[HN Gopher] Every phone should be able to run personal website ___________________________________________________________________ Every phone should be able to run personal website Author : janandonly Score : 209 points Date : 2023-08-11 08:42 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (rohanrd.xyz) (TXT) w3m dump (rohanrd.xyz) | gmerc wrote: | Everyone is on limited mobile data. The end. | retrocryptid wrote: | For the love of christ, no. | | What is the problem you're trying to solve? Is twitter... er... I | mean X not unreliable enough for you? | | Imagine someone depending on a resource that's on a device that | moves in and out of service as you lose coverage or have to | reboot to get bluetooth pairing to work right. | | And what if you wanted to support TLS. Try explaining to normal | people why they're getting security warnings because your CARRIER | doesn't support dynamic DNS so your cert SN or SAN doesn't match | your FQDN. | | And proxies. I don't even want to think what carrier data teams | will do to proxy requests. | | I really like the idea of a carrier / manufacturer neutral | protocol to get data (pictures, contact vCard, call logs, music, | etc.) on and off a phone. | | But it's not HTTP(S). | Knee_Pain wrote: | [dead] | tristanbvk wrote: | I actually agree with the logic. Not necessarily on a phone you | take out but an average Android phone running Linux should be | able to do this. | | You can have a very usable web server and have custody over your | own data/website. | | Couple it with a Wireguard VPN to an IPv6 tunnel broker and | you're golden. | mattxxx wrote: | I really like this in a cyberpunk-kind-of-way, but think it's | impractical from a data usage perspective + the fact that your ip | should change frequently on any mobile device. | | In the abstract, I feel like editing a file on your phone vs. | editing a file somewhere "in the cloud" isn't so different if the | interface makes it indistinguishable, so I don't know if you get | any real benefit to toting around your webserver... | | but I like the notion of a homegrown, self-managed webserver that | you keep in your pocket. | phyzome wrote: | A free, ancient laptop off of Craigslist would work better. | hyperific wrote: | I haven't done this but I've read about plenty of folks using | Termux with an Android phone to host a server. Here's a guide | from 2022. | | https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/host-a-web-... | tonetheman wrote: | [dead] | izzydata wrote: | I agree that they should be capable, but I don't think it should | be done by almost anyone. | fsociety wrote: | I would much rather have a locked down phone which is secure, as | I rely on it for many important functions in my life. I'll leave | the cheap web servers to a Raspberry Pi, CDN, or VPS thank you | very much. | t0mas88 wrote: | I used to be a big Android advocate years ago when I wrote a | lot of code myself. Now I prefer a locked down iPhone that | always works at maybe a bit higher cost. It feels like many | more people have gone through that switch. | | Even though I'm not idealistically aligned with the locked down | App Store approach Apple takes, their ecosystem just works well | for my needs. | madacol wrote: | A bigger reason we should be able to run websites on our phones | is to run decentralized or local-first web apps, but this | requires also solving that our phones' network become accessible | (e.g. implement Ipv6, but preferably bootstrap some fancy mesh | network on-the-fly) | | We should be chatting p2p through wifi/bluetooth by just letting | our friends scan a QR code that links to our phone's web server | that serves a p2p client for real-time chat in the middle of the | jungle | | In that same way, we should be playing games, take notes, run | fair micro elections / lotteries, and hundreds of other | coordination apps | jeroenhd wrote: | Any phone can run an onion service if all you need is a website. | It's rather annoying that you need to root/jailbreak your phone | to use port 80 I agree with that, but it's also not a necessity | for running a website. | | Aside from the phone use case, the concept of "privileged ports" | is pretty silly on any device operated by a single user or used | for a single purpose. In an age where any device on a modern | network can reserve hundreds of IP addresses without any risk of | address space exhaustion, concepts such as reserved ports are | next to useless. | | One day I'll get myself to waste a few weeks writing an Android | mod that gives every app on the system a separate (ephemeral) | IPv6 address. The challenge will be to generate enough virtual | interfaces for network namespacing to do its thing while assuring | it only does so on IPv6 enabled WiFi networks, but I think it can | be done. | sho_hn wrote: | On my Nokia N90i, I used to run Apache and PHP and a gallery web | app to serve up the phone's camera roll on the wifi interface. | Was quite useful at times. | | Symbian was a terribly quirky platform to develop for, but there | were some quite cool things. | jeroenhd wrote: | You still can on modern phones: | https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Termux-services | | You'll have to use port 8080 or some other high port number | because of privileged ports, but for just temporarily sharing | your camera roll that shouldn't be too much of a problem. | sho_hn wrote: | Yup, I love Termux. It's what makes my Android phone useful | as a tool. | kanbara wrote: | really? my phone is useful as a tool to: communicate with | friends and family, do work via writing, reading, checking | metrics, watching videos, and 10000 other things. | | and i live in vim on a computer. this tech-centric "i need | a terminal and full access to the shell for it to have any | worth" is pretty juvenile. phones are real tools for | millions of people-- the greatest technological innovation | of the century. | raarts wrote: | How about: every internet router should have 10TB of space for | household member data and an API to request personal details like | medical data. | | May soon be commercially viable. | giantrobot wrote: | The "S" in IoT stands for security. A bunch of file servers | inadvertently connected to the Internet isn't the best idea. | Leaked personal data and botnets will just be the start of the | problems. | sys_64738 wrote: | Just what we'd need - a new security attack vector :rolleyes | emoji: | karaterobot wrote: | > The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of | Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites. | | ~$5-7 a month for a web server via various platforms. A better | one than your phone would be, most likely--certainly more stable. | I don't think that's what's stopping people, I think most people | just don't have a use case for hosting a web site. | | In my 90s dream of the technohippie utopia they would all have | extensive and idiosyncratic personal websites about various | things they've soldered together, but that didn't work out. Turns | out most people want to watch videos of other people doing | things, and that is most efficiently hosted in a centralized | place. | ip26 wrote: | I think it's axiomatic that an order of magnitude more time | will be spent on consuming content than producing it. Why would | you spend hours every day crafting a deeply insightful blog if | _literally no one_ ever read it? As an author or other content | producer, you want people to consume your work. Therefore, the | equilibrium between content and consumption _must_ settle on | dramatically more consumption than production. | | I think this handily explains why the "personal website for | every human" utopia never came to pass. | | (Yes, I know some people will produce great content purely for | the joy of doing it, and don't care if anyone consumes it. I | think that's an edge case, not the operandus of every living | person) | | P.S. You're completely right about the $5-7/mo hosting. I used | to run a server in my home, but discovered I was spending more | on electricity than the cost of leasing a small VPS. | Centralizing has fantastic economies of scale. | bandergirl wrote: | [dead] | necrophcodr wrote: | The article doesn't make sense. It can technically work with a | bunch of dynamic DNS systems. An IPv6 address isn't fixed to your | device like a MAC address is. | | Even assuming it would be doable, it would be a security | nightmare, and we'd end up relying on some centralised systems | anyway lest we burden the internet with absolutely insane amounts | of continual p2p discoveries. | | If you want a personal