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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: 2) by JNCF on Monday April 11 2016, @06:49PM

    by JNCF (4317) on Monday April 11 2016, @06:49PM (#330169) Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @07:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @07:31PM (#330212)

    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

      by JNCF (4317) on Monday April 11 2016, @09:58PM (#330310) Journal

      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

        by JNCF (4317) on Monday April 11 2016, @10:07PM (#330314) Journal

        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.