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Internet Mapping Glitch Turned a Random Kansas Farm Into a Digital Hell (fusion.net)
An anonymous reader writes: Back in 2002, a company called MaxMind had an idea: Gather up as many unique computer or smartphone IP addresses as they can, match them to a map, and sell that data to advertisers. The problem is that MaxMind's tech has made life miserable for a handful of homes across the US -- especially one otherwise unnoteworthy northern Kansas farm. The farm's 82-year-old owner, Joyce Taylor, and her tenants have been subject to numerous FBI visits, IRS collectors, ambulances, threats, and the release of private information online. They've found people rummaging in the farm's barn and one person even left a broken toilet for some reason. People would even post her details online and encourage others to get in on the harassment, she said. The local sheriff even had to put a sign on her driveway, telling trespassers to stay away and contact him first if there are any questions. What's her mistake? MaxMind thought that if its tech couldn't tell where, exactly, in the United States, an IP address was located, it would instead return a default set of coordinates very near the geographic center of the country -- coordinates that happen to coincide with Taylor's front yard. The abuse began in 2011. A quick online search for the farm's address brings up pages of forum posts reporting the "scam farm."
The glitch is in your brains for geolocating anything deeper than the local ISP's router.
I am not surprised at all.
Sounds like grounds for a lawsuit to me!
How deep are MaxMind's pockets, because Taylor just got access to them!
The road to hell is paved with adverts.
That is how it goes, right?
We don't know where this IP links to, so lets just use a location where someone could live instead of a token for unavailability. We're so smart.
I hope they bury this company and get them to clean up and remodel their home.
"“Until you reached out to us, we were unaware that there were issues with how we selected these lat/lons,”"
Bullshit.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Developers: If we can't resolve the IP lets just give it a default center of the US coordinate, instead of returning a 'could not resolve location'
Project Manager: Sounds good to me!
Later...
A moron sysadmin: I'm getting tons of inbound spam traffic coming from this farmhouse in the middle of Kansas that has curiously rounded coordinates! They must be the culprit, clearly this IP GIS lookup has 5 digits of precision on lat/long!
Lots of stupidity to go around here
Because that's not a glitch. That is a trick to make their database look more complete than it is, and they should bear all cost which is caused by that trick. So these asshats are out of business, or aren't they?
Right here is the reason I still think it's understandable why some elements of society should face hard physical punishment. This isn't a glitch. This is gross negligence and some person should be held accountable for it. I recommend beatings with an ax handle for starters.
How about just directing everyone to "1060 West Addison" in New York City?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Their actions have consequences and they should step forward and compensate the people they unintentionally victimised. This cost of them going about their business ought to come back to them. They had best do it voluntarily.
If you are going to pick default coordinates, why not the middle of the ocean? or the top of mt Everest? Somewhere more amusing than a farm in Kansas?
This most assuredly was not a "glitch".
It was a deliberate design decision on the part of the mapping company to portray the returned data as more accurate than it was. The reason this Kansas farm became a "digital hell" is because the company decided to use a defined point (which happened to be their front yard) to represent "USA, not otherwise specified". (Reason being that it was close to the center of the continental USA.) Similar types of approaches were taken for other entities. (IP addresses in Georgia that didn't have further county/city information got put at the geographic center of Georgia, etc.)
That's not a "glitch" - that's a bone-headed design decision. A fundamental rule of data processing is that you shouldn't represent invalid values (or values with lowered precision) with valid values -- for this very reason. If you have invalid values and valid values which can both be the same value, if you get that value back, you don't know if it's valid or invalid. Sure, pick some value to represent "Somewhere in the USA, but no further information", but make sure it can't be confused with any valid value. Make sure it's incredibly obvious that the value isn't valid just from looking at it.
If you can't do this (if all values of the variable might be valid), you have to use out-of-band information to specify things. e.g. Having an extra data field to specify the level of precision (country, state, county, city, block, etc.). "38N 97W" is much different from "38N 97W, plus or minus 1500 miles".
Clear liability for MaxMind.
What are they - in grade school - can't a reasonable error be returned - like "no record found!"
This is NO different that siring a round at a random location and not taking responsibility for
hitting someone.
Jeeze. This is why you don't want Indians programming you stuff.... They just go home if things
like this heat up.