website, why not use a service like | neocities? It's free, and just lets you go ham with static | content. Don't feel like writing HTML pages manually? Make a | TiddlyWiki and upload that. | necrophcodr wrote: | 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. | jeroenhd wrote: | 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 root on Android is a lot | harder than most Linux servers because of the very strict and | isolated SELinux contexts. | | I've installed termux on my phone and I can install nginx | with a single command. Downloading a Debian chroot and | launching a full, maintained Linux distro is two commands | away. | | Until remotely triggered Android kernel exploits become a | thing, I don't think the updates are the problem here. | h0p3 wrote: | That seems exceptionally reasonable, nomad. That would be | pretty easy to anonymize as well. It's a pleasure to meet you. | | I'll add that Resilio Sync + singlefile Tiddlywiki (I think | most people would be surprised what TW can accomplish) from a | phone is quite workable (a filewatcher with ratox or may toxic, | or IPFS, would do as well, but they aren't as performant or | turnkey). You can automatically push with custom conditions (or | manually do so) to those listening (the burden has to be | shifted away from the phone to some degree). If you have | persistent seeders in the mutable torrent swarm, it's even | better. That would serve a very large number of people on the | planet pretty well, imho. This is harder to anonymize on a | phone, but also doable. | | It's reasonable to do both, too. | | Add a proper USB to boot with, and it would sometimes be easy | enough to walk up to a random machine when you need more than a | phone to work on your Tiddlywiki or other infrastructure. I | admire trying to find ways to make sure almost anyone can | participate in The Great Conversation with minimal material; | it's an important problem. | dataflow wrote: | Yeah I can't make sense of this article either. How is IPv6 | supposed to solve this? IP is for routing which is tied to | geography, not identity. And wouldn't dynamic DNS make your | website unresolvable for at least a minute or two every time | your IP changes? | WarOnPrivacy wrote: | > Yeah I can't make sense of this article easier. How is IPv6 | supposed to solve this? | | I took it to mean he was discussing phones that are on IPv6 | only networks. | dataflow wrote: | Yeah but I'm asking how does that help? As the phone hops | around, the IP address will change, whether it's v6 or v4. | Are they expecting IPv6 will be stable no matter where in | the world you travel? | WarOnPrivacy wrote: | A DDNS service seems like a trivial add-on to make this | work. | | I think the bigger issue is the number of mobile devices | behind CGNAT. | dataflow wrote: | > A DDNS service seems like a trivial add-on to make this | work. | | I responded to this earlier: wouldn't dynamic DNS make | your website unresolvable for at _least_ a minute or two | (or much longer if your TTL is longer) every time your IP | changes? | | > I think the bigger issue is the number of mobile | devices behind CGNAT. | | Yeah I agree on that, they already mentioned that part. | wizardforhire wrote: | Hear me out... after reading the comments and seeing the | multitude of innumerable issues with this idea despite its | impetus as a solution to obvious societal problems, here is one | possible way to approach solving the problem... given the scale, | scope and complexity of the issue/s this is in no way a complete | nor exhaustive plausible solution... | | Rather than the phone hosting the website, the service hosting | the backup of the phone should act as the webserver. Would solve | uptime, and security. To solve the webhosting hostage situation | will require an act of congress to make phone providers and | manufacturers liable for loss of data for the phones complete | with fixed rates for hosting. The act should also stipulate that | webhosting with open standard api and servers is an absolute non- | negotiable necessity subject to substantial penalties for failure | to comply.... Seems harsh but it would cause an open market of | third party sites to provide for the offloading / hosting / | storage responsibilities while usurping the walled garden | strangled hold. In addition would open up a huge search industry | where the ticktock/ instagrams of the worlds are reduced to | search algorithms rather than divine dictatorships. | 0xbadcafebee wrote: | And everybody should be able to eat a diet of mostly candy, smoke | two packs of cigarettes a day, and stand outside in the sun as | long as they want. But it's not a good idea, for reasons. | mishagale wrote: | On the same basis, most home routers are powerful enough to run a | basic webserver, and they are much more likely to have a | consistent internet connection. They probably aren't behind CG- | NAT, and most of them have Dynamic DNS support even if they don't | have a static IP. | bdavbdav wrote: | Exactly - I have a drawer full of consumer electronics which | could be hacked to better run a web server than my iPhone. | notnmeyer wrote: | sorry i missed your call i was being ddos'd | tristanbvk wrote: | Hilarious | bofaGuy wrote: | You can run a flask web server from your iPhone using Pythonista | and StaSh. I'm not sure about port 80 though. | | Pythonista: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1085978097 | | StaSh: https://github.com/ywangd/stash | devnullbrain wrote: | 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. | ehutch79 wrote: | Uh, it's not personal websites we're talking about. It's | hosting them on public facing servers on your phone | specifically | petabytes wrote: | I remember running a server on an old tablet several years ago, | it was awful. You would have to deal with the server not | automatically starting up, not to mention the battery eventually | failing and expanding. | zensayyy wrote: | > The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of | Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites | | What? You can host a personal website for free. People are just | not interested in it | joecool1029 wrote: | It's not running _on_ the phone but it 's a personal static | website behind a phone. I run a small weather station page I can | access anywhere from my house which is on LTE/NR. LineageOS is on | my phone and it does not block inbound connections to routed ipv6 | addresses on T-Mobile (US). ipv4 goes through a CGNAT. Weather | station is running weewx on a raspberrypi connected via wifi | hotspot to the phone. | | To handle the issue of ipv6 addresses changing frequently | (daily?) I have ddclient update my AAAA record to my domain on | cloudflare. I don't set a A record. Then cloudflare just proxies | any ipv4 traffic to the ipv6 address so anyone with my URL can | load the page. | rco8786 wrote: | Seems like this has a lot more to do with limited bandwidth than | with server compute power. | anotherhue wrote: | There's a perfectly cromulent Wordpress app, and no doubt | equivalents for less wizened personal platforms. | WarOnPrivacy wrote: | In case you were wondering what Nokia's _Mobile Web Service_ | looked like. | | http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/Previewing_Noki... | | https://jpmens.net/2007/05/03/mobile-web-server-apache-on-a-... | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Web_Server | | Heyday: | https://web.archive.org/web/20090214014049/https://mymobiles... | | 2010 Goodbye (via redirect): | https://web.archive.org/web/20100621023623/http://betalabs.n... | graypegg wrote: | I'll give you that this isn't a half bad idea to give someone | that spark of interest early on. A phone is a lot harder to mess | with, in ways that I think a lot of people older than 20 did when | they were kids to their PCs. | | However, a server is such a specific + utilitarian thing. And on | a phone it really serves very little utility. Some kid would get | a kick out of making a website their friends can visit, but | beyond that, not being able to run a server is more a symptom of | how locked-down and uninspired phone OSes are, rather than a | thing that specifically NEEDS to be implemented. | jonplackett wrote: | Even if you want to run a website on your phone (seems | pointless...) Wouldn't you need some kind of ngrok service to | allow it to be accessible from the wider internet? In which case | you could use whatever port you want and forward. | | But then you're kinda using a host aren't you... and you may as | well just cache it... | koolala wrote: | This is so important to