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from the this-is-not-the-address-you-are-looking-for dept.
An hour's drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It's the kind of place you move to if you want to get away from it all.
But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor's land find themselves in a technological horror story. For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They've been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They've been visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They've found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.
All that and more because the farm's geographical coordinates where naively chosen as the default location in a widely used database of IP address to physical location mappings.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday April 11 2016, @04:30AM
Hack into the MaxMind servers, change the default US IP coordinates to their stupid CEO's home address. Then he might "take the issue very seriously" for real.
And while they're at it, do the same to Zuckerberg, Brin or Nadella - see how they feel about the digital future they're building for the rest of us...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @04:44AM
And then Joyce Taylor will be convicted of hacking, because the hacker's IP address resolved to her location before the change! You're delusional if you think anything will happen to a CEO except another billion dollar bonus for existing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Monday April 11 2016, @04:51AM
Nice, but that does raise the question of why they didn't choose a better default, such as the middle of a lake so idiots trying to find it would drown themselves. Or perhaps set it point to some secure government facility so anyone trying to find it would get locked up like they deserve.
Then again, "nowhere" does rather describe Kansas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @10:51AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @05:52PM
I'd rather send them to R'lyeh: 47°9′S 126°43′W
With luck they'll get eaten by Cthulhu and never bother us again.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday April 11 2016, @06:23PM
They changed it to the middle of a lake once they realised it was an issue.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @08:13PM
And now hundreds of police officers drown in that lake EVERY DAY trying to find the missing girl. Thanks, genius.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday April 11 2016, @09:37PM
Now that you mention it, somebody should put a TOR exit node at the bottom of that lake.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday April 11 2016, @06:57PM
YEAH!! Have it point to Area 52!
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.