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  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Here’s what I’m imagining. The phone is listening on port 80, probably running some jacked up plug-in to play a favorite song. The user probably installs it and then forgets it’s there. The plug-in becomes severely out of date, running code with multiple zero day exploits. In the best case scenario it is running your battery down and using up your bandwidth, it’s commonly just unavailable because your metro area cell network is jammed so your visitors can’t access the site at all, and worst case it can be tricked into running local scripts that do nefarious things.


  • Having my phone not be able to do something I want it to do is my problem

    I meant, it’s arguable that if people use this feature and expose themselves, that’s their own fault. I’m not sure what you thought I meant.

    That’s why you have it turned off by default

    It’s off by default, but still there for uneducated and unskilled people to turn on and leave themselves exposed.

    … significant improvement

    Vs just paying a few bucks for linode that’s got multiple 9s of uptime? It doesn’t seem worth it.


  • If you give people this ability, most of the ones who use it are going to put themselves at risk.

    Maybe you feel that’s their own problem. Sometimes you need to protect people from themselves. The phone vendors sure as hell don’t want to start seeing news stories of their devices getting hacked all the time.

    And how do you feel about your site visitors not being able to hit your page when your local network is overloaded?


  • I suppose I could be convinced, but my gut reaction is this is a bad idea. Most people aren’t security oriented, and would put themselves at risk with poorly updated websites that are an attack vector for bad actors… There’s a lot more at stake in regards to what personal data lives on your phone… the richest concentration of your PII.

    Also, my battery life is already precious. And what if you’re out of cell range or the network is overloaded? Your site just stops working?