I recently read this very interesting story about a side of mapping a lot of
people never give any thought to:  IP mapping:

 

 

How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital
hell

By Kashmir Hill

Fusion

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.”

Here’s the link to the whole story:

http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/

 

Geoff

 

Geoffrey A. Forbes, M.S.

Director of Mapping

LAND INFO Worldwide Mapping LLC

Tel: +1.763.428.4129

Fax: +1.303.790.9734

E-mail: [log in to unmask]

Web site: www.landinfo.com <http://www.landinfo.com/>