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.

Comments

So, in sum

[SlaveToTheGrind]

1. Cartographers for a U.S. intelligence agency published coordinates for the center of the populated area of Pretoria, South Africa.
2. An IP location service provided those coordinates, along with an uncertainty radius, for Pretoria IP addresses.
3. Other IP location services threw away the uncertainty radius.
4. South African government officials, bounty hunters, etc. used the IP location services that threw away the uncertainty radius.
5. The U.S. intelligence agency changed the coordinates to the center of the town square after being apprised of the issue.

That seems like fairly thin gruel for Slashdot's "U.S. sux" article du jour.

Re:So, in sum

[Anonymous Coward]

That seems like fairly thin gruel for Slashdot's "U.S. sux" article du jour.

Where did this last sentence come from?

Everything you listed happened. It's affecting people, and it's newsworthy.
The /. post doesn't say anything about blame; the /. title notes that it was inadvertent.

Are you such a weak snowflake that you are offended by anything which isn't pure "U.S.A." cheerleading?

Re:So, in sum

[PPH]

That seems like fairly thin gruel for Slashdot's "U.S. sux" article du jour.

You seem to have ignored the broad distribution of blame for this situation and homed in on what appears to be the apparent centroid of the problem.

Re:So, in sum

[Anonymous Coward]

The headline is blatantly false:

How Cartographers For the US Military Inadvertently Created a House of Horrors in South Africa

The Cartographers for the U.S. military did not intentionally nor inadvertently create the problem. The problem was created by the people that threw away data and used data without understanding what they were doing. Those people, as far as I can tell, were not U.S. military.

Now the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, once they were aware of ignorant use of the data, did attempt to mitigate the problem created by downstream buffoons.

Seems like @SlateToTheGrind is more offended by blatant misrepresentations. So the answer to your question about being a "weak snowflake" should be evident by your broken question.

Re:So, in sum

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't the US who caused the problem, others who willfully mislabeled data did. Yet the title says, "How Cartographers For the US Military Inadvertently Created a House of Horrors in South Africa"

Application of cause for a bad situation. That's blame.

The US == Evil narrative is so tiring. Even your post has that narrative running. Nobody sensible believes it. Yet people and bots like you push it every second of every day to destabilize for your own ego and geopolitical position at the cost of truth.

Why has no one sued MaxMind into bankruptcy?

[Archtech]

Seriously, any company that causes so much distress and harm deserves to be put out of business. Unless it has enough money to pay appropriate damages to all of its victims - whether they complain or not - and to fix its utterly insane software decisions.

The CEO actually didn't know what to do about IP addresses that couldn't be located more precisely than "the USA"? I can do that one instantly. Tell the user that the IP address can't be located more precisely than "the USA". I know it rankles to big business, but when all else fails you can always try telling the truth.