
How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell - envy2
http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
======
msandford
I'm pleasantly surprised to see that the MaxMind folks are doing the "right
thing" and relocating the default coordinates to the middle of bodies of
water.

It'd also be nice if they returned (-inf, -inf) or something so people know
it's not a "real" location, lest folks start looking for the house closest to
the lake.

~~~
Sniffnoy
I would say the right thing would be to explicitly return a region rather than
default coordinates at all. In the article it claims accuracy to about the ZIP
code level, but when it's a default for the whole US, it's clearly not.

If the uncertainty can vary, you have to explicitly indicate it. If returning
an irregularly shaped region is too hard, you can at least return a center and
a radius.

...or is that what they were already doing, and the problem comes from people
ignoring the radius? In that case, yeah, I guess they were doing what they
could, and good on them I guess for moving the center to somewhere that won't
cause problems when people ignore the radius. But it doesn't sound like that's
what they _were_ doing in the first place?

~~~
ar0
According to their API documentation[1] this is what they are doing: There is
an "accuracy_radius" element being returned right next to latitude and
longitude.

And according to the Internet Archive, this element existed already in 2015,
so they do not seem to have added it in response to this article.

What they did seem to have added in response to this article, however (as it
is new), is a more explicit warning for their customers:

"Latitude and Longitude are often near the center of population. These values
are not precise and should not be used to identify a particular address or
household."

To be honest, I think it is very hard for an API provider to ensure that their
customers will use all the right disclaimers when providing their data onwards
to their customers... I think the new approach with pointing the general
coordinates into uninhabitated spaces and adding that warning seems probably
the best they can do without completely changing their API design (which would
make many customers very angry, I would guess).

[1] [http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/web-
services/](http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/web-services/)

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jheriko
i feel really sorry for these people. the idea that law enforcement and
service providers are using ip based location for anything serious is
absolutely incredible.

the location from ip address is a fallback for when you don't have anything
better, and it is a fallback you take with the caveat of "could be completely
wrong".

this was my opinion of it when i first discovered the concept over 10 years
ago.

the victims should bring legal action imo and law enforcement should get its
shit together and act competently at the very most basic of levels.

ip based geolocation is and never was reliable. the idea that you can get a
search warrant based off of it is laughable and indicates gross incompetence,
not just in one place, but at every stage that such a thing is knowingly used.

using things you don't understand to draw concrete conclusions is stupid.
literally. its the very definition of the word 'misguided'.

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ChuckMcM
Clearly the right thing to do is to have them map every single "default" IP to
the nearest law enforcement facility rather than an individual address.

~~~
dalke
I can think of a few issues which make that solution more murky.

Why put more work onto the local law enforcement, who now have to deal with
people from well outside their jurisdiction?

There are currently people who go to point X to complain or threaten. In your
model, some will arrive at point X to find out it's a law enforcement
facility. Many fewer will try to go to X if it's in the middle of a body of
water, because it's more obviously not a place where people live. Placing X in
the water means less time is wasted on a wild goose chase.

There are corrupt law enforcement officers. Isn't there the chance that, say,
the state police will come to investigate small-town Mayberry with a single
sheriff and deputy?

Law enforcement facilities do move. Who is in charge of updating the
coordinates when the sheriff's office moves a few blocks away and another
business moves into the old facility?

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AnthonyMouse
> At its least precise, it can be mapped only to a country.

Even that isn't true. Plenty of corporations have all their IP addresses
registered to their main office. In general the way these services work is
that they ask the owner of the IP where they are and have no way to verify it
at all. And of course there are always VPN services and proxy servers that
will let you choose which country your IP address will read as being in. To
say nothing of actually malicious parties that can break into a computer
anywhere in the world and then make all of their traffic appear to have come
from its IP address.

I've also seen the IP address entries for residential ISPs be off by more than
a thousand miles simply because the ISP has customers in both places and
assigned customers in one place IP addresses listed in the other place.

Geo IP can be useful for showing ads as long as you don't care that it's wrong
some significant percentage of the time. Thinking it can be used to locate a
bad actor is dangerous and absurd.

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kordless
Fun lesson on why judging others doesn't scale.

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anonymfus
For Russian IP addresses default location is Moscow Kremlin. Why not make it
The White House for the USA?

~~~
fapjacks
Just what we need: _More_ conspiracy fuel for those everyday Americans who put
complete confidence in default coordinates.

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Scoundreller
> 39°50′N 98°35′W. In digital maps, that number is an ugly one:
> 39.8333333,-98.585522. So back in 2002, when MaxMind was first choosing the
> default point on its digital map for the center of the U.S., it decided to
> clean up the measurements and go with a simpler, nearby latitude and
> longitude: 38°N 97°W or 38.0000,-97.0000.

If 39°50′N = 39.8333333, then how does 38°N = 38.0000?

And why wouldn't they round to 40 and -99 (or -98) ?

~~~
smelendez
The 50' (read as 50 minutes) means 50 60ths of a degree, so that part makes
sense.

And not sure about the rounding, but 38N, 97W just "looks" more central
looking at the map, so I'm guessing they just played around with the numbers
for a few minutes to get it to look nice.

I've definitely done this, picking arbitrary points to place a marker on a map
for, say, a big city, county or national park.

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spo81rty
I think a lot of these reverse ip solutions return the center point of the zip
code they have linked the ip to. For an estimation of location for marketing
type purposes I think that works well. But when people assume that these
databases really map to a physical address, this fails miserably as the
article describes.

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mannykannot
This shows the folly of using a meaningful value when there actually isn't
one. Put a null in your database, or (better) structure your database so that
if there isn't a value, there isn't a corresponding entry in your database,
and a query for it returns the empty set.

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zwetan
When an API "default" can ruin the life of people, it's really sad that such
"IP intelligence" was not thought right from the beginning to answer "can not
be found".

Similar story [0] to a lesser degree is still horrible to the people it
affects.

[0] [https://gimletmedia.com/episode/53-in-the-
desert/](https://gimletmedia.com/episode/53-in-the-desert/)

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pjdorrell
This story takes place in the USA, one of the world's most litigous countries.
Surely someone can be sued for this.

~~~
dfc
You hear this refrain so often it must be true. Comparing the "litigiousness"
of countries is not easy due to different legal systems. One of the best
metrics in my opinion is cases per capita. Germany and Sweden are at the top
of the list. I think the U.S. comes in at 5th or 6th.

------
dfc

      1. 600M IPs attached to the [Kansas] home were 10 orders of magnitude
         higher than at any other location 
      X. 17M IPs located in Pav’s home in Ashburn.
    

Am I missing something obvious? 600M is 10 orders of magnitude higher than
17M?

~~~
the_mitsuhiko

        2. location here has probably 60M associated IPs

~~~
dfc
That does not play well with my concept of orders of magnitude.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
What is your concept?

~~~
dfc
[http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/orders.html](http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/orders.html)

[http://www2.pvc.maricopa.edu/tutor/chem/chem151/metric/magni...](http://www2.pvc.maricopa.edu/tutor/chem/chem151/metric/magnitude.html)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude)

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
Oh I just misread the sentence. Of course it should be one order of magnitude.

