Abstract: Disclosed herein is a computer-implemented method for obtaining one or more offers for a user, the method comprising a secure computer environment within a computing system: receiving personal data of a user that has been authorised for use by the user and is associated with a confirmed user preference of the user, receiving offer data from one or more third party offer providers, generating one or more offer results in dependence on the offer data and personal data, and outputting the one or more offer results Advantageously, the personal data contained within a user's profile that is used to obtain offers or other beneficial services does not need to be transferred to the providers of these offers or other beneficial services as the mechanism to identify relevant offers or other beneficial services is managed through a sandbox mechanism.

Abstract: There is provided a method for mediating the flow of messages in a computer network having a mediation architecture that includes a plurality of logical nodes arranged in a logical mediation cycle. The method provides algorithms for: handing mediation tasks over between mediator nodes; reconfiguring the logical topology of the mediation architecture in response to a change request while maintaining system invariants; and refining the structure of the mediation architecture by adding whole subnetworks in place of single nodes. The method also addresses failure detection and recovery.