At 11:15 PM 1/6/96 -0500, Michael Handler <grendel@netaxs.com> wrote:
ObGPS/cpunk/physical-location-of-machines: A recent IETF proposal would create a new DNS record that encoded the physical location of a machine, encoded in latitude and longitude. This would solve the problem MIT has had in distributing PGP, i.e. where exactly is unix5.netaxs.com? However, there's nothing to stop you from adding records that say your machines are at the latitude and longitude of, say, Fort Meade... ;-)
My laptop's latitude and longitude aren't constants.... And a DNS record identifying the precise location of compuserve.com or netcom.com might not be very meaningful; a more detailed record identifying the location of port5.paloalto-annex-3.netcom.com might tell you which terminal server to aim an ICBM at, but won't tell you where I dialed in to it from. But it still won't tell you if the user is in Washington DC or Germany, though perhaps a DNS record for Snow-Depth might be a bit more informative.
ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1876.txt Again, I'm not too sure of the viability of this proposal. Not on effectiveness of proving true location -- it is more geared toward "visual 3-D packet tracing" -- but simply because I have _no_ fricking idea where our machines are (in terms of lat and long) to any degree of accuracy.
There are several geography servers on the net, which can tell you the lat/long for a city (more useful if your city is, say, Holmdel NJ than if it's Los Angeles.) Or you can buy one of those $12.95 CD-ROMs with all the street addresses in the US on them (perhaps at the cost of adding a PC or Mac and CDROM drive to run the software...) Feed it a street address, and you can get pretty close (mine actually targets the other end of my block, but it's not doing interpolations...) #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 # # "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance" used to mean us watching # the government, not the other way around....