IP mapping hell couple sues

A couple in Butler County, Kansas, US, is suing web mapping company MaxMind after their rented home was the default physical location for all IP addresses in America. Whenever anyone used MaxMind's geoIP databases to look up where an internet IP address is associated, the software would default to the coordinates 38.0000,-97. …

[Jan 0]

Eh?

"the coordinates 38.0000,-97.0000 if no location was defined. That's rounded up from 39.8333333,-98.585522"

What is this "rounding" that you speak of? How does it work and what is it used for?

[diodesign]

Re: Eh?

Don't look at us - it was MaxMind's decision to do that.

C.

[Oengus]

Law of unintended consequences

Why set a default? Have they never heard of "Undefined" or "Not available".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Law of unintended consequences

I'd set it smack bang in the middle of La Brea (tar pits), so the stupidity can be preserved for all time.

[Christopher Edwards]

Re: Law of unintended consequences

Maybe the null pointer wasn't a billion dollar mistake

[Gene Cash]

Re: Law of unintended consequences

> Why set a default? Have they never heard of "Undefined" or "Not available".

They set it to the "middle" of whatever's the smallest geographical unit they can define. If they can only say "it's in the US" then these poor bastards get tagged since they're roughly in the middle of the US.

I'll bet there's other people that get screwed the same way, just not as often, that happen to be in the "middle" of particular states. I hope this wakes up more such lawsuits.

[TRT]

Re: Law of unintended consequences

Pity they didn't elect to use their own US office as the location. Did someone foresee this consequence?

[Gene Cash]

$75K, that's it??

They need to add at least another zero to that, maybe two.

Can we get Peter Thiel to help fund their lawsuit?

I'd be really happy if all of MaxMind ended up on a street corner selling pencils. Hanging's too good for 'em!

[mark 177]

Re: $75K, that's it??

Maybe MaxMind's customers could sue too - for having their time wasted going to a "default location" that did not actually correspond to the IP address they were querying.

As a poster above wrote, why didn't they just say no data was available for that IP address?

[Jonathan Richards 1]

Marketing 101

> why didn't they just say no data was available for that IP address

Because it's hard to sell a dataset that looks like

nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn NaN NaN

[repeat] ....

....

....

....

What would be interesting is to know just how many "default" locations, i.e. non-data records, were being sold to MaxMind's customers.

[JeffyPoooh]

Middle of nowhere

Our ~4 ha coconut plantation is very close to the middle of the tropical island in Asia. Makes it very easy to find on Google Maps and Google Earth. Just zoom in on the island name and there we are.