To expand on the immediate area of research, I'd like to have a distributed system where nodes self-identify what location they're in. There are a number of situations - be it operator misconfiguration or active attempts to misreport where it is more concrete to instead have nodes report their location based on time bounding their distance to known locations. The atlas looks like a great existing set of known anchor points to base such measurements on, but that attestation of location is very difficult to construct without additional authenticity.
(Nodes may be behind NATs make it seem difficult to measure outbound from atlas probes to them)
Candela, M., Gregori, E., Luconi, V., Vecchio, A. (2019). Using RIPE Atlas for geolocating IP infrastructure https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Using-RIPE-Atlas-for-Geolocating-IP-In... randy --- randy@psg.com `gpg --locate-external-keys --auto-key-locate wkd randy@psg.com` signatures are back, thanks to dmarc header butchery