A proposal about hostcount and DNS

Hi all!

During a private mail discussion with Mirjam Kuehne I got an idea
that she requested that I presented it here as a proposal.

#ifdef DISCLAIMER
This idea may or may not be a good idea and is just presented as an
possible solution on how to get more accurate hostcount numbers.

If it is found useful you migth have it and if it is totally
unintressting please discard it, I just presents it to see if someone
migth have use for it.

Also, this idea cover the areas of some DNS details as well as some
security/privacy issues and I does not claim to be a master in either
of those fields, possibly a happy beginner ;)
#endif /* DISCLAIMER */

The current hostcount methods builds it's counting on the DNS A
records but nowdays is there a lot of machines which is not being
registred in DNS while they can make use of the Internet resources.

Example of such machines may be machines behind firewalls, private
addresses (193.168/16 and 10/8) or dial-in machines. These machines
will not be found in the DNS and therefore will not be counted.

In the effort of possibly make the hostcount values show more of the
reality in some sense it would be good to get some method of
collecting such hidden information. A method that would allow for the
form of automation that the current hostcount has would be a good
thing.

One method that came to mind was to allow for some extra DNS entry to
hold a domains true hostcount.

I also thougth that some ISPs for instance migth object to have thier
customer count out public since this migth be of sensitive nature. If
(and I really mean if) they would trust some party (like RIPE NCC)
with the number for the only purpose of creating a total host count
and in that it would be hard to pinpoint a specific ISPs customer
count. With this in thougth that one could have a public encryption
key and private (to RIPE NCC or whoever does the hostcount for the
region) decryption key scheme to hide this information, such a scheme
that came to my mind was PGP.

To aid that people would supply this information througth their DNS
and also describe what a hostcount meant I think that some sort of
Best Current Practice could be issued.

There are of course a lot of difficulties involved here, and among
them is to get ISPs and others to use it.

So, my dear colleagues I now let this idea into your hands and I will
be around to answer some questions. I hope it can at least give some
inspiration to others to figure out something better.

Cheers,
Magnus