[Freedombox-discuss] 'No sysadmin' is the key to Freedom Box

Matt Willsher matt at monki.org.uk
Fri Mar 4 20:52:47 UTC 2011


On 4 March 2011 20:09, Tracy Reed <treed at ultraviolet.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 04, 2011 at 10:53:13AM -0800, Tony Godshall spake thusly:
> > both the above have a remote sysadmin.
> >
> > named Apple and Google.
>
> Only in the same sense that my Linux box has a remote sysadmin named CentOS
> or
> RedHat. Apple/Google never directly ssh into your phone. Although since you
> are
> running their code they can do whatever they want just like RedHat can
> theoretically do whatever they want with my servers.


RedHat has no remote kill switch for your apps. Apple does for iOS,  Google
does for Android.
Apple and Google are the sys admins of your mobile phone because they have
set up interfaces to hide the gory details of the system. In RHEL, RedHat go
so far to help but they don't go to anywhere near the degree Apple or Google
has. In fact, RH go less far the Debian or Ubuntu do in that regard.

 A mobile phone is not a server in any real sense.  Sure you can root it and
put a DNS server and Apache, and FTP and bittorrent on it but that's hardly
consumer friendly and I'd be surprised if you phone provider is giving a
real IP and will allow data back in freely. It has limited availability an
uptime (oops, flat battery - no services for the end user) Or even out for
that matter. For most people it goes via a proxy and there is little that
can be done about that until there is a wifi mesh and then you've going to
want either mobile IPv6, VPNs or dynamic DNS so the clients can find the
'server'.

All in all a mobile is nothing like a server. It doesn't offer the
reliability, the monitor facilities, the flexibility. It's a phone with a
bunch of games and, in Apple case, on the apps they dein fit for the users
use.  I'm not saying that nothing can be learned from those devices, just it
is not a fair comparison and does disservice to John's original post.
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