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Internet mapping glitch turns Kansas farm into a digital hell
Posted by station240 on 12 Jul, 2016 15:13 -
http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/Quote
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
QuoteIf it knows only that an IP address is somewhere in the U.S., and can’t figure out anything more about where it is, it will point to the center of the country...
Quote... 38.0000,-97.0000. Which happens to be in the front yard of Joyce Taylor’s house.
Quote“That poor woman has been harassed for years,” Butler County Sheriff Kelly Herzet told me by phone. Herzet said that his department’s job has become to protect the Taylor house from other law enforcement agencies.
Whoops, major screw up there.
Yes they have shifted it, to the middle of a lake now. -
there is other places in the US like this this just happens to be the largest one, in terms of the number of incidents.
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http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
That's very interesting, since I went to high school with Vogelman kids from Potwin.QuoteThe 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
QuoteIf it knows only that an IP address is somewhere in the U.S., and can’t figure out anything more about where it is, it will point to the center of the country...
Quote... 38.0000,-97.0000. Which happens to be in the front yard of Joyce Taylor’s house.
Quote“That poor woman has been harassed for years,” Butler County Sheriff Kelly Herzet told me by phone. Herzet said that his department’s job has become to protect the Taylor house from other law enforcement agencies.
Whoops, major screw up there.
Yes they have shifted it, to the middle of a lake now.
It is very rural area, the high school isn't in a town...just in the middle of a pasture, about 23 miles from where I lived.
Sent from my SM-G920P using Tapatalk
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IP address mapping has little to be desired. It's largely unreliable for being able to pin point where a user might be. At best, mapping my address at home has placed me some 70-80 kilometers away from my actual location. At my previous address, IP address mapping didn't even get the state right. Even at work where we have a dedicated range of IP addresses, it's not even close.
I don't understand why any half decent organisation would even bother. Any organisation which needs to know the location of a user has access to address information from their carrier/internet provider, no guess-work needed. -
Organizations actually use IP mapping to try to pinpoint locations? Screw this corner case, has that ever worked for any IP? At best it'll get you in the right metropolitan area, but that's about it. You can't narrow in on a damn house with it...
When I was in the South Pole, those tools put my location about 9000 miles away in the middle of Denver, CO
Besides, anybody with half a brain should spot the integer lat/lon printed out to 4 decimal places and realize it's not real, but I guess that's too much to ask of our law enforcement officers. -
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The very first time I had a look at IP address mapping, I could see how useless it was ... and there are people and agencies who haven't noticed?
I know. I'm expecting too much. -
The very first time I had a look at IP address mapping, I could see how useless it was ... and there are people and agencies who haven't noticed?
I remember script kiddies on IRC back in the 90's who kept claiming they could "trace" my location based on my IP address. Even when I was in school I realised how ridiculous that idea was.
Naturally I invited them to go ahead and when their "trace" turned up nothing, they proceeded to flood my poor dial-up modem with data until my connection timed out. I guess that was their version of refusing to admit they were wrong. Of course back then, a new IP address was as simple as hanging up and re-dialing.
I will give some credit where it's due; Back when the internet was just starting to become popular, most people connected to an ISP in their neighbourhood to avoid long distance calls (also known as STD calls in Australia). You could generally make the assumption that based on someones IP address, they were connecting from a suburb not too far away from the point of presence. But even based on that, the area covered by my former telephone area code was still some 800 square kilometers.
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The very first time I had a look at IP address mapping, I could see how useless it was ... and there are people and agencies who haven't noticed?
I remember script kiddies on IRC back in the 90's who kept claiming they could "trace" my location based on my IP address. Even when I was in school I realised how ridiculous that idea was.
Naturally I invited them to go ahead and when their "trace" turned up nothing, they proceeded to flood my poor dial-up modem with data until my connection timed out. I guess that was their version of refusing to admit they were wrong. Of course back then, a new IP address was as simple as hanging up and re-dialing.
I will give some credit where it's due; Back when the internet was just starting to become popular, most people connected to an ISP in their neighbourhood to avoid long distance calls (also known as STD calls in Australia). You could generally make the assumption that based on someones IP address, they were connecting from a suburb not too far away from the point of presence. But even based on that, the area covered by my former telephone area code was still some 800 square kilometers.
I remember an IRC quote about someone who was stealing internet, or something like that, a town over, so they tracked his IP to his house and went there will a couple bananas and said they were the internet police or something and freaked the guy out, can't remember enough to find the darn thing though.
I wish I had been born in the days of IRC and phreaking, it would have been so much fun. -
I remember an IRC quote about someone who was stealing internet, or something like that, a town over, so they tracked his IP to his house and went there will a couple bananas and said they were the internet police or something and freaked the guy out, can't remember enough to find the darn thing though.
You done goofed. -
So I can kind of see how people could be misinformed into thinking that the MaxMind data gives accurate, pinpoint location information, however a search warrant was issued based on this information? Really? Surely if you asked anyone in this industry they could tell you that issuing a search warrant based on IP location data is completely asinine
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Whenever persons in authority tell me that they didn't know something bad about an action they took, I ask them "whom did you ask?".
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The very first time I had a look at IP address mapping, I could see how useless it was ... and there are people and agencies who haven't noticed?
I remember script kiddies on IRC back in the 90's who kept claiming they could "trace" my location based on my IP address. Even when I was in school I realised how ridiculous that idea was.
Naturally I invited them to go ahead and when their "trace" turned up nothing, they proceeded to flood my poor dial-up modem with data until my connection timed out. I guess that was their version of refusing to admit they were wrong. Of course back then, a new IP address was as simple as hanging up and re-dialing.
