On Mon, 26 Jul 2021 07:39:01 -0400 Dan Ritter <[email protected]> wrote:
> Joe wrote: > > On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 16:57:04 +0300 > > Gunnar Gervin <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > Will buy phone zoon, then play with this android for fun & learn. > > > > > > > Please comment here on your findings. Perhaps it is just me who > > thinks they are toys. > > Of course smartphones are toys. > > They are also reasonably powerful general purpose computers that > fit into a pocket. > > Hence "I have the Internet in my pants." > > Phones are books. They play music and TV shows and movies, and > of course, games. > > They are maps that know where you are, can be told where you are > going, and can tell you turn-by-turn instructions on getting > there. They can track your movements and learn your face well > enough to distinguish it from a photograph of your face -- > sometimes. They are the majority of photography and video > cameras on the planet. > > Because phones are valid terminals for the Internet as a whole, > they are reference libraries and documentation and how-to > videos. > > Also, you can use them to communicate, and even call for help. > > All of them, to a first approximation, run some kind of UNIX. > Most of them run Linux. There's a big complicated ecosystem > called Android on top of that, but definitely Linux underneath. > > The requests over the last few days to install Debian on phones > are entirely blocked by practical issues, not philosophical -- > it is perfectly reasonable to want control and thus privacy and > security on such a powerful instrument. > It is the philosophical which makes the practical so very difficult, and it is the philosophy behind the mobile devices which makes them toys. I've recently installed OpenVPN on two Android phones and an iPad. Installing it (OpenVPN Connect, the 'official' client) was trivial. Configuring it has proven impossibly difficult with one phone and the iPad. The iPad does not have the concept of file storage: a matter of philosophy. This means that the only two methods of getting a file into it are using Apple's cloud or using email. The file must be directly useable from these media as there is no provision for the user to store files on the iPad. At least this isn't a problem with Android. The version of OpenVPN on my phone must be older than the recent installations on the iPad and on my wife's phone, because it allows the use of separate certificate/ca files and also manual configuration of the profile. This is obviously a no-no now, enforced by the OS manufacturers, when the only permitted configuration method is to load an all-in-one OpenVPN profile. So far, I have not been able to generate any such file that is accepted by either the Android or iPad, and the error messages produced are not in the least helpful, nor are the 'examples' on the Net. OK, spending another couple of days making near-random changes will probably solve this, but my point is that I did the job on a buster netbook in five minutes, on my Android phone in about ten, and the reason it is taking hours on the other mobile devices is one of philosophy, which translates into (lack of) practicality. -- Joe
