Layering ought not to be religion, but appropriate layering
is a good design philosophy, and strict layering may help stave
off entropy death of the Internet protocols. Which, judging by
the announcements of new Internet Drafts, may not be far off.
its an interesting thing is that there is more interesting things
to be gleaned from the viruses and worms propagated partly via
the ietf lists recently than the i-ds....
j.
Protocol Lawyering
We need protocol lawyers to enforce strict contractual
obligations and responsibilities and rights between
communicating parties - as we all know, the
Open Society Initiative determined that there are exactly
7 lawyers per communicating party in the internet:
Application Lawyer - handles client, serves a writ, etc
Presentation Lawyer, deals with non disclosure agreements, etc
Session Lawyer - handles open and closing remarks in court
Transport Lawyer - the end2end arguments -
e.g. from habeus corpus to appeals from death row
Network Lawyer - deals with discovery, admissability etc
Link Lawyer - frames plaintiff, or defendent, or both,
as necessary
Physical Lawyer - does the work, gets paid the least, still
costs more than any other non legal party
Some people have proposed putting all the lawyers below the
application in the nick...I tend to agree, although there are
problems with this approach w.r.t execution latency