BTW, I'm withholding my IP address for this post...
CAP === 'expense'
I once tried getting driving locations to an address on "City Center" Blvd. Mapquest gave me directions to the geographical center of the city. Google maps gave me the correct directions to the actual road named "City Center".
Reminds me of that time when some slashdotters found Ralsky's physical addy and signed him up for everything imaginable... the post office had to give him his own zipcode among other things.
C|N>K
An hour from Wichita is not Northern Kansas, rather southern.
It sounds like a story about a digital altimeter on a new ground attack aircraft. The programmer was trying to figure out what to display in case of a malfunction. He asked a pilot what altitude they normally flew at. He stated '2,000 ft" and that is what the programmer displayed. There was a warning on the aircraft that if the altimeter said "2,000ft for more than 5 second to pull up. It was fixed in the next install. Why he didn't just display all 9's no one knows.
In this case 0 degrees lat and 0 degrees lon would have been much better. That is an obvious incorrect location.
At first, I thought that said "Internet Fapping Glitch Turned a Random Kansas Farm Into a Digital Hell".
That would have been a different kind of story.
Is there a coordinate system with a value that represents, say, the radius of accuracy of the point coordinates?
It seems like that would be useful for an application like this or anything else where you want to report a center but should also report the potential error value.
People with the phone number 867-5309 has similar problems when that song came out.
Table-ized A.I.
correction, "had". (Mondays, grumble grumble)
Table-ized A.I.
Why hasn't Google blurred or removed this persons' farm from their maps? Oh and by the way the more this story is circulated the more idiots will go and harass this person in Kansas. If anything and anyone has a 'right to be forgotten' on the Internet, it's this poor 85 year old woman in Kansas.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
That really depends on how fast you're driving, doesn't it?
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
I used to build/maintain software that predicted Flooding risk for potential home loans as part of the pre-funding process.
Long story short, one of the vendors of data we used did a stupid trick like this. If they couldn't find the address, it returned a "zip centroid" (middle of the zip code), And if the entire zipcode had no flooding risk, it would go ahead and "clear" the property. The problem was when it got worse than a Zip code match, it would think it got a zip centroid match in the middle of Kansas (probably this lady's farm actually!)... clearing the property of flood risk.
It was the vendor's mistake and they would have been liable, but it was BS and easy to detect once I ran some statistical analysis on it.
It really screwed with people's lives though... they get a home loan knowing they won't need to pay 2-4 grand a year in flood insurance, then once we audited the vendor data, or their home finally showed up on a map, they would be required to get insurance.
What's hilarious (and slightly terrifying) is that people noticed years ago that fraud and scams of every kind were being traced back to this remote farmhouse, but rather than question the source of their information, they assumed that there must be a massive internet scamming operation being run from the middle of nowhere and no law enforcement agency in the country would do anything about it. People will trust anything that appears to come from an authoritative source (even if that source is just "The Internet"), no matter how crazy it sounds.
It would probably be sufficient to have map text that says "Exact center of the United States". That would raise enough eyebrows every time anybody sees it to make most people realize that their data is probably wrong. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Now that I've made MaxMind aware of the consequences of the default locations it's chosen, Mather says they're going to change them. They are picking new default locations for the U.S. and Ashburn, Virginia that are in the middle of bodies of water, rather than people's homes.
but it's not the exact center b/c the mapping company rounded.
Text should read:
This is the default location for all IP lookups and is... not the location you are looking for.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Why hasn't Google blurred or removed this persons' farm from their maps?
Everybody is trying to get there! Why would they remove it? it's like removing a landmark because too many people are trying to get there!
Anyone remember Neil Gaiman's American Gods? An infamous exchange is made at the geographical center of the country.
If those centroids think they have problems now, wait until that episode comes out in the TV series.
Great, now law enforcement will waste tax money and start dredging the lakes anytime they can't find an important cellphone
The mapping service says "We have always advertised the database as determining the location down to a city or zip code level."
If that is true, then they should not mind randomizing their results to give the lat/long of an ip address to something randomly different every time but still in the zip code.
My guess is that if they do this, a lot of their customers will go away.
If they are not willing to do this, then their business model is to 'wink wink nod nod' provide much more accurate location services and they should be held accountable.