me too! Thank you everyone for fighting | for this! | Koala_ice wrote: | I know it's not a phone, but a few friends and I built this for | the Newton MessagePad back in 1998-9 with exactly this vision. | | Ref: http://npds.free.fr/ | dtx1 wrote: | 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. | 7e wrote: | A phone costs hundreds of dollars. A Raspberry Pi costs $50 and | does the job 100x better. | wruza wrote: | https://letanphuc.net/2017/08/this-blog-is-now-running-on-an... | 7373737373 wrote: | I hate it when people propose "just" getting another piece of | hardware, be it for wireless connectivity, routing, internet/ad | filtering, data and web hosting etc. etc. | | WHY must people again and again insist on this? This is _not_ | the way for 99.999% of people | | Why not insist on extending the abilities and security of the | one device 99.999% of people already have, before insisting on | the acquisition of another, special-purpose device, requiring | its own intricate setup and maintenance and power and space and | connectivity? I just don't get it. | aspyct wrote: | One word: battery. | WarOnPrivacy wrote: | Data cap too | giancarlostoro wrote: | 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. | jeroenhd wrote: | 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. | flangola7 wrote: | Why would you need root access for the most common posts on | the internet? | giancarlostoro wrote: | Not sure what port I used and I wasnt trying to use my mobile | IP either, probably just used 8080. | anderspitman wrote: | I'm a big proponent of this idea. Unfortunately IPv6 alone isn't | enough, due to firewalls. It's just not realistic for the average | person to be expected to set up port forwarding etc. Now, if | something like UPnP was universally deployed alongside IPv6, that | would pretty much do it. | | Personally, I think the future of self hosting is going to happen | through IPv4 tunnels[0] with SNI routing. You also get the added | benefit of not exposing your actual IP address, and dealing with | things like DDoS become the tunnel provider's concern. | | [0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling | ianburrell wrote: | I think the problem with this idea is using it to host a personal | website. There are so many other ways to host personal website | that are better. | | I think hosting services for Internet doesn't make sense, but | does for local network. I have thought how could have disaster | response server on local network. Instead of Raspberry Pi with | battery, could have phone which is has own battery, and more | likely to have one available. | kgbcia wrote: | Honestly, it sounds fun until your IP address is shown to the | world. With the potential for people to hack it. For some of us, | we have alot of personal and financial data on our phones. I | prefer paying five dollars a month to a webhost shared servwe, | that has a load balancer, updates the software, backups, etc | butz wrote: | Let's go deeper: website is hosted on your phone, but visitor has | to call your phone number to access it, using a dial-up modem. | thepostman0 wrote: | Would be cool if spam callers had to complete a door game | before getting put through | lightedman wrote: | Mobile BBS! | paulcarroty wrote: | Well, https://github.com/kiwix is designed for something like | this tho. | dt3ft wrote: | This could work. If the site is down, the phone is off or in a | tunnel. Try again later, nothing wrong with that. | janandonly wrote: | 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 site is | Slashdotted/HNewsed than hosting would still not fail: after all, | all the new visitors are temporarily also seeders of the file | over BitTorrent. | yownie wrote: | there were some projects that explored this actually one which | was called chord. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_%28peer-to-peer%29?wprov... | predictabl3 wrote: | 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. | amelius wrote: | What does Rust have to do with it?!? | predictabl3 wrote: | 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. | amelius wrote: | > It's a massive reduction in duplication of effort | | Sounds more like a massive duplication-effort to me ... | jeroenhd wrote: | 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. | nologic01 wrote: | 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. | ilyt wrote: | Uh, you know phones can be rooted since the smartphone | revolution, right ? | crazygringo wrote: | 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 mobile way, are a terrible idea. | enos_feedler wrote: | Its almost like the real reason mobile web servers don't exist | is because its a terrible idea and not because companies | secretly don't want them to | jareklupinski wrote: | > 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 | | even this low bar is (imo sadly) currently impossible for | someone who just has a spare phone in their closet and a bit of | html knowledge | | looking forward to the unicorn that makes wordpress for | ios/android | jeroenhd wrote: | 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. | quaintdev wrote: | 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. | asplake wrote: | 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... | paxys wrote: | Unless that device has an Apple logo on it it is 100% | possible. | maccard wrote: | 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. | quaintdev wrote: | None of them can run server on port 80/443 | ilyt wrote: | Your mobile internet is behind NAT and your WiFI router | would need port redir to point external traffic to the | phone inside the LAN anyway. | | So even if you can run it at port 80 you can't really do | that without NAT or tunnel somewhere and if you need that | you can just NAT to get it visible on 80 from the outside | | It's mostly imaginary problem | maccard wrote: | But you can run a server, register a domain, and send | http://quaintdev.com:8000 to your friends and family, | right? | devnullbrain wrote: | >Phones go into tunnels, run out of battery, and go indoors | where there's a poor signal or none at all. | | i.e. when you can't take a call or a text or read a social | media notification. Why does this need to be always-available | if those don't? | andrewmunsell wrote: | Because you can't predict when someone will try and hit your | site? | bmitc wrote: | While less ideal than hosting it on an "always available" | service, is that really enough to prevent the ability to do | so? Phones are many people's only computers. Why not let | them be actual computers since they're powerful enough to | be? A typical smartphone is miles ahead of a Raspberry Pi | and people do all sorts of things with Raspberry Pis. What | about hosting a portfolio or blog on your phone where you | can share it with someone in real-time, like a job | interview or some presentation or just to show it? | | Also, I wonder what the actual "downtime" of a smartphone | is. I doubt it's that much worse than a lot of websites. | The downtime of a smartphone is also usually completely | independent of the phone itself, as it's usually service | and/or location related. | jeroenhd wrote: | 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 why | that should be. It's not as it Android and iOS come with | important http(s) servers out of the box, why shouldn't port | 80/443 be available to apps? | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: | Hot take: Android is not an operating system. | | Go install AOSP and see how useless your device becomes. An | OS is more than a kernel and filesystem, it's also a basic | set of userspace utilities and functionality. Last time I | installed AOSP on a device- wifi wasn't even supported. And | Google is removing messaging from AOSP. Phone OS my ass, it's | useless without 3rd party cruft that isn't available to end | users. | jeroenhd wrote: | AOSP contains a music player, a gallery, a camera app, a | web browser, a calendar and some dev tools. Sure, they | haven't been updated for a few years, but that doesn't mean | they're not there. WiFi and LTE work just fine as long as | your manufacturer uses hardware supported by normal | drivers. | | That said, office supplies don't make something an | operating system. If all it had was a launcher, it would | still be an operating system, because you can install the | apps you want onto it. | | I don't know why your device didn't have WiFi, ut it's not | the norm. Standard AOSP images should use the vendor | partition to load additional drivers if the ones built into | the Android kernel don't