I was under the impression that DSA keys were only 1k long, by design. 

One can do dsa-like schemes, but DSA itself is fixed at 1K.  OpenSSH
may have extended it - that's a very good question.

  This of course makes them rather useless as time goes by.

Yes, with enough time, but DSA is based on discrete log, not
factoring, so attacks against RSA don't necessarily apply.

-- 
        Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>