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.
"Roderick claimed to have used a "professional" tracking device "that could not be wrong,"
Isn't it strange how many people nowadays know things like that, with absolute certainty. 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?
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
According to TFA, this was caused by stolen devices being in areas without a cell signal, and falling back on WiFi access point geolocation. Further, the area in question has very few access points, so phones can potentially pick up these residential access points from thousands of feet away. Then they are geolocated to the exact position of the access point.
A solution is to disable SSID on your home router(s) so that these data-grabbing sniffers won't see it and try to geolocate off of it.
Better known as 318230.
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.
Many mapping systems give specific latitude and longitude coordinates and an accuracy radius for an IP address. When the accuracy radius is inaccurately large (like searching for a city, or a country) the coordinates arrow points in the middle, which can be someone's house. Someone using location services (like "Find My Lost Phone", and even police) often get these coordinates without understanding the accuracy sucks.
This particular case in South Africa happened because of a mapping service created by "National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency", which is part of the US Dept of Defense.
I'm not sure why useful information like this wasn't in the summary, but... I guess it made me read the article, so the jokes on me.
My favorite quote was from a guy that lives in this house. Right after the article says, "a team of police commandos stormed the property, pointing a huge gun through the door at Ann, who was sitting on the couch in her living room eating dinner", a few sentences later he says, "The Apple customers seem to be the worst."
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".
That's what they did. "The IP address is located somewhere within this massive circle". It's not their fault that idiots interpreted that as "at the centre of this massive circle".
I agree that changing the coordinates of the centre of the circle to an unpopulated area makes sense given that the world is full of idiots, but not doing it by default isn't malicious and certainly shouldn't be grounds for a lawsuit in any sane legal system.
My read is actually the MaxMind CEO is acting fairly reasonably in working towards a solution. His firm had no malintent and worked reasonably in trying to solve both the problems in the US, and now the one in this article.
The first pass attempt at a fix in the US - moving the geographical center of the US to the middle of a lake (which I think is a great idea, BTW) resulted in a further lawsuit from the property owners of the lake. Which was settled. I think this was all a reasonable solution by all parties.
We should encourage this sort of response by companies, not demonize them. As opposed to the often relied on solution by companies when exposed to these sorts of problems - a shoulder shrug perhaps, if the problem is even acknowledged at all.
Put away the pitchforks.