David Reed, "Attack of the Middleboxes": "a new and rapidly accelerating phenomenon - the rise of middleboxes, pieces of hardware and software that place themselves in the middle of communications. Sometimes they are called 'transparent middleboxes' - but since they don't really understand what is going on, they are hardly undetectable. Like the midwestern voice in my dream, they can introduce errors and restrict users to communicating only in the subset language understood by the middlebox".