Sorry to piss in your bucket but
NNTP is a flood fill scheme with no expiry other than time, no replication,
no control of distribution pattern
DNS is [buzzword hat on] a highly scalable replicating database with extensive
caching including optional negative caches fault tolerance and load balancing
If it can handle all the porn sites in the world it can handle cddb. In
fact I've got a mini proof of concept working already
You query for
AA.BB.CC.DD.[somedomain] for a TXT record
Where AA BB CC DD are the codes computed with the GPL licensed (and thus
indisputably clean) reference code.
The hash is fairly even so you can delegate multiple master servers for
DD=1 DD=2 etc when the system goes large
DNS also goes through firewalls nicely.
Final proof this is all sane - my test code is a shell script.
Alan