This link has been bookmarked by 104 people . It was first bookmarked on 10 Apr 2016, by someone privately.
-
28 Sep 18
-
14 Dec 16
-
09 Dec 16
Jon SwindleAn hour’s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem. The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor née…
-
27 Aug 16
-
24 Aug 16
-
12 Aug 16
-
29 Jul 16
Edward GlantzWhy people living on a farm in the geographical center of the United States were repeatedly accused of crimes they did not commit.
-
Thomas JamesHow an Internet Mapping Glitch Turned a Random Kansas Farm Into a Digital Hell https://t.co/DN6X8SwiUT via @Instapaper
-
16 Jun 16
-
11 Jun 16
-
10 Jun 16
-
02 Jun 16
-
30 May 16
-
24 May 16
-
22 May 16
-
21 May 16
-
18 May 16
-
04 May 16
-
03 May 16
-
30 Apr 16
-
29 Apr 16
-
27 Apr 16
-
26 Apr 16
-
25 Apr 16
-
24 Apr 16
-
big town has just 13,000 people. It is real, rural America; in fact, it’s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States.
-
-
19 Apr 16
Mortimer HaverlWhy people living on a farm in the geographical center of the United States were repeatedly accused of crimes they did not commit.
-
17 Apr 16
-
16 Apr 16
-
14 Apr 16
-
-
-
An hour’s drive from Wichita, Kansas
-
town called Potwin
-
there is a 360-acre piece of land
-
been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor née Vogelman, 82, now rents it out.
-
a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house
-
The nearest neighbor is a mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000 people
-
it’s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States.
-
the people who live on Joyce Taylor’s land find themselves in a technological horror story.
-
For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble
-
They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.
-
the residents of the Taylor property have been treated like criminals for a decade.
-
until I called them this week, they had no idea why.
-
Sometimes, through some sophisticated sleuthing, you can find out more information about a specific IP address—for example, whether it’s been associated with a malicious device, or where in the world it’s located
-
The trouble for the Taylor farm started in 2002, when a Massachusetts-based digital mapping company called MaxMind decided it wanted to provide “IP intelligence” to companies who wanted to know the geographic location of a computer
-
show the person using it relevant ads
-
send the person a warning letter if they were pirating
-
IP mapping isn’t an exact science
-
At its least precise, it can be mapped only to a country.
-
In order to deal with that imprecision, MaxMind decided to set default locations at the city, state and country level for when it knows only roughly where the IP address lives
-
can’t figure out anything more about where it is, it will point to the center of the country.
-
the precise center of the United States is in northern Kansas, near the Nebraska border.
-
In digital maps, that number is an ugly one
-
39°50′N 98°35′W.
-
back in 2002,
-
it decided to clean up the measurements
-
38°N 97°W
-
for the last 14 years, every time MaxMind’s database has been queried about the location of an IP address in the United States it can’t identify, it has spit out the default location of a spot two hours away from the geographic center of the country
-
there are now over 600 million IP addresses associated with that default coordinate
-
Which happens to be in the front yard of Joyce Taylor’s house.
-
“The first call I got was from Connecticut,”
-
“It was a man who was furious because his business internet was overwhelmed with emails. His customers couldn’t use their email. He said it was the fault of the address at the farm
-
over the next several months, the calls and visits intensified.
-
When law enforcement agents asked companies like Google and Facebook for the IP addresses used by suspected criminals
-
it pointed at the Taylor house
-
Amateur sleuths who spotted IP addresses used by visitors to their websites or on message forums were so convinced that the Taylor house was the source of their various problems that they created reports about it on Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, the Ripoff Report and Google Plus
-
Butler County Sheriff Kelly Herzet told me by phone.
-
“That poor woman has been harassed for years,”
-
I discovered a young couple in Atlanta that suffered from a similar, but less severe, issue
-
dozens of strangers have visited looking for lost and stolen smartphones.
-
Find-My-Phone apps that say the phones are located inside the house.
