251–260 of 432 posts
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For the longest time (maybe still but I'm out of that loop), installing Windows from a DVD left you without wifi, too; was it not an operating system?
The drivers could be acquired and installed either via CD with the hardware or found on the web. Where are my provided wifi or cellular drivers for my phone?
> The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites. "For as little as $0.25, you can set up websites at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, the masters of only pay for what you use hosting since 2002." [1] Are you telling me people who can afford a smartphone cannot afford some simple static hosting? [1] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/
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…
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 use it, neither of which you control.
Essentially, you will never, ever be some silly idea of a 'self made server owning person' because without mutual agreements and trusts, you get nothing. Not even spare electrons to flip the bits in the CPU registers.
The best we can do is make a balance between our risk appetite and how we want to spend our time. Turns out random phones that will turn into e-waste faster than you can sneeze is what people accept, and thus that is what the suppliers supply.
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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…
It’s also a practical reality of living in a complex world. Someone using Excel isn’t thinking about how that app was programmed. Most computer programmers don’t have in-depth knowledge of how a CPU works. And they definitely don’t understand the chemistry of a transistor.
The fact is we live in a world too complex to understand it all. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
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Literally when the title indicates. Why would phones need to run a web server if that’s not the point?
The point is not that everyone should, it's that some people who want to, should be able to. Phones are quite powerful and can be excellent web servers on a budget.
This still doesn’t remove the issue with running a server via mobile connectivity. Especially when there’s free options, or inexpensive options that won’t run up your mobile data bills.
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…
Not refuting your valid points but just another angle to consider, do all websites need to work all the time? If my family knows they can go to apitman.com to see my latest trip photos, if it's down occasionally that's not going to significantly impact their experience. They can just try again later. That said, when I imagine self hosting from a phone I definitely think the phone + USB drive in a closet approach make…
In your photo example, my mom, the first time the website wouldn’t work, would demand I just email her the photos from the trip from then on.
It's very sad that a forum of self-styled hackers can not see the value in a personal website. Our image of what the web is and should be has been poisoned by 99.999% uptime cloud-hosted tat.
I think the name has you confused. The vast majority of people here are not self-styled hackers. Actually most are against hackers and the hacker ethos. Just because north korea calls itself the democratic people's republic of korea doesn't mean it is democratic or a republic. The same applies here.
> Our image of what the web is and should be has been poisoned by 99.999% uptime cloud-hosted tat.
No. It's been poisoned by greed and power.
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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…
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I chose to purchase a phone that can’t do this. I’m fine with that. I’d rather my phone be how it is. I don’t need some nerd fighting for me in some imagined battle. I am incredibly sick of this line of reasoning. Anyone who spends any time arguing this point quite clearly has too much time on their hands and no real problems. It’s utterly cringey. Leave me be.
“Give it a rest already. Maybe we just want to live our lives and use software that works , not get wrapped up in your stupid nerd turf wars.” — https://xkcd.com/743/ >
2003:
[Cueball approaches a bearded fellow.]
Cueball: Did you get my essay?
Bearded Fellow: Yeah, it was good! But it was a .doc; You should really use a more open-
Cueball: Give it a rest already. Maybe we just want to live our lives and use software that works, not get wrapped up in your stupid nerd turf wars.
Bearded Fellow: I just want people to care about the infrastructures we're building and who-
Cueball: No, you just want to feel smugly superior. You have no sense of perspective and are probably autistic.
2010:
Cueball: Oh my God! We handed control of our social world to Facebook and they're DOING EVIL STUFF!
Bearded Fellow: Do you see this?
[Inset, the bearded fellow rubs his index and middle fingers against his thumb.]
Bearded Fellow: It's the world's tiniest open-source violin.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.
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 instance of your desktop from the cloud... (a while later motorola tried to launch such a device...)
Anyway, here is my current take:
Every phone should be able to have a way to manage your own APIs such that your links to whatever media buckets you have/sub to - you can very easily just create little widgets that will pull your IGs, HNs, whatever and you can just slide the content-boxes around and organize a page very easily...
Add a content-box (we attempted to build a site around this idea in ~2005 - no bueno - as mobile didnt exist as it does today)
the content box will be [text, pics, audio, links, etc] and you can nest one on top of the other...
So add an element - then drop it on top of another to have the link (think tooltip hover to whatever child box on parent)
etc...
Cloudflare the F out of it - and allow for black/whitelists of content within the profile of the user (never link to FB or Twixxxter, whatever)
You get the gist.;
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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.
My use case: I plug in an old phone into the wall, a 65W Thinkpad charger to be precise. The input for the Thinkpad is USB type C which is the same as my ZTE phone. I connect the USB C cable, attach my spicy pillow of a battery (it is removable), wait until the device powers up, and remove the spicy pillow from the phone. The phone stays on.
What I would like to see instead is some way for phones and laptops to work directly off of the wall, not charging or using the battery at all once it is done charging, without me having to physically remove the battery. I thought this is how laptops used to work but I am not an expert. Phones I am positive do not work like this for some reason. I believe one reason is the camera flash. The camera flash requires more oomph (very technical term) than the wall can deliver. I'm guessing that based on a single anecdote that I once tried to use the flash without a battery and the phone rebooted.
I guess the main gist of this comment is to say I'd like to see better thought go into making battery more durable so you can use a phone, connected to the wall for ten years if you wanted to. I am positive that if we could use the phone off the wall without constantly charging and discharging the battery, we would be able to eliminate most cases of spicy pillow.