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Every phone should be able to run personal websites

rohanrd.xyz

411–420 of 432 posts

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd very much like to hear such an argument connecting cellphone websites to human rights. The argument is that individuals must have the right to modify their devices as they see fit, barring some reasonable FTC radio restrictions which are necessary to enable fair use. You can argue that nothing should compel a company, in a free market, to provide such a device. But the nature of human rights is that they must b…

And yet, can't you do that (modify your device) at least on Android? Sure, maybe it means jailbreaking the phone. But as far so know, that isn't illegal.

It's not guaranteed, and increasingly it is difficult to find devices which support this. In general the computing industry seems to be converging on locked-down ecosystems.

Rights must be enforced, not left up to corporate goodwill.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#412

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…

I implemented exactly this in https://github.com/anacrolix/btlink. It works fantastically well. Unfortunately I couldn't get any funding from OTF or similar, and nobody is commercially interested in making websites easy to host and scale.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is correct. Go is more than adequate for this but IPFS has architectural issues.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#415
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at Matrix and what the ecosystem is doing. The entire ecosystem is rebasing on the Rust SDK and bindings to it. It's a massive reduction in duplication of effort, and means there's fewer bugs with interoping clients because they're increasingly all using the same SDK. It's considerably more flexible, more easily embedded than node or Go.

> It's a massive reduction in duplication of effort Sounds more like a massive duplication-effort to me ...

And yet, it's not the first or last project to choose to build a base SDK in Rust and provide bindings on top. And an effort being taken by a company quickly trying to iterate, build a polished product, and bring revenue in on the edges.

And you can already look at various projects and see the positive impacts.

I'd elaborate on why, but we've all heard it a thousand times and the folks that don't want to believe anything they hear about Rust still won't hear it.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm intrigued. Should all smart refrigerators be able to run web servers? TVs? Would you want them to?

This is a complete straw-man argument and deserves no further consideration. Refrigerators are not personal computers and in this case, the less digital tech a refrigerator contains, the better.

Exactly. And a phone is not a personal computer either.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a complete straw-man argument and deserves no further consideration. Refrigerators are not personal computers and in this case, the less digital tech a refrigerator contains, the better.

Exactly. And a phone is not a personal computer either.

How did you make this leap? Are you capable of understanding nuance?

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#418
post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of alternatives to Ngrok and Cloudflare - https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling . What we need is more open source and permissives ones which are well maintained and easy to use. fwiw, I work on one in the list called zrok.io, its open source and we have a free SaaS version. I dont think (as the author suggests) that IPv6 everywhere is happening anytime soon.

I'd seen some of these but Zrok is new to me and looks like one of the best!! > The private share is identified by a share token. The accessing user will use the share token, along with the zrok access command to create a local endpoint on their system, which lets them use the shared resource as if it were local to their system. That's really awesome both in terms of function and documentation. Clear and concise abou…

There will be an Android client at some point, but its not available yet.

One of the great things about zrok is that its built on OpenZiti, so we use Ziti's components as part of zrok. Ziti has an Android client (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.openziti.m...).

Do you have an immediate need? If yes, I can check with the dev team to bump priority... particularly if the use case deploys into production.

Correct, Ziti has an overlay fabric with smart routing. This allows all connections to be outbound at source/destination for better security and simplicity. The smart routing potentially allows us to deliver better performance too. We do have P2P connections on the roadmap for use cases which would benefit more from that type of approach.

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#419
post #298

I see at least one very good reason why this shoud be possible: old phones. Reusing old phones as a webserver seems like a good idea to me, since they were built for power efficiency (unlike old PCs) and would otherwise simply end up as e-waste in a landfill or discarded, forgotten in a drawer somewhere. Maybe it's because I use LineageOS (and Cyanogen mod before that), but I never even knew that there were problems…

Any Android phone already doesn’t usually get security updates after a year or two and you want to run a web server on it?

> Would I suggest running a business website off my phone? No. I doubt it's secure, performance is limited, ddos would be a possible issue. Do I still want to be able to do silly things with the devices I purchase? Absolutely.

Running a web server on a mostly-trusted LAN for 5 minutes doesn't sound like the security risk you're trying to paint it as

Re: Every phone should be able to run personal websites

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not allowed on the app store (Apple will reject apps that abuse this without a legitimate reason, and a terminal app has no business playing background audio or abusing location services). Also, the audio background mode is particularly bad for user experience, as it does not allow you to play real audio, because in toyOS land, only one process can play audio. Yes, this is the state of iOS in 2023. Garbage.

Not true if I recall correctly, since around iOS 4 multiple processes can play audio simultaneously- it is only if a process requests exclusivity that playback from other backgrounded apps is stopped.

A foreground app can play additional audio if it does not require system support (such as controlling the playback from a Bluetooth headset and appearing in the now playing widget/dynamic island). But only one process can play continuous audio in the background. You cannot have Safari play a video and also listen to an audiobook.

“wHy WoULd YoU wAnT tO Do tHaT aNyWaY¿” -typical Apple fanboy response

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