Why you should set sensible defaults: IP Flood Zones
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http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
TL;DR: IP mapping compan(y/ies) inadvertently set default locations on houses -> millions of IP addresses show up as belonging to that house, resulting in the people who live there being harassed endlessly. This is happening with multiple households. One such company will be changing its defaults to (eventually) fix the problem.
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TL;DR: apparently the middle of the USA is the same as the entire USA
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@ben_lubar That's actually a good point; don't provide information you don't have. Then you don't even need defaults.
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@LB_ they knew the IP was in the USA. All they needed to do was provide a radius for how far away the actual answer could be.
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@LB_ Kansas
America; in fact, it’s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States.
Sounds familiar. Oh yes I read about it in the American Gods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods
It is fitting for a shrine to be used as the default value for any unknown location
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@LB_ TR is relying on IPs for geolocation
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@ben_lubar said in Why you should set sensible defaults: IP Flood Zones:
apparently the middle of the USA is the same as the entire USA
It beats the Atlantic off of west Africa (0°N, 0°E).
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@dkf
At least that one is obviously wrong
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See, these problems would all be gone if every internet connection was required to authenticate with their government-verified full name and address. It would stop spam, trolls, everything! Vote fascist for a 3rd glorious decade of total law enforcement
Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.
Maybe some asshole just dumped their junk into someone else's house.
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I like tha happy ending. Companies who provide data as a business shouldn't be that out of touch with the real world implications of the data they're selling, that's a bit terrifying, but it's nice to see journalists doing actual fucking legwork of their own and bringing about a happier resolution via shedding light in a dark corner.
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@Yamikuronue We do some geolocation based work in WtfFramework. I keep screaming my head off about the implications of fallback data accuracy and the importance of handling things correctly.
Nobody cares.
Our data is used for things much more critical than the average geolocation service.
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If nothing else, the defaults should all be changed to the capitol building of the respective area. For areas lacking a capitol building, the highest level courthouse or other government building can be used instead.
Doesn't entirely solve the problem. The problem itself can really never be solved. But at least it makes it so the SWAT teams are less likely to bust down someone's door by mistake.
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@Weng said in Why you should set sensible defaults: IP Flood Zones:
We do some geolocation based work in WtfFramework
We also do geolocation-based reporting in our product. I haven't caught it adding state/city information when not (reliably) available, but it does always add coordinate data. So I'll just hope our customers don't over-rely on it.
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@anotherusername said in Why you should set sensible defaults: IP Flood Zones:
But at least it makes it so the SWAT teams are less likely to bust down someone's door by mistake.
Yeah, no. They'd just lock down the fscking government building for security breaches every other day and make performance that much worse.
Although, that might give them a tip off that somebody was screwing with them (the data provider) and then we'd have governmental pressure to "fix" the data, rather than some whistleblowing reporter asking nicely to do it.
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@LB_ I saw this. What a stupid idea. They could at least set the default to lat: 0, long: 0, which is absolutely nowhere.
"We know it's in the US, so set it to the exact geographical center of the US" is insane-thinking.
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@blakeyrat you do set it to the center of the country, and then you set your margin of error to the radius of the country, not 0.
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@ben_lubar said in Why you should set sensible defaults: IP Flood Zones:
radius of the country, not 0.
Except apparently nobody reads that value, much less uses it...
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IMO if only the country is known, it shouldn't even give coordinates - just name the country and leave it at that. But it sounds like that would be a breaking API change.
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@LB_ said in Why you should set sensible defaults: IP Flood Zones:
But it sounds like that would be a breaking API change.
Yeah, like most visualizers that plot points on a map, for example.
It would definitely by funny though, seeing your traffic being routed from the middle of the ocean... (Pre-pedantry: I know 0,0 isn't the "middle" of any ocean)
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This reminds me of PHP. PHP defines an internal default latitude/longitude for calculating sunrise positions (don't ask me why it's in the standard library to calculate this)
The default position is in the middle of Israel. A weird thing until you realise the guys who made the Zend engine, Andi and Zeev (who even gave their name to it, ZEev and aNDi) are from there. Still gave me a when I first saw it...
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@ben_lubar said in Why you should set sensible defaults: IP Flood Zones:
@blakeyrat you do set it to the center of the country, and then you set your margin of error to the radius of the country, not 0.
@ben_lubar, this isn't a physics lesson where everything is round and inside a friction less vacuum ...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Why you should set sensible defaults: IP Flood Zones:
@ben_lubar said in Why you should set sensible defaults: IP Flood Zones:
radius of the country, not 0.
Except apparently nobody reads that value, much less uses it...
return a polygon and you're good
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Why you should set sensible defaults: IP Flood Zones:
@ben_lubar said in Why you should set sensible defaults: IP Flood Zones:
radius of the country, not 0.
Except apparently nobody reads that value, much less uses it...
Maxmind's downloadable databases don't store margin of error, and I expect the online ones use the exact same data format.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Why you should set sensible defaults: IP Flood Zones:
They'd just lock down the fscking government building for security breaches every other day and make performance that much worse.
I can't say that would be a bad thing, necessarily.
@Tsaukpaetra said in Why you should set sensible defaults: IP Flood Zones:
that might give them a tip off that somebody was screwing with them (the data provider) and then we'd have governmental pressure to "fix" the data, rather than some whistleblowing reporter asking nicely to do it.
yes, that's kind of the point.
You can't "fix" the data, though. The problem isn't the data, it's people insisting on using it incorrectly.
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@dkf I've said it before: we're darn lucky there is no dry land there where people might be tempted to live.
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@Lawrence there is a story about someone that had "null" as his vehicle plate and got a lot of trouble. lat 0 lon 0 would be hell.