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