suffice. | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | 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? | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: | 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? | Knee_Pain wrote: | [dead] | petabytes wrote: | I remember running a web server on an old tablet several | years ago. What changed? Is it not possible on newer devices? | ehutch79 wrote: | Literally when the title indicates. Why would phones need to | run a web server if that's not the point? | jeroenhd wrote: | 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. | TZubiri wrote: | The assumption that an operating system should allow the user | to do everything is quite restricting. | | Under this view, every device should be a standard-issue | military-grade turing-machine. There would be no | individuality, every device would be the same GPL licensed | Free Operating System. | tmpX7dMeXU wrote: | 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. | ilyt wrote: | [flagged] | postalrat wrote: | What are you gaining by entering this fight? Step aside. | indymike wrote: | > Anyone who spends any time arguing this point quite | clearly has too much time on their hands and no real | problems. | | Actually, trying to argue against something that you will | not use, but others would use, that has no other effect on | you, harms yourself (you might change your mind later) and | harms others. | teddyh wrote: | "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/> | ehutch79 wrote: | The lesson is open source needs to produce more | accessible, usable software instead playing Cassandra | ElectricalUnion wrote: | But if you have usable software how you're gonna ask for | consulting and maintenance contracts? /s | behringer wrote: | You fail to see the irony that the only reason you have it | so good with your phone software is because of the pushback | of open source and open standards the nerds have had to | always fight for. | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | ...you don't have use for a feature so you don't think | anyone should want it? | nulld3v wrote: | > 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. | | No one gives a crap about you. We are all fighting for | ourselves out here. | saagarjha wrote: | I fail to see how this has anything to do with what your | personal preferences are? | smoldesu wrote: | I come baring bad news; your smartphone can host webpages | whether you like it or not. Worse yet, it can use it's | browser to render arbitrary pages of data (detestable | feature) and even execute _code_ when given permission by | the kernel. Very scary stuff. | | Thankfully, nobody will be forcing you to use this feature; | it shouldn't bother someone who ignores it. It _is_ a | feature of your phone though, unless you 're daily-driving | a pager or 2G Nokia. Hopefully this helps you make peace | with the "utterly cringey" reality of modern computing. | seiferteric wrote: | 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. | crazygringo wrote: | 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. | dTal wrote: | The argument is that control can't be taken away from | you, I suppose. I argue in another comment[0] that peer- | caching could mitigate unreliability, but that still | leaves the question of how you maintain ownership if | other entities are allowed to serve it on your behalf. Is | it possible to make yourself reliably globally routable | without trusting a third party, or needing their | permission? | | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37103721 | extraduder_ire wrote: | > why shouldn't port 80/443 be available to apps | | Because they're < 1024, I guess. Anywhere I've seen besides | windows needs you to be root, or have some other specific | permission to listen on that port. | | Not that I agree with it, but it is the existing status quo. | jeroenhd wrote: | I know about privileged ports, they just don't make sense | anymore. They were a good idea on a timeshared system with | groups of students logging into their own shells because | equivalent personal computers were unaffordable. | | These days, computers are used by one, maybe two or three | people. If I, the only user of my phone, decide I want to | use port 80, why can't I? Put this stuff behind a special | privilege for all I care. | justsomeadvice0 wrote: | IIRC macOS got rid of privileged ports for these reasons. | Dunno about iOS... But in any case what cell provider is | going to let you handle inbound traffic? Most of the wifi | networks you are on are NAT'd, etc. At best you'd | probably want an outbound persistent tunnel that is | "terminated" by a relay elsewhere. At that point you | might as well just have the relay host the thing. | toast0 wrote: | You're not getting inbound connections on IPv4 without a | fight, although, I remember when you used to be able to | pay mobile carriers to get a public IPv4 address that | might have also been static(!) for VPN purposes. But it's | not uncommon for carriers to give you a whole /64 on | IPv6, and for that to be full proper connectivity (maybe | they block smtp and smb, that's very common). | | Yeah, IPv6 isn't everywhere, but if you have it on your | phone and everywhere you want to access you phone from... | maccard wrote: | That's true even with a residential ISP though. It's no | harder than serving off a laptop on android. | jeroenhd wrote: | Sadly, cell provider puts me behind an IPv4 CGNAT, they | didn't even bother to hand out IPv6 addresses at least. I | picked them out because they were cheap more than | anything, so I only have myself to blame. | | I have previously used carriers that did expose (IPv6) | addresses, though. Port 25/53/etc were blocked but I | could host a web server on there if I wanted to drain the | 2GB of mobile data I had at the time. | | NAT isn't a problem with IPv6 support. Of course there's | the network firewall, but adding a rule to accept ports | 1714-1764 isn't that hard. | | Right now I've solved the problem with a VPN tunnel, but | that's not really that permanent a solution. | FireInsight wrote: | 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. | MichaelZuo wrote: | It's true that there will always be unscrupulous actors but | there are many ways to restrict or punish them already, I | don't see why they would necessarily overwhelm existing | methods. | jeroenhd wrote: | Apps can already open ports and with the HTTP DNS record | arbitrary ports can be used to serve http/3 content. | Services like RDP and several types of VPN server all | connect to unprivileged ports any app can listen on. | | There should be a separate permission for listening on | standard, reserved ports (anything in the IANA docs for all | I care) that should require manual consent, like with | location access. In fact, I think there should be a | retractable permission for any kind of remotely accessible | port binding. The fact any calculator app can start a VPN | server on my phone without my knowledge isn't good! That | doesn't mean providing any type of service is inherently | bad, though. | | For instance, there are tons of phone <=> desktop sync apps | (My Phone on Windows, KDE Connect on Linux/Windows/Mac) | that constantly communicate between each other. Why should | your phone always be the one to initiate that direct | connection? Why should we rely on cloud servers when | mutually authenticated SSH is already doing every bit of | protection we could possibly need? My phone is half a meter | away from my computer, it shouldn't need to be this | difficult! | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | > My phone is half a meter away from my computer, it | shouldn't need to be this difficult! | | FWIW, that's possible today on Android (not necessarily | tomorrow, not necessarily on iOS) - I can and do | regularly move files around with rsync/scp courtesy of | termux, either by running the command on the phone or | just running sshd on the phone (which does, in my setup, | need to be manually started; I don't know if that's | inherent or could be changed) and then running the | transfer from another machine. | kroltan wrote: | > HTTP DNS record | | Can you tell me more about that? | | I know about SRV records from Minecraft (of all things!) | for a similar purpose, can you point me towards a | reference of what is this about? Wikipedia fails me. | quectophoton wrote: | You can check this post from Cloudflare[1], and from | there you can reach the IETF draft[2]. | | [1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/speeding-up-https-and- | http-3-neg... | | [2]: