Incidentally, this client isolation thing can be extremely annoying in practice in networks you do not control. Hardware device makers just assume that everything is on One Big Wi-Fi Network and all devices can talk to all other devices and sing Kum-Ba-Yah by the fire.
Then comes network isolation and you can no longer turn on your Elgato Wi-Fi controlled light, talk to your Bose speaker, or use a Chromecast.
That seems less annoying than a hotel full of people who can play whatever they want with my Chromecast.
No malice is required for this to happen; it is completely possible to do by mistake.
Words like "I've been trying to use the Chromecast!" "The Living Room Chromecast?" "Yes! It says it's playing, but I don't see anything on the TV screen!" "You hit the play button, right?" "Yeah, and then it keeps stopping on its own!" "Are you sure you plugged it in?" "What in the world is wrong with this dumb thing?" drift between one partner and another in some other in some far corner of the hotel as they innocently trample my efforts to watch old episodes of How It's Made.
For all of these reasons, I tend to travel with a network that I control. That's usually in the form of some manner of very small router -- with a strong preference towards something that runs (or can run) OpenWRT. There's a ton of such "travel routers" in the market that are centered around $60 or so that don't take up much space at all.
I use this to slurp up whatever free wifi or ethernet I can get, or my phone tethering/hotspot, and I don't worry at all about how someone else's network might decide to treat me today. Whatever stuff I bring with me all works about as well as it does at home.
It's a real router with a stateful firewall, just like you use at home. Such devices protect you from the nefarious goings-on of the hotel wifi, just as they protect you from the nefarious goings-on of the big bad Internet on the other side of the cable modem at home.
A travel router differs only in that it is designed to be physically small.
I mean, yeah, isn't that the main purpose of client isolation? It sucks when you're on something like a locked down university dormitory network but it also stops (or at least, inhibits) other people from randomly turning on your lightbulb or worse, deploying exploits on your poorly engineered IoT device and lighting you up with malware.
Even when not using client isolation, I've run into similar problems simply from having a computer connected over Ethernet instead of WiFi, and whatever broadcast method a gadget uses for discovery didn't get bridged between wired and wireless. (Side note: broadcast traffic on WiFi can be disproportionately problematic because it needs to be transmitted at a lowest common denominator speed to ensure all clients can receive it. IIRC, that usually means 6Mbps.)
Adding exceptions for certain protocols, IP ranges (maybe multicast, even) are certainly ways around this, but I imagine with every hole you poke to allow something, you are also opening a hole for data to leak.
Client isolation is done at L2. You can't add exceptions for IP ranges / protocols / etc this way because that's up the stack. Even if devices can learn about each other in other ways, isolation gets in the way of direct communication between them.
The paper makes the point that you need to consider L3 in client isolation too - they call this the gateway bouncing attack. If you can hairpin traffic for clients at L3, it doesn't matter what preventions you have at L2
The reason why US bus ridership is so low is because buses are terrible. They are dirty, loud, inconvenient to get onto, often badly designed inside (too many seats, too little space), with unsavory individuals making you feel unsafe. In summer they aren't air conditioned, they seem to be refrigerated, you literally need a coat to stay warm. The fact that they are also slow is just icing on the cake.
In addition to that, the US has a stigma: "only poor people ride buses".
It's not just AI, replace "safe" with "open" and you will find a close match with many companies. I guess the difference is that after the initial phase, we are continuously being gaslighted by companies calling things "open" when they are most definitely not.
Lots of big words there, but can I now expose the local Mathematica (confusingly renamed Wolfram a while ago) that I'm paying for, through MCP to Claude Code?
Because it seems I can't and all the big words are about buying something new.
> depending on how best is defined in the given context
That is a big hedge there. I found over time that many of my objectively correct and informative posts on Reddit get downvoted because the truth is sometimes inconvenient (don't critique a manufacturer in the reddit devoted to devices from that manufacturer, people will not like that, they are not there to hear unpleasant things about their buying decisions), and even on HN if you post unpopular opinions , you will get downvoted into non-existence (just try saying that Postgres isn't the best tool for everyone ever).
"best" is hard to define and so far the best attempt I've seen to get it right was the GroupLens USENET scoring system (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GroupLens_Research) — this could work quite well if it were easy to adopt for many people. It worked quite well even at the time for USENET, but only for groups where there were enough people doing the scoring.
Slashdot let you rate content across multiple dimensions.
I see no specifics about the scoring in the wikipedia article, but a search revealed that it was a simple, single five star rating scale. The same as on Amazon, and formerly Netflix?
Yes, as simple as can be. It's the recommender system that made the difference, and that was dead simple, too, but resulted in a subjective "weighting" of scores: your recommendations would depend more on people who were like you.
