As John Crain has announced a week ago to the NANOG list, the J root server is changing to a new IP address. For people operating name servers, this means that the root hints file should be updated. A rare event: The last update was on August 22, 1997.
A couple of observations: As of today, this announcement hasn’t made it onto ICANN‘s or IANA‘s or InterNIC‘s home pages in a prominent manner – but probably, that’s fine since even Gambling Magazine carries some version of the news. Also, as Perry Metzger observes on NANOG, the PGP public key which is used to sign the root hints file (C1D27AF9) isn’t easily available through the usual key servers (it’s also not available from the list of ICANN PGP keys).