Re: Ouch! Dave's address redirect idea under attack?

Rohit Khare (khare@pest.w3.org)
Thu, 8 Aug 96 19:10:13 -0400


Well, they're talking the talk, who knows if they can follow through...
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http://www.pointer.net/pointer-tech.html
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Technical & Future Issues

(this page is constantly being refined)
_
The Pointer Network is always being improved. Each day our design team reads
the e-mail we receive and come up with a weekly plan of attack for new
features. Here are just some of the items which are on the slate for
development in The Pointer Network:

SPEED
At present The Pointer Network can search through over 10 million unique
pointers in less than a second. We timed this using a dummy load of 250
"active" connections into the system and each connection performed lookups,
one per second, over a one minute period. The result averaged under one second
per connection. The performance of The Pointer Network is critical so we will
keep a close eye on the real-life load and search times for our visitors.

STATISTICS
One of the most important features of The Pointer Network is being able to
know the "who and when" part of the connection equation. Our clients need to
know how many people entered their pointer, where they came from, and how many
times that person came back. In addition, for companies that advertise in
magazines or other traditional print media, our statistics service will be
valuable to use so they can see exactly which ad brought in the visitors. We
intend to add charts and graphs to the statistics section to help give precise
details on the activity on each pointer.

"POINT SERVER"
For those of you who are familiar with the nuts and bolts of the Internet, we
are wrapping up the development of a "point server" which will work just like
a nameserver but will allow you to reach The Pointer Network invisibly using
any of today's popular browsers. This means you will not always need to come
to a "pointer.net" address to jump to a web page. You'll just enter the
pointer in the "location" bar of your browser, hit enter, and whoosh.... you
are sitting on the destination web page. The point server is written in C,
operates on most of the common Unix platforms and will be fully documented and
supported.

SECURITY
With any online service there is always a hacker lurking somewhere in the
shadows. We are taking a rather "overkill" approach to this potential problem
by running a packet sniffer 24 hours a day on The Pointer Network. Every
connection is logged and every packet is recorded to a separate disk on a
separate site. We intend to keep The Pointer Network as secure as humanly
possible and the team at ReplyNet know the security business rather well.

More will be added to this page after opening day. Your comments and
suggestions are what make things work - keep 'em coming!