Current version is | https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-dnsop- | svcb-... | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | For anyone else looking: I don't think the cloudflare | post says so, but the IETF draft does include "port" as | an optional thing that SRVB records can include so we | might _finally_ get support for that in browsers:) | theamk wrote: | You don't need reserved ports for the custom protocos.. | And most of them, like sync apps, use high port anyway. | soulofmischief wrote: | 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 | software which had to go out of its way to restrict | freedoms. | | 2. It's an incredibly slippery slope to use "crapware" as a | justification for reducing the freedoms of the individual. | Criminals will find a way, do not create a hostile user | experience. | ilyt wrote: | But the option is there, rooting. As long as that is | reasonably available I don't really see problem. Of | course the seven hells of apple ecosystem is another | matter | | You can argue all you want about what the normal joe | shmoe _should_ be able to do but most joes shmoes will | use that to hurt themselves more than help. | | Limitiations are essentially OSHA of computing, by making | it hard to do the wrong stuff it makes most people least | likely to hurt themselves. | bakugo wrote: | > But the option is there, rooting. As long as that is | reasonably available I don't really see problem. | | Well, it's not reasonably available. The number of | android phone manufacturers that still allow bootloaders | to be unlocked without significant friction is pretty | small, and hardware attestation is slowly killing the | whole rooting/custom rom scene since phones with unlocked | bootloaders can't run many apps. | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | > But the option is there, rooting. As long as that is | reasonably available I don't really see problem. | | The option is there on some phones, and that with | caveats; lots of phones don't let you root them, and even | if you can they'll artificially break things (like sony | degrading the camera, or any app that refuses to run if | it realizes it's on a rooted phone) | froggit wrote: | Locked bootloaders. | tqi wrote: | It might feel good and noble to chide people about this | stuff, but this type of hyperbolic, exaggerated | grandstanding is THE reason why our society is so | polarized. It is absolutely NOT slippery slope to human | rights violations to talk about edge cases or to make | tradeoffs. Escalating everything to such high stakes | makes discussion and compromise impossible. | COGlory wrote: | >feel good and noble to chide people about this stuff, | but this type of hyperbolic, exaggerated grandstanding is | THE reason why our society is so polarized. | | Is this line supposed to be ironic or something? | hunter2_ wrote: | It's quite reminiscent of the tolerance paradox, at | least. | cvoss wrote: | > When discussing human rights | | I've never heard an argument before that the ability to | host a personal website on a cellphone is a human right. | But, by using this phrase, you seem to be assuming your | readers already agree with you that human rights is what | we are discussing. As a rhetorical device, that may be | effective at getting someone to back down for fear of | being labeled as anti-human-rights, but it is not | effective at persuading someone of your implied thesis. | I'd very much like to hear such an argument connecting | cellphone websites to human rights. | zerbinxx wrote: | 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 | froggit wrote: | > 2. It's an incredibly slippery slope to use "crapware" | as a justification for reducing the freedoms of the | individual. Criminals will find a way, do not create a | hostile user experience. | | It's a legit security issue. Not protecting people from | these things is far more user hostile. | _Algernon_ wrote: | Is the right of a handful of people to run a web server | on their phone more important than the right of millions | of "unsophisticated" users to not be scammed / abused by | malware? | | Since it's inception smart phones have been a consumer | platform, used for consuming content. The platform for | tinkerers already exists. It's called a PC with Linux | installed. Every platform does not need to cater to your | needs. | froggit wrote: | PC is overkill for this case. A raspberry pi would get | the job done while saving energy and equipment costs. | _Algernon_ wrote: | A raspberry pi certainly fits the definition of a | "Personal Computer". | hunter2_ wrote: | The whole "Mac versus PC" thing somewhat solidified the | notion that PC refers to x86, and Raspberry Pi uses ARM. | ineedasername wrote: | 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. | Angostura wrote: | I'm intrigued. Should all smart refrigerators be able to | run web servers? TVs? Would you want them to? | l33t7332273 wrote: | That would be one decent instance of a self cooled | server. | kanbara wrote: | i've never heard someone say that it's a human right to | run a webserver. | | i understand that you want to own the stack on your tech, | and i would argue that if custom OSes were allowed, that | fulfils that need. it's not apple or google's | responsibility to let you do anything with their OS, in | the same vein that you often are limited by stock router | firmware or what's on your ps5. | | as phones are hyper-personal it makes sense people want | more control, but most average users do not. and as | someone who works closely with smartphone tech, i want it | to just work and i don't want to worry about whatever | nonsense is enabled by disabling security or os-level by | guarantees. | | just get a fairphone or whatever. it's not a human right | to force tech companies to embrace your vision of | computing | [deleted] | nulld3v wrote: | Apps can already do this mostly and it's caused absolutely | no issues. In fact, it's often used for ad-blocking. You | just can't bind to port 80/443. | flangola7 wrote: | So? That's up to the user to decide. | duggan wrote: | Sure, if the user can build their own phone. | | Otherwise they're competing with a lot of other people | interested in what the phone should and should not do. | | If they own a hammer, they can do what they like with a | hammer, but a phone is not a hammer. It's a complex | arrangement of molecules, licenses and competing group | interests. | dividuum wrote: | Probably terrible data point, but running "nc -l -p 80" | within the iSH shell app on iOS opens port 80 and is | reachable from a desktop machine in the local network. iSH | has requested the "Local network" permission at some point. | jeroenhd wrote: | That's interesting, thanks for the information! Refreshing | to see Apple provide to be the less restrictive app | platform! | LeoNatan25 wrote: | 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". | dividuum wrote: | I apologize in advance: 'cat /dev/location > /dev/null & | python -m SimpleHTTPServer 80'. Totally crude but works, | even when turning off the display. | NavinF wrote: | There are workarounds for that: https://developer.apple.c | om/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. | mcpackieh wrote: | For most people it doesn't really matter if their personal | webpage of gundam facts and cat pictures only has one 9 of | uptime. | opportune wrote: | Unless you live in a tunnel, who cares? If you're hosting a | basic portfolio and personal site you don't even need 2 9's of | reliability | dTal wrote: | We've had networks composed of unreliable nodes before - | indeed, this assumption is baked into some of our oldest | protocols, like email and usenet. All that is required is for | at least 2 equally unreliable peers to act as temporary caching | servers to bring the effective uptime up from 95% to 99.99% | (provided everyone's downtime is uncorrelated). | crazygringo wrote: | Which is why it works perfectly fine to send e-mail when | you're on a plane without WiFi -- it's designed to send once | you've got a connection. | | But the article is about a personal website. Websites run | over HTTP, which is _not_ designed for anything unreliable. | | It's interesting to think about a web that was designed to | have lots of intermediary caching peers along the way as part | of the protocol, but that's not what we have. | drdaeman wrote: | HTTP is different than SMTP or NNTP. A phone could work as a | nice personal mailhost, if power management issues could be | solved. | dTal wrote: | It's true, I was imagining some something more | sophisticated