[HN Gopher] Design for Obsolete Devices
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Design for Obsolete Devices
Author : polm23
Score : 86 points
Date : 2021-07-23 04:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (anaellebeignon.fr)
(TXT) w3m dump (anaellebeignon.fr)
| lcam84 wrote:
| I switched to a dumbphone three years ago. It often creates
| restrictions that are surmountable. It prevents me from
| participating in the gig economy for example it is very difficult
| (or impossible?) to call an uber or use a take away app. There
| are however things I can't do, for example use the bike system in
| Lisbon, because it requires the use of an app. In this example
| the use of a card with RF ID would not only be more accessible
| but would have a better user experience.
| marttt wrote:
| +1. I've intentionally never owned a smartphone.
|
| Living in Estonia and using a dumb phone, I can still
| comfortably query my bank account balance via a voice service.
| I can also sign documents with my digital ID by confirming a
| secret and entering my PIN code. Buying intercity bus tickets
| also works, including season tickets for e.g. 30 days (by
| calling a number that includes your bus card identification
| string and another string for the type of ticket you want to
| buy). The newly created electric bike network in my hometown
| also sort-of works if you bind it to your bus card.
|
| What I miss, though, is being able to work as a bike courier
| for Wolt or Bolt using just a dumb phone. Or maybe also use a
| Bolt electrical scooter. Not quite sure, but I think none this
| is possible.
|
| All in all I'd say the quality of my life has massively gained
| from sticking to a dumb phone. No cravings to hug a smartphone
| in my sleep; enjoying the luxury to actually look out of the
| window during train commutes, etc. It seems obvious, though,
| that these simple, hassle-free, app-free, visual-glare-free
| solutions are on their way out.
|
| Then again, seeing things like the Gemini protocol develop
| still gives me some hope. Maybe the next generation of nerds,
| facing climate and energy overconsumption issues, will start
| preferring really simple solutions again. Who knows.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| You're not obliged to hug a smartphone if you can. I have a
| smartphone, but I don't use it often. I use it for important
| services, like navigation, bank apps. I can read a book if I
| don't have nothing better to do. I can check out my messages
| once or twice a day if I feel like that, or I can leave my
| phone somewhere for a weekdays and forget about it existence
| if there are better things to do.
|
| IMO smartphone is a simple solution. Smartphone is an
| internet-connected computer. It's as simple as it gets. Phone
| calls, SMS are complex beasts with archaic protocols nobody
| heard about, without any reliability guarantees.
| noduerme wrote:
| Public bike systems should really not require an app. Unrelated
| but similar... Here in my town in the US, since covid the
| McDonald's is still closed for indoor dining/pickup. Therefore
| they have allowed people to walk through the drive thru line
| with the cars. (When I was 15, you were not allowed to do
| this). Some of the people have already placed orders on the
| app. But the general feeling is a line of cars with two or
| three people standing between the cars taking their turn to
| order at the drive thru window, at midnight when nothing else
| is open. Somehow this ragged line feels more dystopian to me
| than almost anything else since covid.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > Public bike systems should really not require an app.
|
| <advocate representee="Devil">The web makes for second-rate
| UIs, especially on mobile platforms. With that in mind,
| you're going to want to develop iOS and Android apps. Given
| that, why bother making a mobile web UI as well?</advocate>
| nemetroid wrote:
| The public bike system in my town can be used either with
| an app or with an RFID card, the latter option not
| requiring a phone at all.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| Why does it have to be _web-based_? There are public rental
| systems that can be unlocked with a phone call (or maybe
| even SMS). Not every solution to a problem needs to involve
| a computer on both ends. Of course it 's nice to have the
| web or app solution in addition to that, but it really
| shouldn't be the only way of interacting with such a
| system.
| nayuki wrote:
| Bike Share Toronto nicely offers a handful options to take
| out a bike: Credit card, RFID/NFC key, mobile phone app.
| xmprt wrote:
| One of the problems we're facing today is building a ton of
| public infrastructure around the assumption that everyone own
| a car. This leads to sprawling suburbs and horrible public
| transportation.
|
| I wonder if we're building a future where everyone owns a
| smartphone which is going to lead to many problems down the
| line.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Which generation of the radio standards does it use? In some
| countries 2G is gone and in some areas 3G is gone. Are there
| any 5G dumphones for when 4G is gone?
| lcam84 wrote:
| I have a nokia 800 tough with 4G. I bought after an
| experiment of living without internet at home. At the time I
| was using a 3310 with 3G. The experiment lasted 6 months and
| ended a month or two before Covid strike.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I'm aware of at least one CAT dumbphone that does 4G. Not
| sure about 5G.
| bserge wrote:
| What is the point of 4G on something that is designed to
| limit Internet access?
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Probably to be able to connect at all, even if only for
| messaging, email, and phone calls. Hey, it's a mobile
| network terminal, you've got to have _some_ network
| access there!
|
| They are retiring 3G like mad, and even 2G towers are
| getting fewer and farther between (although it's likely
| that 2G/GPRS/EDGE will never truly go down).
