How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell

I&#x27;m pleasantly surprised to see that the MaxMind folks are doing the &quot;right thing&quot; and relocating the default coordinates to the middle of bodies of water.<p>It&#x27;d also be nice if they returned (-inf, -inf) or something so people know it&#x27;s not a &quot;real&quot; location, lest folks start looking for the house closest to the lake.

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.<p>the location from ip address is a fallback for when you don&#x27;t have anything better, and it is a fallback you take with the caveat of &quot;could be completely wrong&quot;.<p>this was my opinion of it when i first discovered the concept over 10 years ago.<p>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.<p>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.<p>using things you don&#x27;t understand to draw concrete conclusions is stupid. literally. its the very definition of the word &#x27;misguided&#x27;.

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

&gt; At its least precise, it can be mapped only to a country.<p>Even that isn&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;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.<p>Geo IP can be useful for showing ads as long as you don&#x27;t care that it&#x27;s wrong some significant percentage of the time. Thinking it can be used to locate a bad actor is dangerous and absurd.

Fun lesson on why judging others doesn&#x27;t scale.

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

&gt; 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.<p>If 39°50′N = 39.8333333, then how does 38°N = 38.0000?<p>And why wouldn&#x27;t they round to 40 and -99 (or -98) ?

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.

This shows the folly of using a meaningful value when there actually isn&#x27;t one. Put a null in your database, or (better) structure your database so that if there isn&#x27;t a value, there isn&#x27;t a corresponding entry in your database, and a query for it returns the empty set.

When an API &quot;default&quot; can ruin the life of people, it&#x27;s really sad that such &quot;IP intelligence&quot; was not thought right from the beginning to answer &quot;can not be found&quot;.<p>Similar story [0] to a lesser degree is still horrible to the people it affects.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gimletmedia.com&#x2F;episode&#x2F;53-in-the-desert&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gimletmedia.com&#x2F;episode&#x2F;53-in-the-desert&#x2F;</a>

This story takes place in the USA, one of the world&#x27;s most litigous countries. Surely someone can be sued for this.

<p><pre><code> 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. </code></pre> Am I missing something obvious? 600M is 10 orders of magnitude higher than 17M?