Fusion reports on an IP mapping glitch that turned a quiet farm in Kansas into the center of a digital nightmare. The remote estate and its residents, during the course of the last decade, have been accused of being identity thieves, spammers and fraudsters, and as a result have been doxed and threatened. The reason derives from an IP mapping service called MaxMind. The company attaches geolocation — when possible — to IP addresses for marketing and other purposes. When an IP address cannot be attached to a location, the default goes to a central continental location in Kansas. To make it easy, the company rounded the coordinates, thereby making the farm the default. There are 600 million IP addresses associated with this default, and many are used by hackers, criminals and other bad actors. The founder of MaxMind said they had not been aware of the issue and will change the default location.
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