Curious what HN thinks about this hypothetical: Imagine you have a web app designed to talk to a specific backend server API. It's also common for users to run instances of the server on their local machine. How would you feel about the app checking a (single) well-known port to see if there's a local server running, and prompting the user: "we detected you're running a local copy of the server, do you want to connect to it?"
This doesn't seem to be done very often, and the public cases usually seem to be pretty ugly (Zoom). But I could see it being useful. Imagine for example an app for browsing S3 directories, that could also detect if you're running a minio server and allow you to connect to it, and transfer data back and forth between your different backends.
I don't think the case that you're describing is unethical, but I also don't see it as beneficial enough to outweigh the security risks of it being possible.
This doesn't seem to be done very often, and the public cases usually seem to be pretty ugly (Zoom). But I could see it being useful. Imagine for example an app for browsing S3 directories, that could also detect if you're running a minio server and allow you to connect to it, and transfer data back and forth between your different backends.