The Glitch That Kept Sending The FBI To A Tiny Kansas Farm

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Video written by Adam Chase
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[@AmericanActionReport]

Several decades ago, a man in Florida had a similar problem that had a very low-tech explanation: The man had acted in a police training film distributed to police departments throughout Florida. For years thereafter, policemen would stop him on the grounds that he looked suspicious. They associated his face with criminal suspects, though they couldn't remember exactly where they'd seen his face. After "achieving" a nationwide record for being stopped by the police the most times of anyone in America, the poor man moved to another state.

[@plumjet0930]

What was the amount of times he was stopped by the police?

[@AmericanActionReport]

@@plumjet0930 I don't think the article gave the number of times. I read it more than forty years ago, pre-internet. All I remember was in the few comments I made.

[@plumjet0930]

@@AmericanActionReport Okay.

[@mnxs]

*The Inverse Florida Man* 😂 > suspected of all the stupid sh*t > actually did none of the stupid sh*t

[@cryonim]

lmao, talk about being famous.

[@WildBluntHickok]

I once was on Google Earth and noticed a ton of tourist photos linked to this one spot in the middle of the ocean. I assumed there was a tiny island there and I was zoomed out too far, but there was nothing there when I zoomed in. Plus all the photos seemed to be of different locations. Then I noticed the coordinates: zero latitude and zero longitude. That spot in the ocean is where photos on google earth that are missing their location data go to die.

[@danese1636]

Talk about a whole new meaning to "throw 'em overboard!"

[@IllustriousElucidation]

The Null Island? I think I have seen that video from MinuteEarth...

[@baksatibi]

That's known as the Null Island and there's actually a weather bouy there.

[@helmsscotta]

Some West African country should put a buoy there with a server to display all the sights to be seen at that location.

[@christopherg2347]

Yeah, that is "Null island". As the others said, Minute earth has a video on it: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mJvZeqN_YpaqbpY Narrated by Tom Scott

[@someoneelse7629]

On a much smaller and less irritating scale, a big company changed their phone number and left a voicemail to their new number, but it was so badly made that it sounded like my phone number, so my phone was ringing off the hook. I contacted the company and asked them to fix the voicemail so people would stop calling me, but they didn't So I started cancelling their orders, telling their customers to go to other companys and the finall piece, they had ordered a truck load of gravel, and when the truck driver called to ask where he should put it, just dump it in a pile outside the front door. They changed their voicemail to CLEARLY spell out their new number.

[@seanrcollier]

Bravo!

[@Tker1970]

I had a similar situation. A big box store once published my cell number in a corporate directory for a warehouse. I would get tons of calls without any help to correct. Until I started answering questions for people calling. Then they fixed it.

[@motalasuger]

It’s pretty tiresome accidentally crossing with a company number, my cell number was used by a company previously and I still after over 10 years still get calls though very rarely now asking for the company. The bummer thing is that the records have been updated to list me and removed from the company since many years, but there are stupid sites that just scrape data off other databases and etc for their own use, and thus it’s apparently pretty much impossible to entirely get rid of all the listings, since sites who are cheap and lazy enough to steal others data won’t update it to remove incorrect details.

[@geraltoftrivia7654]

Had something similar with my number that ive had for 15 years now. Back when i got it id get angry phone calls for some drug dealer and a bunch of calls from mexico

[@alexforce9]

Thats the best thing I read today.

[@tcoren1]

What I find strange is that for all that time they never thought to ask "hey sheriff deputy, is there a particular reason you believe the stolen items are here? This is a weekly occurrence for us"

[@novablox1575]

Daily*

[@quantisedspace7047]

Yes, particularly in a ln ultra rural area where it would likely be the same sheriff calling multiple times.

[@mightymcphee4228]

They probably did but I imagine the cops just said that their investigation methods for an active investigation wasn't public information or something like that and just stonewalled the family without ever doing an adequate job of determining their own flaws within their procedure. That's my guess

[@acmenipponair]

@@mightymcphee4228But sorry, an intelligent sheriff would start himself an investigation, why he is always send to that location, especially when he had realized after several of this happenings, that these results cannot be correct.