Seems like the nice folks affected should line up to see how this bluff call works out.
Why hasn't Google blurred or removed this persons' farm from their maps? Oh and by the way the more this story is circulated the more idiots will go and harass this person in Kansas. If anything and anyone has a 'right to be forgotten' on the Internet, it's this poor 85 year old woman in Kansas.
Becase the right to be forgotten was something ruled in the EU, and the US is not a member of the EU. For some reason people keep dredging that up, and while a service may offer to do it for her out of good will, Google has absolutly no other reason to do so. And if I may, many of the people who make the most noise about it aren't affected by it either.
That being said, my sentiments are with yours exactly - why the business didn't check first if they were putting the marker on somebody's property is stupid and irresponsible.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
If anything and anyone has a 'right to be forgotten' on the Internet, it's this poor 85 year old woman in Kansas.
Seriously! The poor woman has gained 3 years just since I read the article!
I get placed all over the country with my IP address. Depending on the day, I can be anywhere from Chicago, IL to Houston, TX. Today, I'm apparently in Ash Flat, AR. Given that I'm not anywhere near any of those places, I wonder if I could bill my ISP for travel expenses...
uh-oh, Toto I don't think we're in random Kansas farm anymore. But with this Oculus gadget, we might be able to change that...
Provocateur
Those companies should buy a lot and place a sign on it...
Something like: "This is $COMPANY_NAME default GeoLocation spot, if your gadget points to this spot it simply can't find itself".
What are the gun laws like in Kansas? Surely, after receiving a few tantrum-throwing stalkers, one would starting shooting first and questioning later? Speaking of stalking, why isn't using this service, a criminal offense?
Potwin is only about 20 miles outside of Wichita which is in Southeast Kansas.
I guess we're supposed to be content there wasn't also yet another fucking Wizard of Oz reference.
If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about...
Could a class-action suit be opened? I'm pretty sure everybody that was harassed/doxxed, and the property owners themselves deserve some sort of justice for the bullshit they endured.
Why hasn't Google blurred or removed this persons' farm from their maps? Oh and by the way the more this story is circulated the more idiots will go and harass this person in Kansas. If anything and anyone has a 'right to be forgotten' on the Internet, it's this poor 85 year old woman in Kansas.
If breathing wasn't automatic you'd be dead. Any more clever ideas? Maybe you think the road signs should be removed too? Perhaps ban maps showing the farm? How about putting a triple chain link razor wire topped fence around their house to "protect them"??
What a douche bag! As if these people haven't put up with enough shit already without your moronic suggestions that they be further penalised.
It's clickbait headlines like this one that drive me to Reddit. Every substantive clause in the headline is contradicted by the article.
It wasn't a glitch, it was a design decision. The farm wasn't random, it was a specific one that happened to include a set of coordinates. And the farm may have been hell, but it wasn't a digital one -- it was hell because of people in meatspace misbehaving on the basis of some information that happened to have been transported in digital form.
I check back in from time to time, but things here seem to be getting worse, not better.
Once, a page failed to load and gave me this IP address along with an error message. Concerned, I entered the IP address into an IP address locator and found this farm. The street view image looked the same as the photograph in the article. I realized that this was probably just a location given for the center of the US (or a location of just the US) and I ignored it, never realizing that I would ever see it again, before I saw this article and I realized that that was what it was. They should probably just map these things to somewhere where people are more likely to realize that this is just a sort of glitch, like 0,0 or the North Pole.
am I the only one who is surprised there isn't a database of really high precision ip address to GPS coordinates, considering the number of GPS enabled devices connected to the internet? Wouldn't it be easy for an entity, like google, to notice that GPS enabled devices connecting from ip address a.b.c.d tend to be located near a specific GPS coordinate? Lots of devices send location info with their requests for data, like weather and Pizza. I'm surprised that the weather channel and dominos don't have a second business selling this kind of data
This is what happens when you hire tech evangelists (they know someone who knows someone who got them the job), marketing leaders (blahblaher with a fancy beard), customer relations managers (you have relations, you do not manage them!) rather than smart QA folks who have veto powers.
She could have gained 3 grand per month by setting up a hot dog cart and a big sign "welcome to the center of the USA" instead of "call the local police if you're here for whatever reason"
bickerdyke