It seems that whenever I run Parity and I bring up :8545 in a web browser (locally or on the public net), it redirects to :8180 OR simply gives me an error. In this case, I get the Parity UI styling saying:
404 Not Found
Your homepage is not available when Trusted Signer is disabled.
You can still access dapps by writing a correct address, though. Re-enable Signer to get your homepage back.
What I am expecting is the "normal" weird error I would get if I ran geth and looked at port 8545 in a browser. Text gobbledegook that I could re-create and post if you need the details.
But what I really want to be able to do is execute commands via the RPC interface across the public internet. Is there another, better way that I should be going about this?