[@normalaboutpathologic]

@@acmenipponair "intelligent" "sheriff" well, there's where the problem lies

[@pmmichalczuk]

Perfect cover! Now they can do all of this stuff without raising any suspicion - they would just say that it is a bug.

[@rickrolled3666]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/gnmpkGdshauUi7M

[@genericytprofile852]

Holy shit this is actually perfect. They should sell their house for a good bit and find someplace quieter. I'd bet alot of people would be interested.

[@dani.munoz.a23]

"oh it's just a bug in maxmind's system, this happens all the time" "We don't use maxmind." "Well shit"

[@V530-15ICR]

@@dani.munoz.a23 maybe other ip location providers also put that place or use outdated maxmind

[@StopItGarrison]

Yes

[@Kafaldsbylur]

At my work, we do tracking of GPS devices. One vehicle we were tracking would occasionally apparently teleport to Kansas before returning to its regular location (skewing our data thanks to moving hundreds of kilometres in a fraction of a second and back). We found it quite weird and couldn't quite figure out what was happening, until we looked at what was at that specific point in Kansas. Garmin HQ.

[@aafisch]

that's hilarious

[@jbird4478]

Wait... why do you track GPS devices? That's fucking creepy, man.

[@lonestarr1490]

ATTENTION: The following statement is completely and utterly false. Please refer to the answers below to learn how these things actually work. I leave the original comment in order for those answers to make sense. ORIGINAL COMMENT: @@jbird4478 Every GPS device is tracked. There is a whole network of satellites dedicated to just tracking GPS devices (actually, there are multiple networks of such satellites). That's literally what GPS devices are for: being tracked. They are trackers. So, yeah. There are people working on tracking GPS devices. That's how it works.

[@Kafaldsbylur]

@@jbird4478 Because the people who own these devices want the data? A GPS tracker is useless if you never look at where it's been

[@knmaherijayatp8181]

@@jbird4478 what creepy about it? i own a small car rental company, i always track all my cars with gps devices. every companies out there with mobile assets will use gps to track their assets.

[@QuestionMan]

Ironically, this glitch would also have allowed MaxMind to accurately determine the source location of a lawsuit against them.

[@Tobias-et1xt]

But good luck to MaxMind to determine their IP

[@MouseDenton]

This situation is a perfect summary of my concerns about advancing technology: it's not that AI will become too powerful on its own, or that algorithms will turn us into cattle, but that the people with the authority to empower tech to fuck with our lives are believing the sales pitch of those who provide it, ignoring its limitations and even utilizing it in ways it's not equipped to be implemented. The greatest threat from a tool often isn't malice, but incompetence.

[@Dave_Cymru]

Hear, hear.

[@adammaclabhrainn]

There's been a huge scandal here in the UK where the authorities, relying on software that turned out to be inaccurate, had hundreds of post office workers wrongfully convicted of fraud, starting in 1999 and only being fully recognised very recently. That makes me think that yours is a very prescient comment.

[@danielkingery2894]

Your comment should be tagged to the top.

[@gibsonms]

@@adammaclabhrainn my local postmistress in the village, Seema, was one of the worst affected. Horizon is a joke and why nobody from FSC is in prison is baffling - but not surprising.

[@cryonim]

It's not really the tech people, as Software Engineers we are taught and brought up in a way to detect edge cases and prevent them from happening in the first place, this is a sort of speciality true for all SWEs but it gets better as the quality of the engineer goes up. And believe it or not, better Software Engineers are working for small new companies like MaxMind (when it was initially made) than for big companies with established products, so generally you'll find better quality from Softwares by these small new companies. However! The business side, namely the Product Owners or how you'd call them, businessmen/old engineers are not like so and are not keeping up with the tech so they can't/don't care about edge cases or anything. And ultimately it is them who command what features to put or what to do in situations like these. They are right in their own sense and they keep the overengineering out, the team lean and decide financial structure but when it comes to tech, their inaptitude leaves giant holes in the software architectures which is why things like what happened in the video exist, at-least generally. I'm almost certain an engineer would have pointed out this point to the center thing with "hey PO, it seems like our algorithm will always center on IP's general location. But I propose we allocate additional time for a task where we can modify it to give specialized output in that event" and the PO would have turned him down saying "We don't have the capacity/time for it, let's look at it after release". Not bashing POs, but this is generally how important things in the software industry are overlooked, and tbh no one is at fault here as no one can predict which things are relevant failures or irrelevant failures.

