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posted by martyb on Monday April 11 2016, @03:53AM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Monday April 11 2016, @05:43AM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Monday April 11 2016, @05:43AM (#329914) Journal

    They should have set the default location in the United States for an IP address whose exact location cannot be determined more precisely to 38°53′52.17″N 77°02′11.4″W instead of the exact geographic centre of the United States. Or perhaps 39°6′32″N 76°46′17″W or 40°25′53.51″ N 111°55′59.13″W might also be good spots. I don't think anyone would actually think that the people at those coordinates would actually be responsible for such nefarious activity. Or well, maybe they would. And some of it might even be more true than anyone knows.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @06:26AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @06:26AM (#329917)

    Very funny, but I'm sure Maxmind would rather be sued by a farmer than by Paypal, Microsoft, or AT&T.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @06:44AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @06:44AM (#329923)
      Did you actually bother to look up the three coordinates given? They sure as hell aren't PayPal, Microsoft, or AT&T.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @07:03AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @07:03AM (#329928)

        Whoosh.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday April 11 2016, @06:31AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday April 11 2016, @06:31AM (#329920) Journal

    For addresses "somewhere in America", why not use the address of the white house?

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @01:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @01:01PM (#330007)

    I would say pick the local sheriffs office or some other major public building. Say wriggly field for Chicago ;)

  • (Score: 1) by mgcarley on Tuesday April 12 2016, @04:14AM

    by mgcarley (2753) on Tuesday April 12 2016, @04:14AM (#330456) Homepage

    Why not use the coordinates for WBC or KKK or something?

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