GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

Mon Apr 11 17:16:02 UTC 2016

Has happened in Atlanta, too, due to (what I think) was a lookup on the
ASN's whois, which wasn't specific:
http://fusion.net/story/214995/find-my-phone-apps-lead-to-wrong-home/

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 9:55 AM, Chris Boyd <cboyd at gizmopartners.com> wrote:

>
> Interesting article.
>
> http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
>
> 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 family for more than a hundred
> years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor née Vogelman, 82, now
> rents it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old
> orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It’s the kind
> of place you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest
> neighbor is a mile away, and the closest 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.
>
> But instead of being a place of respite, 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.
>
> --Chris
>