than HTTP. But I guess the article wasn't. | TZubiri wrote: | True. The SMTP has provisions that account for the host | server being powered off, a personal computer was a | reasonable host for this protocol. | | The sending client is supposed to retry if the receiving | server is down. | duskwuff wrote: | > The SMTP has provisions that account for the host | server being powered off | | But it's still built with the expectation that the | recipient host will usually be available, and that | unavailability is a transient condition -- a failure to | contact the recipient SMTP server is a noisy failure, | and, after the first few retries, most servers back off | to one attempt every 8 hours. Mail servers which are only | sporadically _available_ would require some fairly | substantial rearchitecture. | [deleted] | Eumenes wrote: | how about some p2p web server when you go offline, another node | picks it up? | throwaway894345 wrote: | Has anyone managed to find a reasonable way to make an old | android phone into a server in a reasonably | practical/maintainable way? Even if it is plugged in all the | time? | quaintdev wrote: | Author here. I understand what you are saying but this is not | supposed to be full fledged social media kind of websites we | want to run on phone. The site could just be a simple way for | your loved ones to check up on you without calling or messaging | you. I remember the Nokia web server used to share battery and | other vital info on website. There are lot many things that can | be done with a tiny web server. | zdragnar wrote: | "Why aren't you answering my calls? I can see you have | battery left!" | | Sorry ma, I was in a meeting. | | Really, our proclivity for instant gratification over | patience is unhealthy. | | I'm sure there's all sorts of neat ideas for what could go | onto a phone's website, but I can't say that I see the | appeal, personally. | adrianmonk wrote: | I assume the intention was more like, "Oh, their battery is | at 18%. Maybe I won't download 500 photos from their | gallery at just this moment." | brutal_boi wrote: | I'm on the same boat with this. | | We already have crappy written apps waking up devices on OEM | software, last we need is random agents on the internet waking | up our phones. | anderspitman wrote: | 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 | makes more sense. | passion__desire wrote: | 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. | troupe wrote: | If you are going to use cloudflare, you might as well just | host the page with them. | | Maybe the value of running on your phone would be so people | could see that your phone is up or something like that? | passion__desire wrote: | It would be textual version of public WhatsApp status ( or | stories) connected to your mobile number. For those people | who don't mind sharing information with the public. | p1mrx wrote: | 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. | TZubiri wrote: | Proposal rejected. Websites run on web server. Phones are not | servers. | DanAtC wrote: | iOS can with some caveats | https://apps.apple.com/us/app/worldwideweb-mobile/id16230068... | Espionage724 wrote: | What's stopping anyone today with Android from installing Termux, | proot, a distro of their choice, and then hosting a webserver? | Groxx wrote: | Port 80 / 443 privileges at the device's networking level, | mostly. If you don't need those there are indeed plenty of | options (e.g. hosting onion sites works fine). | cramjabsyn wrote: | A linux distro targeting old apple handsets would be excellent | for this. Even it only EOL devices were supported itd still be | very useful to have a lightweight arm server with battery backup. | superkuh wrote: | Disregard phones, they're terrible computers with terrible | networking. Everyone should run a personal website on their | computer at home. | mgraczyk wrote: | Sorry but the claim in this article is not correct (on Android) | and is proposing a bad solution to the problem you're trying to | solve. | | First, nobody is stopping you from doing this. I just spent 30 | seconds installing the first app I found on the Play store and 1 | minute configuring my router, and now I have a static web server | that I can hit from anywhere in the world. | | But the real issue is that it's the wrong way to build a personal | web server for your phone. The right way to do this is to host a | server in a datacenter and install an app or service that pushes | content to that server. Other users can hit that server to see | that data you push. Tons of advantages of doing it this way | (reliability, battery life, capability, throughput, cost, | security, support for multiple devices, support for multiple | kinds of devices, ...) | | The reason that people don't build things like this isn't because | they are evil or protecting their "walled gardens", it's just a | bad design. | 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: | 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 larger problem of not allowing the | computer owner to have root privileges. And letting an | advertising company have them instead. IMHO. | | Unrelated perhaps but it is possible to forward port 80 in | Android. For example, I forward tcp/80 to a computer running | NetBSD. This can be done using an app, e.g., NetGuard. TLS | zealots might want to try this sometime and observe some of the | unencrypted egress traffic. | sillysaurusx wrote: | 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. | vlan0 wrote: | 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". | dfc wrote: | I don't think you saw those statistics in the last decade. | | https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet- | bro... | sillysaurusx wrote: | 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. | divyenduz wrote: | Sounds like a good use case for TailScale funnel. Not sure if | this is possible today but can work via that route. | ivanmontillam wrote: | 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. | GavinAnderegg wrote: | > The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of | Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites. | | I sympathize with this, but disagree. There are a lot a great | free options for hosting a website. I personally use GitHub | Pages, but Netlify, Vercel, and even Glitch offer excellent free | tiers. Heck, if you just want to put some words on the web, | WordPress.com offers free blog hosting. | | All of these options are using someone else's service, and that | may go away without notice. I understand some people wouldn't | prefer that. But on the other hand, I value my phone's battery | and site's availability over owning the full stack. | gsatic wrote: | Why is phone battery going to die? | | Do a traffic dump and check how many thousands of requests its | handling for all your personal data from every app installed. | [deleted] | jeroenhd wrote: | Because phones have all-day battery life because they turn | off the radios as often as possible, sending and receiving | data in short bursts. Lingering sockets are shut down for | non-system services and push messages are exchanged through | dedicated messaging providers with power management planning | built in. | | It's one of the reasons running standard Linux, or even de- | Googled Android, on a normal Android device can absolutely | tank your battery life. Waking up the radio is expensive, and | packets coming in at random moments means the work put into | power saving scheduling goes down the drain. | hilbert42 wrote: | _"...or even de-Googled Android, on a normal Android device | can absolutely tank your battery life. "_ | | Not necessarily. About eight hours ago I was having trouble | with the GPS on my main phone (I cleared GNSS on GPStest | app and it wasn't refreshing fast enough), so I found | another in my assortment of phones that was still running | and had some charge left in it and used it (it also had | GPStest installed)--and I'm using it now to post this | comment. | | It's a Huawei GR5 Honor from 2017 with original battery | that I've de-Googled, and when I picked it up earlier the | battery indicated 22 remaining which surprised me because | I've not used it for some weeks. | | When I read your comment I thought I'd ckeck the battery | and phone usage logs and I'm now even more surprised. The | phone was last used on July 19 (24 days ago) and the | battery drain graph shows a very gentle and almost | perfectly linear decline from then (until I put it on | change and started using it). | | Moreover, it estimates remaining battery life in | standard/default