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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.
"“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
>gross negligence
At best. This is an inch of intent away from deliberate misinformation. Malice. That's with benefit of the doubt.
I'd be more amused if you'd said Chicago since that's the correct address for Wrigley Field
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?"
I'd be more amused if you'd said Chicago since that's the correct address for Wrigley Field
Pretty sure this was just a clever ploy to out Cubs fans :)
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
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.
Not just Cubs fans--the joke was in the Blues Brothers, so I've known the address of Wirgley Field since I was a kid, despite never having set foot in the greater Chicago metro outside of O'Hare or Midway.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
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.
People with the phone number 867-5309 has similar problems when that song came out.
That's probably true, but at least it was a little easier to get a new phone number than to change the lat/lon coordinates of your farm...
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.
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."