[@Wookiee925]

As an IT person nothing bugs me more than people who think doing something like this has tracked down an exact location of a person rather than a generic plot on a map near where the ISP is

[@sarowie]

yeah, if your lucky it is near where the ISP node is. People that plan ahead use VPN/Tor Browser.

[@jbird4478]

It doesn't even track the ISP half the time. It sometimes tracks where the ISP office is. I'm in England half of the time according to these systems, despite actually living in the Netherlands 🤷

[@baksatibi]

There's nothing wrong with spitting out a coordinate pair that points to an actual location as long as you also provide a precision value (e.g. country, state, city, etc.) and your consumers actually check that precision value first. Or, just ask your consumers the precision they need and return nothing (or an error) if your data is not precise enough.

[@christopherg2347]

As IT person it bugs me that they return coordinates *at all* You do not use your normal return value to indicate a error. Including if that error is "we can not tell you more then that it is somewhere in america".

[@christopherg2347]

@@baksatibi Option 2 and *only* option 2 for me. Never not use your normal return values to indicate a error. Have a dedicated field for that.

[@MephiticMiasma]

Reminded of a guy who went to get personalized license plates for his car. The form had three options for what you wanted your new car plates to say. He put "Hiking" as one, "Swimming" as two, but couldn't think of a third option he liked. So he just put "no plate" to indicate he didn't want one if he didn't get his first two choices. He got his new plates. They read "No plate" Then he started getting parking tickets from all over the state, as every time the police wrote down 'no plate' it all came back to him.

[@MegamanXfan21xx]

So if you can't think of a second and third hobby, just put "breathing" and "existing".

[@losthor1zon]

That's as bad as what happened in Ireland several years ago. At a time when jobs were abundant they had a large wave of Polish immigration. It happened that one driver kept eluding the police, despite amassing a huge number of traffic tickets all over the country. Despite best efforts, they could not locate this person. The driver's name was Pravo Jazdy (sp?) - which it turns out is Polish for "Driver's License".

[@DGTelevsionNetwork]

I remember reading about somebody put their vanity plate as null or con or something and he got a speeding ticket. When they processed the ticket it crashed the whole system down for a week. They must have been running their shit on 98 or something lol.

[@1WolfFan]

The version I heard was "No Tag", and the person really only wanted one vanity plate, but if it wasn't available they didn't want any plate at all... for their motorcycle, as opposed to their car... I have a feeling that while there may be a grain of truth to this, it might be one of those urban legends out there. I'd usually recommend a quick search at Snopes, but I have found them less than reliable as of recent.

[@MephiticMiasma]

@@1WolfFan My memory is from a magazine, with pictures of the guy. But it's something that has likely repeated itself in various ways elsewhere.

[@one_smol_duck]

I'd expect this from the government, but it makes me kind of nervous that this is a service provided by a private company that private citizens can use to trace IP addresses to locations. That seems very dangerous. Also -- like come on. This is one of the worst hacky software "solutions" I've ever heard of. The fact that they changed it to the middle of a lake, instead of catching null values with some sort of error message, makes me so mad. Don't give your users coordinates when you don't know the coordinates. That's so stupid

[@zohaibsaeed4063]

People are working in government and private company are same its happen. Designing something for mass audience some time leave this type of a bugs untill identify it will remain same.

[@magnuswright5572]

Most logical platforms return 0° N 0° W, also known as "null island" (there's no land, it's the middle of the ocean) if the location is unknown

[@CasD1806]

If you think private companies never make stupid mistakes.... Want to buy this bridge I have?

