{"id":105504,"date":"2016-04-13T14:43:54","date_gmt":"2016-04-13T14:43:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/04\/13\/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turned-a-random\/"},"modified":"2016-04-13T14:43:54","modified_gmt":"2016-04-13T14:43:54","slug":"how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turned-a-random","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/04\/13\/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turned-a-random\/","title":{"rendered":"How an Internet Mapping Glitch Turned a Random Kansas Farm Into a Digital Hell"},"content":{"rendered":"

How an Internet Mapping Glitch Turned a Random Kansas Farm Into a Digital Hell<\/a><\/p>\n

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kenyatta<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They\u2019ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They\u2019ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. <\/b>They\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

All in all, the residents of the Taylor property have been treated like criminals for a decade. And until I called them this week, they had no idea why.<\/b><\/p>\n

As any geography nerd knows, the precise center of the United States is in northern Kansas<\/a>, near the Nebraska border.<\/b> Technically, the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the center spot are 39\u00b050\u2032N 98\u00b035\u2032W. 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\u00b0N 97\u00b0W or 38.0000,-97.0000.<\/b><\/p>\n

As a result, for the last 14 years, every time MaxMind\u2019s database has been queried about the location of an IP address in the United States it can\u2019t identify, it has spit out the default location of a spot two hours away from the geographic center of the country.<\/b> This happens a lot: 5,000 companies rely on MaxMind\u2019s IP mapping information, and in all, there are now over 600 million IP addresses associated with that default coordinate. If any of those IP addresses are used by a scammer, or a computer thief, or a suicidal person contacting a help line, MaxMind\u2019s database places them at the same spot: 38.0000,-97.0000.<\/b><\/p>\n

Which happens to be in the front yard of Joyce Taylor\u2019s house.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How an Internet Mapping Glitch Turned a Random Kansas Farm Into a Digital Hell kenyatta: For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They\u2019ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They\u2019ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “How an Internet Mapping Glitch Turned a Random Kansas Farm Into a Digital Hell”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[2855,4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105504"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}