The InterNIC (the company responsible for registering .COM, .EDU, .ORG, and .NET domains) has had a great deal of trouble lately, with people submitting malicious CHANGE DOMAIN requests (change admin or technical contact, point root nameserver entries to rival ISPs, etc). In response, the InterNIC has created "the Guardian project" which delineates who has access and authorization to change data in the InterNIC's record. Not much new cpunk relevance, but much of what has been discussed here is very applicable to this project (digital signatures, common access to databases, etc). I'm not completely pleased with their implementation, but it will do for now. They _do_ support PGP as an access controller within the Guardian project, and they have purchased a copy from ViaCrypt for this purpose. A good thing, says I. Check out their proposal: ftp://rs.internic.net/policy/internic/internic-gen-1.txt 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... ;-) 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. ("They're somewhere in PA." Brilliant, you can find that out via WHOIS.) The document suggests using GPS to locate your true location, but I'll be damned if my boss is going to spend $1,000 just so I can have more DNS entries to maintain... -- Michael Handler <grendel@netaxs.com> <URL:http://www.netaxs.com/~grendel> "Hours of frustration punctuated by moments of sheer terror."