[@toericabaker]

Why do you put so much faith in the private sector? lol why expect these mistakes from the gov't only? both are just made of mortal people

[@QuincyIsCrispy]

@@magnuswright5572 That wouldn't work here because the company wants to return when the IP address is detected to be in a given country or city even if they don't have the exact coordinates. Why they don't just return a string that says "Somewhere in America" or something is beyond me

[@powerofanimegod5578]

Should've had a dog named courage would've cleared up most of the problems for them

[@rojoscostanada8685]

I did as you said, slowly over time his pigmentation has turned a pinkish hue. Any suggestions?

[@alexei9122]

@@rojoscostanada8685 that's the first step done. Now you wait for eldritch horrors to pay a visit

[@Perrysmells]

Yes

[@rojoscostanada8685]

@@alexei9122 SOMEBODY FUCKING HELP ME

[@powerofanimegod5578]

@@rojoscostanada8685 did you ask your computer?.....

[@BallisticDamages]

That would be an absolute nightmare to constantly deal with, on so many levels. I would definitely look into legal action. This kind of stuff can go from ruining your night, to ruining your reputation, to being a threat to your family. And those relying on these databases need to understand that these systems are not perfect, because the people who make them are not perfect.

[@rickrolled3666]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/gnmpkGdshauUi7M

[@xxxdumbwordstupidnumberxxx4844]

They filed a lawsuit, settled in September 2017.

[@thatdamncrow9197]

@@xxxdumbwordstupidnumberxxx4844 but some companies aren’t updating the info hence causing issue

[@Anankin12]

Also variable IP addresses are a thing. I never have the same IP address for more than 24 hours at a time.

[@rogerrabbit3200]

Bless you for the Meta joke. 😂👍

[@ZeekDaGeek]

Sam, I think you might want to know how predatory your advertising partner, Fabulous, is: - No where on their website do they list the price of their service, they only mention that it's annual. - There doesn't seem to be any refund policy in place. - In order to get close to signing up, you must provide an email, before they tell you a price. - Once you've given them your email they won't delete it, so far I've sent two request for my account to be deleted so they stop emailing me. - They ask you to choose a price for their service "based on what you think it's worth" meaning that they will charge you as little as 1$ per month, then once it renews at 50$ I suspect there's no getting your money back. Regardless of if their service is good everything about it felt like a scam during the sign up process that I didn't go through with it.

[@peachierose3356]

it doesn't have a refund policy... true... I paid for 1 year premium and couldn't refund it even if I found it wasn't suitable for me after 1 month...

[@peachierose3356]

maybe try unsubscribing from their emails?

[@mekaerwin7187]

@@peachierose3356 So you're saying their customer service is less than fabulous?

[@trollme.trollmehard.9524]

Credit cards specifically have a "chargeback" feature for this scenario. Consumers are generally trusted first, and the _company_ has to dispute it. If they get enough of them, the company can't use the service any more.

[@Josh_Quillan]

Yes, I was curious and went through their little quiz (luckily with a disposable e-mail) and was hoping to get a "this is how this works and what we're going to do" somewhere along the line, but instead I was somewhat annoyed at them claiming what I was doing was somehow worth $16.71, and then suddenly: bam, credit card or paypal? How about they do the bare minimum and actually describe their product in some level of detail above "we use TEH SCIENCES to help you!!!11" before I throw money at them?

[@DoggosintheHouse]

I love how you get to the point where this couple have sued the company that was making their lives hell, and how their lives continue to be hell.... and then just walk away and start talking about your sponsor without any further follow up or summary.

[@juanix9948]

chad moment right there

[@RufusTheRuse]

...agreed. I just watched this today and was all "And then...?" No then there.

[@fxshlein]

"Normally what you should do in a Situation like this is make sure the coordinates are in the middle of a lake or something" No. How about just not spitting out coordinates at all? Display an error message, or a confidence value. If its actually just spitting out two coordinates, this is not on the agencies or people involved, this is 100% on that company not handling edge cases correctly.

