I'm curious too.
Why didn’t they move? With those accusations being flung at their property, it’s a miracle they weren’t both thrown in the klink, their kids taken away, their computers all confiscated, and their life savings drained defending themselves.
I know we wouldn’t have stayed after the fourth or fifth incident.
A confusing article that keeps talking about IP addresses, which I don't think is the problem as most home users have a floating IP address assigned by the service provider (Comcast or whoever). It sounds more like the issue was that MaxMind geolocated to this couple's farm for any failed search. My guess is that being in Kansas, this farm's geo coordinates are some sort of mid-point in the U.S.
A beautiful example of a bit of bad coding leading to disastrous real-world results.
“the company changed its default location to “the middle of a lake somewhere,” “ Wait - why wouldn’t they put in their actual address where the server is instead of the middle of a lake? Isn’t this how the problem started in the first place? Why are they trying to hide their address?
If it’s on the computer, it must be true. So thinks the ordinary idiot. The level of credibility given to online systems is extraordinary, and unwarranted.
Once erroneous data is entered into a system, it’s all over folks. Good luck trying to get it changed. You are just an innocent victim of stupid idiots designing systems that do not provide a means of correcting errors.
Default values are not your friend.
I don’t understand why the police would keep going to the house...after a few false alarms, you’d think they would figure out something was screwed up.
In 2013, the Butler County Sheriff’s Department ran a background check on the Arnolds “because of all the activity taking place at the residence,” and told them an LDNS server (local domain name server) was on their property.
There was no such thing, the Arnolds say, but that didn’t stop law enforcement agencies from getting “weekly reports about fraud, scams, stolen Facebook accounts, missing person reports, suicide threats from the VA [Veterans Administration] that appeared to come from the address and stolen vehicles all related to the residence. Each incident brought law enforcement to the residence — at all hours of the night and day.”
And EVERY LAST ONE of them should be immediately FIRED FOR BEING STUPID!!!
To understand what happened to the Taylor farm, you have to know a little bit about how digital cartography works in the modern era—in particular, a form of location service known as “IP mapping.”
IP refers to an Internet Protocol address, which is a unique identifier assigned to a computer or a computer network. IP addresses play an essential role in computers talking to each other, and every internet-connected device needs one. The device you’re using to read this article has an IP address, and when you visited this site, our servers wrote it down. So we now have a record that someone using that particular IP address read this story in our server logs. Sometimes, through some sophisticated sleuthing, you can find out more information about a specific IP address—for example, whether it’s been associated with a malicious device, or where in the world it’s located.
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 to, for example, show the person using it relevant ads or to send the person a warning letter if they were pirating music or movies.
There are lots of different ways a company like MaxMind can try to figure out where an IP address is located. It can “war-drive,” sending cars around the U.S. looking for open wifi networks, getting those networks’ IP addresses, and recording their physical locations. It can gather information via apps on smartphones that note the GPS coordinates of the phone when it takes on a new IP address. It can look at which company owns an IP address, and then make an assumption that the IP address is linked to that company’s office.
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.
Or in simple terms, a glitch in the IP mapping tools that defaulted, incorrectly, to their physical address.
It’s amazing that the family and their dogs are still alive.
I hope this couple thanks their stars that no LEO’s used a swat team at 0 dark thirty, first killing any dogs then starting the house on fire withy flash bangs, pulling the family out in their under ware to be handcuffed and watch the house burn to the ground.
Seems like we used to get two or three reports of swat raids gone bad every week. Maybe it has been all the press resulting from BLM.
I don’t get it either but just wow, how horrible for them.
Thanks - this gives me something to read while I eat breakfast....printing it now...and eating late...
I’ll let you know what I think - you know you can count on that, right?