Re: Intermediaries - various cases

On Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 08:34:47AM -0700, Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler) wrote:
> >From my perspective it seems like there are two rather different types of
> things being talked about.  Apologies for the vagueness, but ...
> 
> 1) Intermediaries that I am aware of and in fact are probably services that
> I am paying for.  Like a company that says, "give us your message and we
> will take care of the security and reliability issues and make sure it is
> delivered to the addressee".  Sort of like the Post Office.

Sure, that's a good example.  You address your letter to a friend, but
send it via the Post Office.  The ultimate recipient is your friend, and
the Post Office does the routing.  But if you were sending a message to
the Post Office, perhaps to complain about mail delivery, you could do
so directly without routing.

> 2) Intermediaries that our network or security people might be aware of but
> I am not (and so I have difficulty giving an example, but I'll bet you folks
> can).

That is another kind of intermediary, sure.

Another one would be an intermediary established by the ultimate
recipient, to help them load-balance, or provide some other service
to their services.  In HTTP land, these are called "surrogates", or
"reverse proxies".

I guess I'm just warning to be careful about trying to classify the
different types of intermediaries there might be.  There are *many*,
and while there probably is a decent classification scheme waiting
to be developed, it's not going to be as simple as we might expect.

> Incidentally, I enjoyed getting a glimpse of what you do for a living, Mark.

In order for it to be called a "living", don't you have to get paid? 8-)

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred)
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.               [email protected]
http://www.markbaker.ca        http://www.idokorro.com