[@KentonBenfield]

Yep. Deplorable API design. Default values should NEVER just be a regular value, they should be special somehow. Similar to how Pi is not 'just' 3.14..., and if you got 3.14, it should NOT just say Pi.

[@NickersonGeneral]

Hi! Computer science major here. I don't know for sure how Maxmind works, but I can tell you from experience that whenever someone looks at a system that works imperfectly or hyper simplistically and wonders why they don't implement a solution that's obvious to anyone on the outside, there's usually a good reason for it. The fact that the video even says that spitting out co-ordinates in the middle of nowhere is the comman practice just screams "we WOULD print out more information if it were feasible, but it's not for some reason". My best guess is that it's a system designed to hold millions of lines of information, process thousands of transactions per second, and adding on extra work to each and every transaction would be a compouding nightmare. If the system needed to do more than just spit out co-ordinates (like, say, decide whether to print an error message, calculate a confidence value, explain in detail how much they know about each individual search), then it would slow the system down to an unusable crawl. Just a guess, but if I'm wrong, I still guarentee there's an explanation as to why they can't just say "we only know the location you're looking for is somewhere in the U.S."

[@ghyslainabel]

@@NickersonGeneral considering the inherent uncertainty of location, each IP address location should come with a precision tag: is the IP address located within the country, state, county, city, institution? It is 1 byte of information.

[@agaveboy]

@@ghyslainabel you're right

[@username7763]

@@NickersonGeneral I'm sure you are right that there is a reason for it. Maybe it wouldn't fit in the data type they had, or the database or had special requirements. However, we have become so accepting of broken software in society. I don't think there is any good-enough reason for it to provide an incorrect location. Probably that way for a reason, but still broken. Picking a different position as a default is masking the bug.

[@richardroland4365]

The agencies harassing these folks are without excuse, and it should be they who have the hell sued out of them. An IP address is NOT a personal identity.

[@muchotexto4248]

"SIR WHY IS OUR STALKING METHOD NOT WORKING THIS IS WRONG"

[@byewhobayou8868]

Especially considering that these very same agencies are the ones that told us criminals use IP addresses as proxy networks.

[@vect0r858]

Care to post your current IP then? :D

[@muchotexto4248]

@@vect0r858 The fact it can be used to track you doesn't mean it's a personal identity I know, scary stuff but this might be true

[@the_kombinator]

Good thing they're not searching for MAC addresses.

[@WarlockBenj1998]

What I don't understand is why they didn't just have a "Could not find exact location" response in their software. Like, the software already knows that it didn't find a proper location (otherwise how could it map to the default coords), it probably wouldn't have been hard to just you know.... not send any geo location info that doesn't match. It could still send "USA" if the ip originated from the US, but then leave all other fields blank including lat/long

[@drylooped]

Because then the companies that use them would not want that product as it would not be accurate enough for them. Would you accept a program that half the time would just spit out "source unknown"?

[@markeyboi6545]

Exactly. As a software developer myself I can say this problem is due to poor software design and is easily fixable. They could just have add a second field to their response data named something like "precision", and for exact coordinates it could say "exact" for state it could say "state", etc, or it could just give a distance of accuracy (so 0m for exact, 1.9 million sq miles for the whole US, etc). Those are just 2 obvious ways I know of, there are plenty of other ways they could have solved this easily.

[@Dubanx]

@@markeyboi6545 Yup, extremely sloppy and poorly written code.

[@HansLemurson]

But then you'd have to, like, _handle exceptions_ or something!

[@rogerwilco2]

Yes. It smells of sloppy programming/management.

[@jager6863]

These folks should have been able to sue this company out of business and used the money to relocate. They are in serious risk of injury or death because of this companies incompetence.

[@zurielsss]

They should continue to sue maxmind year after year as more threats come in until it goes bankrupt.

