The GeoIP base for geolocation by IP address turned a woman in Kansas into a nightmare

Geolocation of IP addresses in the world

An hour drive from Wichita (pc. Kansas) there is a small town called Potvin, and in it - a farm of 1.5 km ² . The only resident of this farm, 82-year-old Joyce Taylor, has been subjected to attacks, telephone threats and inexplicable aggression of people from all over the world, visits by FBI agents, debt collectors from the Internal Revenue Service, suicide victims and police officers in search of missing people. children. Once someone left a broken toilet on the road, in an incomprehensible attempt to say something.

Neighbors communicated with her as a criminal. So far, the woman did not understand what was the matter. It turned out that the problem is in the geographical coordinates of its farm , as well as in the specifics of the work of the Internet-based location service by IP address MaxMind.

The MaxMind company began its work in 2002. She set a goal to collect a database of IP addresses and try to georefede these addresses. Usually this is done with the help of “ward-driving” - cars ply on roads in search of open Wi-Fi hotspots, registering their IP-addresses and GPS-coordinates. The collection also comes from applications on mobile phones that store IP addresses and their coordinates - this is how a company’s address range is determined.
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As a result, the GeoIP database was created, which is now used very widely, in a variety of Internet services.

Of course, this is not an exact science ( example ). Sometimes the service can only determine the country by IP-address, sometimes - the city. To display such "fuzzy" data on a map, MaxMind determines the coordinates for the conditional center of each country, state and city. For example, if the location of the American IP address is unknown, then the label is simply displayed in the center of the country.

This is where the fun begins. The exact geographical center of the United States is in northern Kansas, near the border with Nebraska. Technically, its geographical coordinates are 39 ° 50′N 98 ° 35′W. On digital cards this corresponds to 39.8333333, -98.585522. For some reason, in 2002, MaxMind decided to “simplify” the pointer to the geographical center and installed it in a simpler form: 38 ° N 97 ° W or 38.0000, -97.0000.

As a result, over the past 14 years, for each unknown address in the United States, the company indicated these coordinates. This happened often: about 5,000 companies are requesting this data from the MaxMind database, and in general more than 600 million IP addresses are now associated with these coordinates. If at least one of these addresses is used by fraudsters, criminals, mobile phone thieves - the MaxMind database gives out the same coordinates: 38.0000, -97.0000.

The coordinates are directly in front of the house of Joyce Taylor.



She received her first call in 2011 from Connecticut. An enraged man swore that his company could not use e-mail: all the boxes were filled up with spam. “He said spam comes from the address of the farm. - Taylor says. “Then I began to suspect something was happening.”

In the following months, calls and visits by unknown people have increased. Detective detectives conducted their investigations and “punched a man by IP”, which led them to the home of an elderly woman in Kansas. Until now, there are numerous complaints on Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Ripoff Report and Google+, if you enter its home address in the search.


The same toilet

The attacks on Joyce Taylor continued, so even the local sheriff had to intervene. He placed a road sign at the end of the road with a request not to drive to the house and call him on all questions.

“This poor woman has been oppressed for years,” he says. The local police took on contact with representatives of various law enforcement agencies who came here.

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Joyce Taylor is not the only victim of the "bug" in the services of determining the coordinates by IP-address. Last year, journalist Kashmir Hill told how people constantly come to a young couple in the same house in Atlanta, demanding the return of their phones, on a tip-off of applications like Find-My-Phone.



Hill suggested that there are others with similar problems - and asked a familiar programmer to process the open MaxMind database in order to compile a list of addresses that correspond to the maximum number of IP. There were thousands. Address Taylor was in first place with 600 million IP addresses, many times ahead of others (the house in Atlanta was at 865 place).

Kashmir Hill wrote in MaxMind - they have not heard of any problems.

She also contacted other people on the list. Some did have strange, similar stories. For example, Tony Pav lives in Ashburn (pc. Virginia). Nearby are several large data centers. In total, these coordinates account for more than 17 million IP addresses. Because of the choice of coordinates by default in the city, map services point precisely to the home of Tony. His problems began in 2012, when he found a police outfit near the house. They were looking for a stolen laptop from a government service.


Search warrant filed by Tony Paw in 2012

Then there were calls from angry people, etc. Tony plans to sell the house in three years when he retires, and he fears that no one will want to buy it if he finds out about this situation.

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One of the founders of MaxMind promised a correspondent to the journalist that they would take steps to solve the problem. New points will be selected by default for geographic objects - in the middle of water bodies.

The update of the MaxMind database is scheduled for Tuesday (04/12/2016), and most client firms will release their updates in a few weeks or months.