power mode at 8 days 23 hours (but it's | since been on change). Note: the phone was set to standard | power mode during those past 24 days. If I switched to | 'Power Saving' mode the estimate is 11 days 16 hours, and | in 'Ultra Save' its estimate is nearly 33 days (778 hours | 44 mins). | | Incidentally, the phone has 346 apps installed. | | It's amazing what battery life one can achieve when one | stops both Gapps and user-installed apps yapping back to | Google-Central. | jeroenhd wrote: | A de-Googled device doing very little will have great | battery life. Once you load up a chat app or two, that | battery life quickly starts degrading, because every app | starts polling a server for updates. | | Most people use some kind of app that receives push | updates from the internet onto their smartphones, whether | that's Facebook or WhatsApp. If you can live without | those apps then you'll have a much better time, because | the WiFi can actually turn itself off completely and the | phone modem can fall back to a state as passive as | possible. | | You don't need to de-Google your phone for this effect. | Just disable all internet access (WiFi off/disconnected, | cellular data off) and your phone can last a day longer. | Works great for devices repurposed as navigation systems! | hilbert42 wrote: | _" You don't need to de-Google your phone for this | effect. Just disable all internet access (WiFi | off/disconnected, cellular data off) and your phone can | last a day longer."_ | | True, that's my experience too. As mentioned, I've well | over a dozen unmodified and rooted Android phones and | some of these have been repurposed including for | navigation, remote control of equipment etc. | | I'm not a typical user, no social media, no Google | accounts, no cloud storage and such, so for phones that | aren't rooted Gapps are either disabled or where possible | removed, similarly, any running services that I'm not | using are stopped (if possible). On rooted phones apps | only run when I'm using them, WiFi/SIMs are disabled and | or airplane mode is on when the phone is not in use, also | no background data is allowed etc. so I expect my phones | to last for days without recharging. | | What surprised me about this Huawei is that it is six | years old and the battery has been abused--left charging | at 100% for days on end--yet it still managed 24 days on | standby in normal power mode. No doubt it would have | lasted a full month if I hadn't used it today. | [deleted] | saagarjha wrote: | It's only doing that intermittently when you're not | interacting with the device. | kjkjadksj wrote: | Depends on the app and what permissions you set | nwoli wrote: | If you're getting more than a thousand requests a day | you're gonna move to a real web host anyway | saagarjha wrote: | It's less about requests per day and more about my | website going down if my phone is in my pocket. | GavinAnderegg wrote: | My blog has been on the front page of Hacker News a | couple of times with GitHub Pages. It didn't break a | sweat. | zlg_codes wrote: | That's because you're using Microsoft's infrastructure | for your site. | GavinAnderegg wrote: | Sorry, I was saying that because I thought the poster was | saying "you'll need a real host (instead of a free one) | if you get more than 1k visits a day". But looking back, | I think "real host" meant "not a phone" and not "not a | free host". So my comment here didn't really make much | sense. | notatoad wrote: | hosting a website properly just isn't that difficult or | expensive. | | if somebody wants to have a website, they can. there's plenty of | free options that don't involve a device that has intermittent | connectivity, runs off a battery, and that you probably don't | want to enable remote access to for security reasons. | | the reason people don't set up personal websites is that they | don't want to. not becauase they can't host it. facebook does a | better job of serving the "personal website" niche than personal | websites do. the dream of every person having their own website | is a thing that tech nerds want from others, not a thing that | most people want for themselves | indymike wrote: | > there's plenty of free options that don't involve a device | that has intermittent connectivity, runs off a battery, | | I have a great reason to host a website on my phone. I want to. | It's my phone. I'm paying for the service. You can do what you | want with your phone, but please, don't tell me what I can and | can't do with my property. | [deleted] | tracerbulletx wrote: | You really don't want your phone's radio activating to serve | random http requests, most of which are probably going to be | bots, and people loading websites really don't want to wait for | the latency that would be involved with your phone serving web | requests. | paxys wrote: | > The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of | Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites. | | Is there a single person on this planet who wants to host a | website but can't and will start doing so if their mobile phone | supported it? I'm going to guess no. | | 99.99999% of people want to host nothing at all (and probably | don't know what web hosting is). For the ones that do, it is | still a lot more cost effective (and reliable/performant) to buy | a $5 VPS or a Raspberry Pi than rely on a device and network | connection that aren't meant to be used for web hosting. Cell | phones have limited battery life. Mobile network connections are | spotty, and they allocate the vast majority of bandwidth for | downloads because that's what people are using their devices for. | | So the ecosystem doesn't support running websites on mobile | devices because (1) it is a terrible idea, (2) the demand is non- | existent and (3) there are a hundred better options. | mch82 wrote: | My sense is the opposite. Billions of people use Facebook & X | because hosting their own website is too hard. It's very likely | millions of people would love a simple way to host a website | from their phone. | ufmace wrote: | I don't think so. What people want is a way to create some | words, audio, pictures, video, etc and let people see it. The | vast majority of people don't care at all about exactly what | technological choices are used to make that happen. For a | variety of reasons, services that are at least semi- | centralized and running on proper servers in datacenters are | vastly more effective at this than trying to run a web server | on a mobile device being used in its intended role. | nroets wrote: | I registered a domain, paid for word press hosting, learned | the set up and started writing my travel journal there. The | photos display in full HD without ads. | | But most family and friends forget to visit it, because | Facebook is not promoting my website. | 7373737373 wrote: | The cost and complexity of the process you describe is | beyond the complexity that people, who want to express | themselves in small ways, incrementally, over time, are | willing or able to engage with, especially up-front | OfSanguineFire wrote: | Millions of people won't want to host a website from their | phone, simply because millions of people are no longer used | to navigating to obscure third-party websites. They don't do | it themselves much, and they don't expect their peers to do | it. | | The internet activity of younger generations today is | increasingly centered around use of only a handful of | websites, mostly provided through dedicated phone apps. | Unless a person's own website gets promoted by a social-media | site's algorithm, or comes up at the top of a Google search, | no one is going to visit that URL. | anderspitman wrote: | > 99.99999% of people want to host nothing at all | | While I agree this is true today, people also didn't know they | wanted cars or smartphones until good implementations were | made. Smartphones existed for many years but were niche before | the iPhone. We as an industry have thus far completely failed | to show the value of self hosting. | solardev wrote: | Geocities, Tripod, MySpace, GoDaddy, WordPress, Blogger, | Blogspot, SquareSpace... | | People just don't need or want this. Facebook has a network | effect and shows you all your friends' posts. Having to visit | fifty personal sites would be a pain. | Nathan2055 wrote: | > Having to visit fifty personal sites would be a pain. | | Which is why RSS (and Atom, but I'm just saying RSS because | it's less to type) was such a brilliant invention, and also | why it was "killed." | | Everyone is talking about things like "ActivityPub" and | "interoperability" and "personalized algorithms" nowadays | but RSS supported many of those features twenty years ago. | | Yeah, it didn't solve the account portability problem | (you'd still need a separate account for each forum and | blog you wanted to comment on; OpenID almost solved this | issue but was a nightmare to work with, Mozilla Persona | (which is not the same thing as Mozilla Personas, wow that | company is bad at naming things) would have definitely | solved this issue if that company had spent more than | twenty minutes promoting it), but it did solve the actual | fundamental issue that most people seem to be getting at | with these modern systems: it offered a way to collate and | display updates from a wide variety of mutually | incompatible Internet sources all together in one place. | | It's an incredible simple pitch, even to non-technical | people: display your YouTube subscriptions, Twitter | follows, blogs you're interested in, and news sites that | you read all in one place, in software that you control. | | The problem is that operating a "platform" rather than a | website got to be too profitable, and suddenly the goal | shifted from serving useful content to make you want to | come back to a site to serving enough content that you | never want to leave to begin with. Many people believe that | if Google had made Reader the center of their social | strategy rather than killing it to pursue a short-sighted | attempt to compete directly with Facebook, we could be | looking at a much healthier Internet today (and Google | probably could be earning a lot more money than they | currently are, considering the abysmal adoption rate of | modern Google services is often argued to be directly | linked to fear of shutdown).[1] | | Personal websites died for the mainstream because Facebook, | Twitter, and Instagram offered a better interface for the | average consumer. But they could be brought back by a | system that made the good parts of those sites | interoperable. Frankly, this is the kind of thing that I | want to see Mozilla pursuing again, not...whatever the heck | they're doing now. (You go their website and they're | selling Pocket, which is basically a bad centralized | version of what I'm talking about; a rebadged VPN service; | an email alias service; and Firefox. What happened to the | people who tried to do things like Persona?) | | [1]: https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader- | death-2013-r... | input_sh wrote: | > Everyone is talking about things like "ActivityPub" and | "interoperability" and "personalized algorithms" nowadays | but RSS supported many of those features twenty years | ago. | | RSS is read-only, ActivityPub allows back-and-forth | interaction between servers. The two are not comparable. | ehutch79 wrote: | Do normal people give a shit? | | Like if you ask a cashier at McDonald's, will they have | any clue what you're talking about? | | Walk into an office. Ask the receptionist, are they going | to care at all? | | Do commenters on hacker news ever have conversations with | the bulk of humanity in order to have any perspective? | hgsgm wrote: | Personal website hosting is 100% free from many, many vendors. | nonameiguess wrote: | This makes no sense. | | > The reason I think this is needed is because a large percent of | Internet users cannot afford hosting personal websites. The | privilege of self hosting that early Internet users enjoyed was | never given to the new Internet users. | | If you actually have the technical chops to self-host a personal | website in your house, why on earth would you want to do it on a | phone? A Pi, Nano, Jetson, NUC, any kind of small form-factor | mini PC is a far cheaper and better option if the limiter is | seriously that you can't afford a hosting service. A web server | does not need a camera, a touchscreen, a gyroscope, a GPS chip, a | radio transceiver, an accelerometer, a fingerprint reader, or any | of the many other hardware features that cause a phone to cost so | much. | | You may as well ask why your thermostat, printer, microwave, | smart lightbulb, or television can't run a web server. There is | nothing technologically stopping them. If they can run a stored | program and connect to a network, they can bind to a port and | listen for incoming requests. But running a website on them just | isn't the purpose for their existence. General purpose computing | devices exist and are cheap. If you want one, get one. There is | no reason every single device that can do any form of computing | needs to be a fully general-purpose computing device. | mulmen wrote: | 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 (or | even could) be a thing. | | The article doesn't convincingly establish why phone hosting is | important. If it's a cost issue then wouldn't it be a competitive | loss-leader for an ISP add-on like we had in the past? ISPs used | to provide web hosting, email, newsgroups, etc. Those all went | away in favor of dedicated providers, which seems like a better | model. | albuic wrote: | 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. | nixpulvis wrote: | I mean, yes... but also why? For testing, or when I'm away from | my computer, sure! | | Popularizing dynamic DNS seems like a good idea, but may require | new protocols altogether in order to support all the IP address | changes. But yea, more edge compute; owned by the source. Sounds | good to me. | ttoinou wrote: | This is looking like a solution in search of a problem | powera wrote: | Just because you _can_ , doesn't mean that you _should_. | | Nobody should be running their personal website on their | cellphone. When I read this type of diatribe, I hesitate to agree | with it. Abstract considerations of freedom lose out to "you're | going to tell people they should do this, and that is a bad | thing". | 7373737373 wrote: | But you are telling people NOT to do this, from the get go, | without giving a reason? | jonbell wrote: | 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 about personal websites, let | alone normal people. And then we want to argue people should | be able to host on their phones? Good gravy. | 7373737373 wrote: | 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? | koolala wrote: | 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. | Lukkaroinen wrote: | https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/host-a-web-... | WarOnPrivacy wrote: | > _All we need is IPv6 connectivity everywhere and phone | operating systems optimized to run web servers._ | | Unless you're relegated to IPv6-Never ISPs (eg:Frontier) which | doesn't matter to IPv6 advocates because IPv6 is already awesome! | and everywhere that counts! | circuit wrote: | > 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/ | imadj wrote: | 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, you'd need a better argument, one that | specifically show how that would be destructive and harmful so | that they shouldn't have this freedom. | troupe wrote: | Running a webserver on your phone incurs all the same issues | plus it might be out of range or your phone might be off. So | having a webserver on your phone is actually worse. | imadj wrote: | > Running a webserver on your phone incurs all the same | issues | | Huh, what? The issues I mentioned proceed from using | services you don't own or have power over. How can I suffer | from such issues on my own device? | | > out of range or your phone might be off | | and? If the owner is ok with that, where is the problem? | Are people not permitted to walk because a car is faster? | jakelazaroff wrote: | What if your service provider cuts you off? | imadj wrote: | 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? | somsak2 wrote: | right, just like you can change the provider of your | hosting. | imadj wrote: | 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 | purple_elephant wrote: | [dead] | vorticalbox wrote: | You can run a static site on github.com for free. | opportune wrote: | Micropayments aren't more of a thing already for a reason. | There is friction and overhead with signing up for a 3P | subscription service even if the actual dollar cost is | negligible. | smallerfish wrote: | The reason is high credit card fees. If payment gateways | allowed micropayments they'd be more popular. (Square, for | example, charges 31-33c on anything under $1.) | nfRfqX5n wrote: | looks like it can't handle a few clicks from hn | dt3ft wrote: | Down for me as well. I guess you get what you pay for ;) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-08-12 23:00 UTC)