[@andres.5204]

"glitch" implies it was accidental and they just didn't code something right or didnt account for something but did account for it and they purposely coded it to that location it wasn't a glitch it was just negligence

[@leoleo4469]

an "oversight" is the usual term and for the guys to not see the problem i think their eyes must've been suffering from "undersight"

[@2MeterLP]

Apart from endangering innocent farmers, spitting out specific coordinates in the middle of the USA instead of saying "IDK, somewhere in the USA" seems like terrible user interface design. All those people who harrased those farmers were sent on a wild goosechase to nowhere because the software didnt give a clear answer. Imagine driving multiple hours to get your laptop back, only to find a confused couple who dont have your laptop.

[@eekee6034]

Maxmind do give a confidence value. It's the coders employed (or contracted, whatever) by the government who don't bother to use it. However, if they did use it, law enforcement would probably hate on them because... well, this isn't the only area they demand answers even if those answers are lies. See also: determining race from a skeleton.

[@XiaoYueMao]

@@eekee6034 the problem is the confidence value is based on what the backend knows, "heres this coordinate randomly in the US, we have full confidence that this IP is in the US as our coords show!" but the front end doesnt say the confidence is on "its in the US" its "these coords are correct"

[@ZlothZloth]

Huh? Nowhere is in Oklahoma, these people were sent to Kansas. ;) Yep, there is such a place. You can look it up on Google or Bing. I've got a mapping program that centers on there when it has no clue how to interpret what's been passed to it - but zoomed out to so far that you can see most of the planet. (After all, I wouldn't want anyone to think that's the actual location.)

[@wannabecarguy]

Actually this is true because people believe everything they see in the movies. Just because you got the numbers off the license plate doesn't mean you will find the operator of the vehicle. And this is true any identifying numbers.

[@plzletmebefrank]

Well... Likely because of how it's coded, it's meant to only give N by W coordinates. So it has to do.... Something.

[@mikemartin6748]

This is why confidence intervals are necessary. If I tell you there's 15 bad jokes per HAI video, that doesn't tell you if I'm averaging 14 and 16 or averaging 0 and 30.

[@rickrolled3666]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/gnmpkGdshauUi7M

[@jbird4478]

🤓you are very right

[@SlurMaster9000]

I bet the API provided those details and the people using it just didn't understand or ignored it.

[@angolin9352]

@@SlurMaster9000 I bet you they didn't and when an engineer suggested it, management shot them down for any number of reasons. "Oh, that might confuse people!" "Oh, that might make our guesses appear less reliable and hurt our brand image!"

[@DonVigaDeFierro]

The only subject I hate with a passion is statistics. The management teacher was a ghoul who failed the entire class. The computer theory teacher was an actually senile old man who never taught us anything. The statistics teacher? Very normal. He spoke good. His explanations were good. His class was good. In the end, everybody passed the exams with very high marks... Except me. I was the only one who failed the class. And I fucking hate statistics because I actually made an effort to study the subject, I double-checked all my answers, I did lots of exercises and solved lots of problems, I consulted dozens of textbooks and I still failed the class... I asked a guy to compare answers after the final exam's results, and literally all of my answers were wrong. My grades were never good to begin with, but that day I confirmed that I am indeed an idiot and that no matter how much effort I put into learning and into correcting, I simply can't... And all thanks to statistics.

[@brandon152lee]

This is actually extremely embarrassing for all of our law enforcement agencies.

[@greenpedal370]

I think you will find they simply don't care.

[@JxH]

No. They're immune.

[@reverbscherzo7850]

I have my location turned off on my tablet, so every time I open Google Maps, it starts me out in Tulsa, OK. I've become very good at zooming over to where I actually live. 😂

[@Dallen9]

..... Hearing this story and knowing the company isn't being fined and charged criminally is what's the most upsetting thing about this. Yeah the Arnolds have decades of unjust hurrashment and the company should 100% pay for that.

[@pinkysweets]

they got sued for 75k

[@Top-Code]

@@pinkysweets you mean 75m right? RIGHT???

[@pinkysweets]

@@Top-Code nope, the family only asked for 75k

[@Top-Code]

@@pinkysweets BRUH WHY

[@Arslan35]

@@Top-Code dude if someone asks you to pay 75m it would take you a life time to pay it, 75m probably is more than a whole human body

[@cheezemonkeyeater]

"Being a poor, naive multi-million dollar tech company . . ." It's shocking how many of them there are.

