By Charles Miller
For reasons that are too many to start listing here, many public IP addresses on the Internet have geographic coordinates associated with them. Among other things, it is how your computer is able to display accurate weather information for your current location. In 2002, a company called MaxMind had the idea to vacuum up as many IP addresses as they could get their hands on, locate them on a map, and sell the data to advertisers. That proved to be a successful business, advertisers loved it, but MaxMind created an absolute nightmare for a few individuals.
Among the millions of IP addresses MaxMind logged there were hundreds of thousands for which the geographic coordinates could not be determined to be in a specific region, city, or postal code but were just some unidentified place somewhere in the U.S. Labeling the IP address as being in the center of the U.S. made sense to MaxMind, but rather than using the coordinates of the historical marker located in the unoccupied Kansas countryside at exactly latitude 39°48’38.001″N longitude 98°33’21.9996″W, MaxMind rounded the coordinates off to 38°N 97°W for the sake of brevity.
The problem is that there is no such thing as a “fuzzy” or approximate geographic coordinate. 38°N 97°W is a very specific spot on the globe—not a spot a few centimeters one direction or the other but an exact spot. That very specific spot is in the front yard of a farmhouse near Potwin, Kansas owned by 82-year-old Joyce Taylor. The tenants who live in that house have been paying a price since MaxMind took more than a half billion IP addresses that could not be more specifically located and put them all in Joyce’s front yard.
After the internet became a thing, law enforcement authorities quickly realized it could be a useful thing. Being able to find the geographic coordinates associated with an IP address undoubtedly aided in solving many crimes, but the authorities sometimes failed to take into account how MaxMind could not accurately locate every address. Among the millions of unidentified IP addresses MaxMind dumped in Kansas, some were IP addresses deliberately hidden for nefarious purposes.
Eventually the tenants in Kansas started receiving unwelcome visits from FBI and IRS agents, bill collectors, angry individuals who had been defrauded online, and the just curious found rummaging in the farm’s barn. For a while it seemed that every time the authorities tried to track down some cyber crooks, they ended up in front of that rented farmhouse in Kansas.
Today more companies are aware that there are no such thing as “fuzzy” geographic coordinates, and many are taking care to not pinpoint locations potentially troublesome for the people who live there. For the center of the U.S., they can use the aforementioned historical marker on a lonely country road near Lebanon, Kansas. For other locations, using “fuzzy” locations in the middle of bodies of water avoids a repeat of the problems the renters in that Kansas farmhouse had to endure.
Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 415 101 8528, or email FAQ8@SMAguru.com.