Having moved to Mastodon, I also recovered some faith in the Internet (of old). You control your timeline. You are not the consumer being fed stuff, you choose what you want to see.
As a side note, I keep hearing people recommend threads, bluesky, or other corporate media machine du jour and I cannot understand how people can't learn a lesson. If you touch a hot stove once, you normally don't touch one again. And yet here I see people around me hoping (against all reason) that this time it will be different, really, this corporation is good, this service will not get progressively ensh*ttified like every other service that came before. It baffles me.
Mastodon is different. It is not owned by a single corp (nitpickers get your engines started) and can't be turned into a machine that juices your attention span for money.
Facebook’s best feature, at its peak, was that everyone was there. My friends and family aren’t on Mastodon, and likely never will be. If the goal of a social network is to connect with people I know in real life, rather than follow various Internet personalities, it fails at this for me.
This isn’t Mastodon’s fault, but it’s the reality of the situation.
I’m not on Facebook anymore due to what the site has become, but I found the same emptiness on Mastodon, as my friends aren’t there. I’m not influential enough to get everyone to move to a new platform just for me.
When I joined Mastodon, I ended up following a bunch of developers, but ultimately felt like a fly on the wall to a friend group I wasn’t part of, as a lot of these people had been real-life friends or co-workers. I guess if your friend group is all geeky enough to join Mastodon, it can work. I have very few real-life connections that fall into that bucket, which I think is the case for most people.
The people I know who still use social media seem more than happy with Meta’s products. The others just stopped using these things all together and don’t seem to care about finding an alternative.
This is country-dependent, I think. In Poland, for example, schools and kindgergartens still pressure parents to sign consent forms allowing them to post images of kids on Facebook. "For promotional purposes".
Everybody signs. Well, not everybody, but I am one of the very few lone outliers.
Try your local weather app. Here in Switzerland the MeteoSwiss app is absolutely wonderful, and has all these main features:
- Uncertainty bands in the forecast (the bands are a better UX than more lines imo)
- User-supplied reports
- Many many many different maps (snow / cloud / wind / sunshine / air quality / etc)
- Alerts (not notifications, but real alerts to watch out for something)
yr.no tends to be most accurate for Scandi+Baltics somehow pretty often.
Ventusky has the best app experience in Android with many different layers like wind, precipitation, air quality and many more. Can only recommend this as well.
EU weather apps usually have an horrible UX. This one seems pretty cool and I’d pay for it if it would be available. I now use the ugly Windy.com app and the weather ios app.
Has EU weather sources per credits (DWD, ECMWF, EUMETSAT -- roughly what it's doing is graphing multiple models), but if you are into weather apps you're likely best off with Carrot that (a) lets you design your own UI including matching this (more or less), and (b) lets you choose among weather sources and flip among them with a tap.
If it's about cute UI and key notifications, try Hello Weather. For microcell notifications on anything, Tomorrow weather. For much better maps, WeatherMap.
For comparing multiple models, try Windy.app. For coastal barrier island use, I have 8 graphed at once, most of them EU models.
Very little reason for any weather app beyond Carrot, though Apple Weather is surprising evolved from the app of 20 years ago, no longer the 4th app to replace after messaging, maps, and browser).
Carrot is the only weather app with a vicious weather control AI singing an entire Broadway concept album about your destruction at you though.
I appreciate the uncertainty approach of Acme, but it’s not very meaningful if the methods are black box (just a generic list of agency sources isn’t informative). Something like meteoblue is much more robust and transparent. Will have to give Carrot a try, sounds promising.
My understanding is that they're just starting out with the app. Someone posted it to HN prematurely. Dark Sky expanded to support global weather and I'm sure Acme will as will.
Why is that? I know that some US-based news websites choose the nuclear option of completely disabling access to EU-based users instead of complying with EU laws. But weather app? What problem do they have with supporting EU users?
Yes. We pay for it with taxes! And again with our money in the App Store. But the app success is build upon the lawsuit from WetterOnline which is a private company.
The lawsuit backfired and made the state funded app well known. WetterOnline attacked the DWD because the state funded app is superior :)
I think in Italy they have some similar app. Would be nice if the EU helps us to unify the app. And add offline capabilities, bad or no internet happens. The weather radar is offline of less use but the forecast still helps.
They release videos for dangerous weather on YouTube. We’ll know for regular people, in regular cloths, speaking like regular Germans. Everyone loves it :)
I like it when important services are provided by the state and private companies. Save foundation! In worst case the state is always better. In best case they compete and public benefits. In this case the private company just sucks. But they made a good job in advertising for DWD ^^
PS: If someone would implement a nice weather for Linux (best Gtk) based upon DWD public data? DO IT!
Then comes network isolation and you can no longer turn on your Elgato Wi-Fi controlled light, talk to your Bose speaker, or use a Chromecast.
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