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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @10:34AM
> Who would be stupid enough to think that the coordinates for an IP address are accurate?
Who would be stupid enough to think these people even know what an IP address is and aren't just using some high-level geo-location app?
> Sure, there's a nearby ranch house, but if you are going to trust the coordinates, you would need to go after the mice and weasels.
It/s not iike any of them have ever used a traffic GPS and have any experience with geo-location being close enough.
> because the universe just builds better idiots.
Unintentional irony, you are doing it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @11:03AM
This
The people showing up at this location are not looking in apache server logs, finding an IP address, and then looking up the location, they are using some other kind of highlevel "find it for you" app, that just happens to be using this data, and returning to them a Google map with the pointer aimed at this farmhouse in Kansas. And so the fools (including the law enforcement fools that have shown up) are just blindly pushing the "get directions" button, entering their starting address, and blindly following the map.
Because, you know, if the computer said so, it must be correct.
(Score: 1) by Osamabobama on Monday April 11 2016, @06:46PM
What we need is a good (definition suitably adjusted) horror movie about a group of college students who blindly follow the coordinates provided by findmyphone.com to retrieve a stolen iPhone, only to end up in a sadist's gruesome trap. Horrible deaths, suspense, only one gets out alive...all the good tropes. A little pop culture fear should help cut down on unwanted visitors, if just barely.
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