Slashdot Mirror
How Cartographers For the US Military Inadvertently Created a House of Horrors in South Africa (gizmodo.com)
Kashmir Hill, reporting at Gizmodo: The visitors started coming in 2013. The first one who came and refused to leave until he was let inside was a private investigator named Roderick. He was looking for an abducted girl, and he was convinced she was in the house. John S. and his mother Ann live in the house, which is in Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa and next to Johannesburg. They had not abducted anyone, so they called the police and asked for an officer to come over. Roderick and the officer went through the home room by room, looking into cupboards and under beds for the missing girl. Roderick claimed to have used a "professional" tracking device "that could not be wrong," but the girl wasn't there. This was not an unusual occurrence. John, 39, and Ann, 73, were accustomed to strangers turning up at their door accusing them of crimes; the visitors would usually pull up maps on their smartphones that pointed at John and Ann's backyard as a hotbed of criminal activity.
[...] The outline of this story might sound familiar to you if you've heard about this home in Atlanta, or read about this farm in Kansas, and it is, in fact, similar: John and Ann, too, are victims of bad digital mapping. There is a crucial difference though: This time it happened on a global scale, and the U.S. government played a key role. [...] Technologist Dhruv Mehrotra crawled MaxMind's free database for me and plotted the locations that showed up most frequently. Unfortunately, John and Ann's house must have just missed MaxMind's cut-off for remediation. Theirs was the 104th most popular location in the database, with over a million IP addresses mapped to it.
[...] The outline of this story might sound familiar to you if you've heard about this home in Atlanta, or read about this farm in Kansas, and it is, in fact, similar: John and Ann, too, are victims of bad digital mapping. There is a crucial difference though: This time it happened on a global scale, and the U.S. government played a key role. [...] Technologist Dhruv Mehrotra crawled MaxMind's free database for me and plotted the locations that showed up most frequently. Unfortunately, John and Ann's house must have just missed MaxMind's cut-off for remediation. Theirs was the 104th most popular location in the database, with over a million IP addresses mapped to it.
How could he possibly know that it "could not be wrong"? Because he paid a lot of money for it? Or because some shyster salesman sold him a bill of goods?
This is very often the same thing.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
That seems like fairly thin gruel for Slashdot's "U.S. sux" article du jour.
You just have to dig a little deeper for the meat.
"It's almost with religious zeal that these people come, thinking their goodies are in my yard," John told me. "The Apple customers seem to be the worst."
ah HA! You thought was "U.S. sux", but is "Apple sux" instead! Bamboozled again.
Clearly this homeowner is just an Android zealot, because those are the only people who ever criticize Apple users. I've learned this fact right here on Slashdot.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
A point is one dimension, an ares is two.
One dimension would be a line, not a point. Ares, being a god, is in an entirely different dimension.