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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @04:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @04:53PM (#330103)

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @08:42PM (#330253)

    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.