Domains, InterNIC, and PGP (and physical locations of hosts, to boot)

[Michael Handler <grendel@netaxs.com>]

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."