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Comment by generj | Hacker News Reader

Because less than 5% of the population knows what a VLAN is yet alone how to set one up for their IOT devices.

Ideally Apple will resurrect the Airport and make it easy to have privacy and security in the home. An Airport-HomePod combo could do a lot of neat AI things in-house / on-prem.

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I wouldn't expect the average person to set anything up. I'd expect the AP to isolate all devices by default. Most of these devices and their corresponding apps are just reaching out to "the cloud" anyway. It's not like they actually treat the LAN they're on as a LAN.

That having been said, I don't know for sure that most generally available consumer devices would actually work under this arrangement.

Client isolation (whether wireless, by broadcast domain, IP filtering) is in conflict with ubiquitous device casting/streaming/detection features common in apps, which often do expect the ability to find each other on a LAN.

I think throwing those features out is a tough sell for the home consumer market, but makes sense in the SMB and above area.

That's why you replace those features with things like a local mqtt broker. That way devices communicate only via the local services. I tried doing real time video first because it's widely assumed to be the hardest.

Multicast is widely exploited for fingerprinting by smart TVs, unfortunately, much as I think mdns is a beautifully elegant idea.

I've never gotten local streaming to work, but that might just be down to the age of my "smart" TV though (which is now disconnected from the network due to lack of updates). But I have noticed that setting up a network printer is a lot easier than it used to be, and I assume that's because of LAN-based discovery, though I haven't dug that deeply into how it works.

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