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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."
They should have located it at some high security base, so that people with too much time on their hands would no longer be a public nuisance
He's the most interesting developer in the world.
2030, somewhere off the west coast of Africa there's a graveyard. A graveyard for broken drone ships, and the occasional long range drone aircraft. Fragments of wing and the odd tyre float between listing hulls, batteries and fuel long since depleted.
Well, not just "somewhere", GPS coordinates 0,0.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Stay on call, my friends...
They should've done the equivalent of 127.0.0.1 and returned the user's own geographic coordinates. That'd make it fun to watch the people who didn't bother learning exactly how the database worked when it couldn't determine the location. "OMG! Someone help me! The spam is coming from inside my house!"
Too hard to get to. They should set it to 1060 West Addison Street, Chicago.