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

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

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....