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

[Eberhard W Lisse]

While not uninteresting, where is the IH relevance?

el

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On Oct 2, 2025 at 17:46 +0200, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>, wrote:
> 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
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