-
discovered that it was one of the only houses in the neighborhood with a router and wifi. The couple lived in a digital desert, and because of the way some location mapping works, looking for a permanent network in the area to act as an anchor, lots of IP addresses were getting attached to the house.
-
he said he could build a program that would crawl through a public Maxmind database of mapped IP addresses to see if there were physical locations that appeared repeatedly.
-
To my knowledge, we have never claimed that our database could be used to locate a household.”
-
most casual internet users don’t know anything about IP mapping defaults—they just know that when a website tells them that their scammer lives in Potwin, Kansas, they get in the car and go.
-
a man in Virginia who has experienced similar problems for years.
-
Tony Pav
-
cul-de-sac in Ashburn, Virginia.
-
home to a number of large data centers
-
there are a gigantic number of IP addresses associated with Ashburn
-
all 17 million of these IP addresses appeared to be located in Pav’s home.
-
. In 2012, he came home late one night to find the police about to break down his door. They said they were looking for a stolen government laptop with personal information on it
-
He’s gotten angry phone calls and Facebook messages from strangers who’ve been wronged by someone online.
-
“It’s like having a target pointed directly at you. I feel like I’m sitting on a time bomb.”
-
Pav has plans to retire in three years, and thought he wouldn’t be able to sell his home when he had to disclose the problems it had.
-
MaxMind will refresh its database next Tuesday. And the Taylor farm will, hopefully, be a quiet place again sometime soon.
-
-
13 Apr 16
-
12 Apr 16
conscius_esseHow an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell An hour’s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem. The plot has been owned by the Vogelman f…
-
balbiraulakhHow an internet mapping glitch turned a remote farm into a digital hell https://t.co/dETxszY3oH (@kashhill, Fusion) https://t.co/StJELeniyY
-
noone ishereFurther proof of IP address doesn't equal physical address.
Came across this article posted today about many people who are getting harassed and having trouble with law enforcement because people are using services to tie an IP address to a physical location.
One 80 year old lady has over 6 million IP addresses tied to her physical address because of the way a default in a database was set up.
Thank you for all the great content! Always look forward to the next episode."
Here's what's going on
in 2002, when a Massachusetts-based digital mapping company called MaxMind decided to point unresolved IP addresses to the center of the country. The geographical center of the US is in northern Kansas. It rounded the coordinates off. To the front yard of Joyce Taylor’s house.
5,000 companies rely on MaxMind’s IP mapping information http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
36
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oY2XMRtMlaBEujRfmD2cy7x1F-amg-OXQSqhL3qUqmQ/pubhtml?gid=1082472789&single=true -
11 Apr 16
-
-
Andreas KaltInternet mapping turned a remote farm into a digital hell | Fusion
-
Steven JosselsonInternet Mapping Turned a Remote Kansas Farm Into a Digital Hell
-
Vincent MurphyChoose default values wisely https://t.co/QiNAbMH33Z
-
Shauna HedgepethSeriously - data often looks suspiciously like fact. It's not. Issues like this exist in just about every data set: https://t.co/Tq7Jxkptxe
-
Bill GenereuxWhy people living on a farm in the geographical center of the United States were repeatedly accused of crimes they did not commit.
-
Wessel van RensburgHow IP address mapping is ruining lives https://t.co/TMNi5XWDhu https://t.co/pf6JuYakTD
-
Edythe O.This is great, @kashhill continues her series of people's lives being Disruptee due to becoming digital defaults. https://t.co/j2jhnDGola
-
10 Apr 16
Muzaffaruddin Alvivia All News on 'The Twitter Times: Muzaffar69/corpgov' http://tweetedtimes.com/Muzaffar69/corpgov
#CorpGov All News on 'The Twitter Times: Muzaffar69_corpgov'
-
Mikal WattsIn a little Kansas town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem. And the people who live there are finding themselves in a technological horror story.
-
abdchariesInternet mapping turned a remote farm into a digital hell via Digg http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.