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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.
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
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.
>gross negligence
At best. This is an inch of intent away from deliberate misinformation. Malice. That's with benefit of the doubt.
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".
They're apes, not monkeys. Didn't you have biology in high school?
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
Back in the dark ages (before the internet) I stopped at a gas station to ask where I would find "Township Line Rd." Attendant's response was far more helpful than anything the internet can give: "Which township?"
Until they are bankrupt, and their product lives on.
They should be able to go after ANYONE using that database(s).
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Yes but apes are just a sub-genus within the group of more general monkeys - they are still -basically- monkeys and so are we.. :)
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Well, my native tongue is fortunately more logical, but English is what I have to work with here.
Ezekiel 23:20
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
That's exactly what Google and other companies are doing.
But IPs are dynamic and may be assigned to various locations within a few weeks and most GPS enabled devices are mobile, so there is a common sense limit on how exact these data would be.
bickerdyke