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Internet Mapping Glitch Turned a Random Kansas Farm into a Digital Hell

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 Anonymous Coward writes:

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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by captain_nifty on Monday April 11 2016, @07:47PM

    by captain_nifty (4252) on Monday April 11 2016, @07:47PM (#330222)

    I recognize Potwin, KS.

    I used to live in a rural location (i.e 1.5 miles down a private road) with no good internet options available, so I used a satellite internet service. It was horrible.

    One of the things I noticed was that all geo-location web services thought I was in this place in Kansas.

    I had assumed that was the satellite downlink location, but this finally explains the real reason.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @08:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2016, @08:51PM (#330260)

    You're in Kansas?

    • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday April 11 2016, @10:09PM

      by JNCF (4317) on Monday April 11 2016, @10:09PM (#330317) Journal

      Nobody lives in Kansas, he's either a liar or a corn stalk.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2016, @07:53AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2016, @07:53AM (#330497)

        You misread his post.