Pity the poor people living in IP black holes
Posted by staff / April 11, 2016
If you’ve ever hunted down an IP address, particularly if it’s an address that’s wronged you in some way, you likely feel pretty computer savvy…until you discover you’ve tracked down the wrong person, possibly one whose life has been made hellish by residing at a default address through no fault of their own.
About two hours from the center of the U.S., eighty-two-year-old Joyce Taylor and the renters of her farm in Potwin, Kansas have been inundated with angry messages and law enforcement raids because one company — MaxMind — responsible for providing “IP intelligence” for thousands of inquiries, happened to pinpoint her residence as the default when searches couldn’t locate a more specific location.
As Fusion’s Kashmir Hill explained:
But IP mapping isn’t an exact science. At its most precise, an IP address can be mapped to a house. (You can try to map your own IP address here.) At its least precise, it can be mapped only to a country. In order to deal with that imprecision, MaxMind decided to set default locations at the city, state and country level for when it knows only roughly where the IP address lives. If 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.
And Ms. Taylor is far from alone, though her case is the worst of the worst. Thousands of other homes have become IP address dumping grounds, though the only ones targeted for harassment are those where a particular IP address has been involved in suspicious behavior.
After being made aware of the issue, MaxMind began shifting these default locations to bodies of water rather than people’s homes, but if the FBI shows up on your doorstep for seemingly no reason, you could be living in one of these black holes.
Full story at Fusion.
Graphics credit: Canva
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