[ih] How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell (Fusion)

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

EXCERPT:

An hour’s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there
is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem.

The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred
years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor née Vogelman, 82, now rents
it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard,
two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It’s the kind of place
you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest neighbor is a
mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000 people. It is real,
rural America; in fact, it’s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical
center of the United States.

But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce
Taylor’s land find themselves in a technological horror story.

For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds
of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves,
spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents,
federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal
veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found
people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their
names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone
left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.

All in all, the residents of the Taylor property have been treated like
criminals for a decade. And until I called them this week, they had no idea
why.


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.”

[...]
https://archive.ph/zHha3

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True