone as well 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.

You're focusing on the tenant part too much, it's about power. Their knowledge and means are generally not focused to be in power, no matter their tenancy.

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.

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