I will give some credit where it's due; Back when the internet was just starting to become popular, most people connected to an ISP in their neighbourhood to avoid long distance calls (also known as STD calls in Australia). You could generally make the assumption that based on someones IP address, they were connecting from a suburb not too far away from the point of presence. But even based on that, the area covered by my former telephone area code was still some 800 square kilometers.
I remember an IRC quote about someone who was stealing internet, or something like that, a town over, so they tracked his IP to his house and went there will a couple bananas and said they were the internet police or something and freaked the guy out, can't remember enough to find the darn thing though.
I wish I had been born in the days of IRC and phreaking, it would have been so much fun.
It was! So. Much. Fun.
For IRC quotes, bash.org is an oldie but a goodie. The Top100 section is a goldmine.
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#23601 +(17121)- [X]
<mage> what should I give sister for unzipping?
<Kevyn> Um. Ten bucks?
<mage> no I mean like, WinZip?
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#240849 +(13932)- [X]
<Patrician|Away> what does your robot do, sam
<bovril> it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls
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#400459 +(13680)- [X]
<Sonium> someone speak python here?
<lucky> HHHHHSSSSSHSSS
<lucky> SSSSS
<Sonium> the programming language
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#111338 +(16758)- [X]
<JonJonB> Purely in the interests of science, I have replaced the word "wand" with "wang" in the first Harry Potter Book
<JonJonB> Let's see the results...
<JonJonB> "Why aren't you supposed to do magic?" asked Harry.
<JonJonB> "Oh, well -- I was at Hogwarts meself but I -- er -- got expelled, ter tell yeh the truth. In me third year. They snapped me wang in half an' everything
<JonJonB> A magic wang... this was what Harry had been really looking forward to.
<JonJonB> "Yes, yes. I thought I'd be seeing you soon. Harry Potter." It wasn't a question. "You have your mother's eyes. It seems only yesterday she was in here herself, buying her first wang. Ten and a quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow. Nice wang for charm work."
<JonJonB> "Your father, on the other hand, favored a mahogany wang. Eleven inches. "
<JonJonB> Harry took the wang. He felt a sudden warmth in his fingers. He raised the wang above his head, brought it swishing down through the dusty air and a stream of red and gold sparks shot from the end like a firework, throwing dancing spots of light on to the walls
<JonJonB> "Oh, move over," Hermione snarled. She grabbed Harry's wang, tapped the lock, and whispered, 'Alohomora!"
<JonJonB> The troll couldn't feel Harry hanging there, but even a troll will notice if you stick a long bit of wood up its nose, and Harry's wang had still been in his hand when he'd jumped - it had gone straight up one of the troll's nostrils.
<JonJonB> He bent down and pulled his wang out of the troll's nose. It was covered in what looked like lumpy gray glue.
<JonJonB> He ran onto the field as you fell, waved his wang, and you sort of slowed down before you hit the ground. Then he whirled his wang at the dementors. Shot silver stuff at them.
<JonJonB> Ok
<JonJonB> I have found, definitive proof
<JonJonB> that J.K Rowling is a dirty DIRTY woman, making a fool of us all
<JonJonB> "Yes," Harry said, gripping his wang very tightly, and moving into the middle of the deserted classroom. He tried to keep his mind on flying, but something else kept intruding.... Any second now, he might hear his mother again... but he shouldn't think that, or he would hear her again, and he didn't want to... or did he?
<melusine > O_______O
<JonJonB> Something silver-white, something enormous, erupted from the end of his wang
<JonJonJonB> Then, with a sigh, he raised his wang and prodded the silvery substance with its tip.
<JonJonJonB> 'Get - off - me!' Harry gasped. For a few seconds they struggled, Harry pulling at his uncles sausage-like fingers with his left hand, his right maintaining a firm grip on his raised wang. -
the tracking software i used before was always accurate in finding an IP address till the company changed hands (which changed their servers and such). I never used a MaxMind related product and i always managed to find the exact location of where some scammer is
. It will trace the location of every node which also gives a general idea of location incase an exact location of the IP isnt possible.
It seems that both people and MaxMind are dumb if they cant figure out a general location. Part of tracking involves looking at the registrar of the IP address and for dynamic IPs it will show the ISP and sometimes the division giving a general idea of the area of the IP address. MaxMind should've spewed out an error saying somewhere in the US,cannot find exact location.
MaxMind isnt the only company guilty of this, various other companies that create this sort of software do the same thing in various different ways. -
Sometimes on my mobile you get the right country ( South Africa) but often the geolocation is in another city, as I keep the GPS turned off. Turns out pretty much all cellular data is funnelled through a datacentre in Midrand Johannesburg via NAT..........
Of course if I use a WiFi connection it might be better, but then again I often use one phone as a hotspot, so no difference. Amazing in that plain Android allows hotspotting OOTB but the builds from the phone manufacturers or the networks do not, and want to charge you for an app to do that. -
Location services APIs in the operating system are very accurate, even if GPS is disabled. The relative strength of WiFi BSSIDs is a remarkably accurate proxy for physical location, since basestations don't move around much. We're talking ~50 meters or less in urban areas with multiple wifi networks. Obviously it won't work in the wilderness. This location information is imprinted into photos taken with your device, and can be accessed by web APIs too.
IP addresses, on the other hand, are basically meaningless for location, for a variety of reasons. The numbers are allocated to organizations, not to physical locations. A large proportion of connections are proxied, including some devices proxied by design. The same host connecting to the same server over a span of time may not even use the same source IP address as a result of NAT. And allocation of individual addresses is often dynamic, so the same IP address is recycled for separate hosts.