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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: 2, Interesting) by samjam on Monday April 11 2016, @03:43PM
In my day we had NULL for this sort of situation. Not magic values.
What DO they teach them at school these days?
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Monday April 11 2016, @04:31PM
Eternal September? :P
Internet has been invaded by hordes of people that got enabled thanks to "easy GUI". Solution.. enforce command line and entering communications parameters after reading a introduction on the subject. It would filter out a lot of the spare reserve of humans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @04:53PM
My thoughts were similar. Whatever idiot came up with using a valid location as the default needs to be fired.
It would have been better to use something like the north pole, 90 comma 0 in GPS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @08:42PM
Yeah, unlike using the middle of nowhere as the default location - which the original coders believed EVERYONE would understand, let's use another place in the middle of nowhere that we believe EVERYONE will understand. That's how we get's shit DONE aroun' here.
(Score: 1) by Osamabobama on Monday April 11 2016, @06:49PM
Better yet would be a malformed coordinate (e.g. 100 degrees north) that causes a crash or the ability to execute arbitrary code.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @08:47PM
No that's too simple. What we should do is XOR their current co-ordinates with that of Trump Tower then add pi but only to seven decimal places, but rounded down instead of up. Ha ha, they'll be thanking us for our cleverness.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday April 11 2016, @06:49PM
TFA says that this data gets used for finding aggregate locations of IPs, which is a use case where country level precision can still be useful. Not that you couldn't design a more useful interface, but the data provided can be useful. It's being represented incorrectly by companies that use MaxMind for their own services.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @07:31PM
They also need to do aggregate for state and city/town level too.
The problem is they overloaded the coordinate data by trying to stuff that info into a data type not designed for it.
In hindsight they should have included a second field in the return value such that they could zero-ed out coordinates as flag that means look at the second field to determine the aggregate location. But they didn't and now unforseen consequences....
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday April 11 2016, @09:58PM
I agree completely that their 14 year old service should have a better interface, but I think the unforseen consequences of their interface being used wrong fall squarely on the shoulders of the individual companies that are using the interface wrong. Either they didn't actually read and comprehend the manual or they're intentionally misrepresenting the data to end users. But just replacing their current default coordinates with NULL (as OP suggests) would break functionality for people who are using the interface correctly.
What would you think of a second field that represents precision as a radius from the coordinates in the first field?
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday April 11 2016, @10:07PM
Not trying to misrepresent your suggestion as naive, samjam. Just trying to state that there are valid cases relying on the current interface which your suggested change would break, and that I wasn't referring to the AC's suggested interface. I get that you would want to make further changes to the interface if this thing returned NULL.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @08:37PM
I always return NULL to indicate a problem, except when I return NULL to indicate a success. Screw those other magic numbers, pfft.