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| 2G and 3G networks will eventually be shut down, so 4G
| support is part of future-proofing the product.
| lcam84 wrote:
| My dumbphone as 4G. Is the way I use to have internet at
| home. But there are not applications compatible with the
| operating system (WebOS)
| nicbou wrote:
| The embedded video does not load on my not-obsolete Pixel 5
| (Firefox)
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Here too (on a brand new HP laptop, also Firefox). But it isn't
| related to the age of your device.
|
| > Firefox Can't Open This Page
|
| > To protect your security, www.youtube.com will not allow
| Firefox to display the page if another site has embedded it. To
| see this page, you need to open it in a new window.
|
| > https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-
| page?as...
|
| Which says
|
| > If you see this error, it is usually caused by a
| misconfigured website that is trying to display another website
| without the consent of its owner.
|
| > Websites can use x-frame options or a content security policy
| to control if other websites may embed them on their own pages.
| This is an important security feature to prevent clickjacking,
| which is an attack that allows malicious sites to trick users
| into clicking links on a site.
|
| Generally speaking this kind of situation represents the
| opposite problem to what the OP describes: the web browsers
| themselves are constantly changing and breaking previously
| working websites. This imposes a burden of continuously modify
| the websites to comply with the latest and greatest APIs; most
| of the web isn't going to upgrade and will slowly rot (like
| happened with sites that relied on Flash, a proprietary, non-
| standard plugin). Obsolete devices - the theme of this post -
| aren't a moving target like the web is.
|
| Now, for this particular website, being a 2021 course, it's
| just a bug. It _should_ just be fixed and set the proper CSP.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The X-Frame-Options header is sent by YouTube, not by the
| website. The website appears to be trying to embed a normal
| YouTube.com link (/watch?) instead of using its normal embed
| path (/embed/).
|
| This is probably intentional behaviour by YouTube to prevent
| clickjacking and the like. I don't think this has ever been
| how YouTube intended embeds to work, so you can't really
| blame browsers here. The author should fix their link to get
| the video to show up.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| I was thinking along those lines: this api (content
| security policy) didn't work with older browsers, because
| they didn't exist. An older browser wouldn't have blocked
| this iframe. And by looking up, it would be indeed very
| old.
|
| So yeah my rant didn't apply to this particular instance.
| lcam84 wrote:
| Yes, I cannot see it on my 2013 macbook also. It seems like
| some security issue from embedded videos. Here is the link
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZaOAfookBE
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Back in the days I developed a webmail interface and backend [1]
| for myself because GMail got unusable on Windows CE devices while
| they were still on the market in Germany.
|
| Designing a website with WAP-level of HTML is quite a challenge,
| but it's possible.
|
| And it works so well with 2G slow connections that you start to
| appreciate it when your "flatrate" is throttled again. If you try
| to use any website in the new web with 2G slow, you'll realize
| how broken most concepts are. Even the ordering pages of ISPs to
| confirm an email address for a new internet connection is built
| with 20MB of Angular for no reason. It's so absurd that you
| cannot order an internet connection without an internet
| connection.
|
| How did we collectively get to this point of not giving a damn
| about anything?
|
| There's still such a huge population of the world that hasn't
| fast access to internet [2] that I don't understand why we keep
| making things bloated if they're unnecessary by concept - and can
| even be replaced via pure HTML/CSS most of the time.
|
| [1] https://cookie.engineer - source under "webmail" project,
| built with old, old, PHP in 2005-2007 during the dark ages of web
| development.
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...
| yourenotsmart wrote:
| > How did we collectively get to this point of not giving a
| damn about anything?
|
| Sites don't target 2G, so your conclusions about what we give
| damn about are a bit premature.
|
| You don't optimize a resource that seems abundant. It may be
| wrong, but it's economically the only common sense approach a
| system would take.
| andai wrote:
| Unfortunately, optimizing for developer convenience seems to
| have a lot of overlap with optimizing for wasting my time.
| rmetzler wrote:
| > How did we collectively get to this point of not giving a
| damn about anything?
|
| - works on my machine
|
| - you need to build new features, not refactor / optimize
| what's already there
|
| - etc
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I'd build stuff for old machines all day, were I paid for it
| just as good as I am to work on, as they sometimes say,
| webfeces.
| slim wrote:
| Before 2008 I used to Tweet by sending an sms to a special
| phone number. When twitter removed the service, their bloated
| website cost a lot for a tweet. So I made a Wap service using
| their api and now tweeting cost me a fraction of what the sms
| cost me. I built it in a few hours, it was very fun to chop
| every last byte of html exploiting the flexibility of the
| browsers (who knew you did not need to close html tags?). That
| service was used by a few friends on feature phones till 2010.
| I discovered it when a friend complained that the service did
| not work anymore. I had completely forgot about it.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| OT: Didn't we chat a couple days ago on Reddit? The Internet is
| small... :D
| [deleted]
| bengale wrote:
| I would guess that a lot of it is profit driven. People without
| fast access to internet probably don't spend a lot of money,
| and the vast majority of things built on the internet are to
| make money.
| NohatCoder wrote:
| It is quite ironic that the site is almost 4 MB, mainly because
| of oversized png-encoded photos. And wtf is that favicon?
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(page generated 2021-07-24 23:03 UTC)