[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 ;)
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