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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: 3, Interesting) by PinkyGigglebrain on Monday April 11 2016, @06:52AM
Why did they even bother giving it actually coordinates? Why not set the Default to 0,0? That would make it pretty damn obvious that the data base didn't have a correct location for an IP address. Or worst case someone would think that the address was a ship in the Sea of Guinea.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by khchung on Monday April 11 2016, @07:04AM
Using North Pole would be even better. Any fool who is stupid enough to believe the North Pole is the actual location probably won't have enough smarts to go there.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Monday April 11 2016, @08:12AM
Bu7 3v4ry1 kn0wz 5an74 h4z l33t sk1llz!!
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday April 12 2016, @06:54PM
Actually, I'm quite glad it's not the North Pole. It's getting harder and harder to keep an inconspicuous summer evil layer about those parts. I don't need a bunch of angry idiots looking around for my internet backhaul.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @07:06AM
> That would make it pretty damn obvious that the data base didn't have a correct location for an IP address.
That, and it's a commercial database.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday April 11 2016, @06:36PM
I'm not really familiar with this, I just read TFA, but I think they're trying to be as close as they can so that the data can be used for determining the aggregate location of a group of users. For that purpose, the center of a country could still be more useful than the Sea of Guinea. I could totally see wanting to also provide a radius of error or something, but I think a point is valid as long as it isn't misrepresented. The real problem is that the data was misrepresented to end users by other companies.