[@eekee6034]

Absolutely. I hate the way the world's ended up.

[@dunamisfelis2961]

"Cronies"

[@lordssundee7047]

Just imagine building an evil mansion in that location, it would be so funny.

[@sphinx4647]

“You know what, maybe that car wasn’t working or something I’ll just cal another uber

[@staticbuilds7613]

A haunted graveyard would be better

[@dangeary2134]

Even better, knock down the house and put up an outhouse, made of brick! Nothing else around it, and make sure there is no door on it!

[@lordssundee7047]

@@dangeary2134 nah, make a steel cabin in the middle of an massive wheatfield with an Aperture Science logo painted onto the side.

[@kevrobe1]

​@@lordssundee7047we did what we can because we must.

[@harryhack91]

I also had quite an annoying situation regarding geolocation a long while ago. My Internet Service Provider operates in several countries, but their main branch is in France. It seems like they were running out of IP addresses for my country, but they had quite a lot of spare IPs in France, so they re-assigned some ranges to my country. It just so happen that I had the bad luck to have an IP within those ranges. Hence, most websites suddenly started to wrongly identify my location to be France. That's specially annoying when using services with region-locked content like Netflix. Imagine having to use a VPN to connect to your own country because of that. Hopefully it was fixed in a few months

[@johnchessant3012]

Surely the investigators must've found it strange that they got coordinates that were exact integer degrees latitude and longitude. To not get confused for the next house over you'd need at least 4 decimal place precision.

[@airplanenut6242]

I can almost guarantee they just copy/pasted it into a mapping program and never thought twice about it. In fact, the mapping probably occurred in the background, I’d guess

[@sarkedev]

Most likely they never even looked at the actual coordinates, it was just a point on a map

[@rogerwilco2]

No, it was probably translated into an address for them.

[@Treblaine]

They may not have even seen the coordinates as numbers, they may have just had it directly transfer the data to an address.

[@zerotwoisreal]

so what? you're saying that without decimal points the places don't exist? 20, -90 is just as valid of a place as 20.20399, -90.143287. easier too remember too.

[@noodengr3three825]

A pre-internet version of this was back in the day before cell phones when you could dial a phone using only 7 numbers for local calls. Folks would think a 800 number looked local and omit the 800 and use only the last 7 numbers to call. Often those were a legit private number of a household. The resident would continually get calls for the business with the 1-800 number. One guy got so sick of it , he started answering the phone announcing the company was going out of business and to sell any stock you owned in it.

[@mikehopkins8350]

In Potwin in the 1960’s you only needed to dial 4 digits for calls within the town. My grandmother, who lived her whole life in Potwin, had a fit when they started using 7 digits in about 1970.

[@spaceflight1019]

Once upon a time...entire states had only one area code. West Virginia was the last state to be upgraded. When Ma Bell ringed Pittsburgh's 412 area code with the new 724 code people complained, but now you must dial a "1" before dialing the rest of the number, no matter what the area code is.

[@TheJacklikesvideos]

@@spaceflight1019 RI is small. i think we implemented a second area code about 20 years ago, but i've never seen an in-state call with another one.

[@mommyjen2]

@@spaceflight1019 there are currently 11 states with only one area code

[@Mtbambeno]

My parents used to get a lot of calls during the summer of people wanting to reserve rooms at an inn that has the same number as theirs but a different area code. Amazing how many people got mad when they were the ones that dialed the wrong number.

[@MrOvergryph]

1:32 Slight correction. IP addresses are not unique to your computer. MAC addresses are unique to your computer. IP addresses are unique to your network. That is to say, your entire house has 1 global IP address, and various subnetted IP addresses (numbers that only matter to your router and that no one else can see) to connect all your devices to your home network, which, again, has the 1 global IP address for all your devices. If a hacker had your IP address, he/she could infiltrate your entire network, including all subnetted computers on said network, not just the one.

[@roge0]

That's still not completely accurate. This is true of your typical IPv4 NAT, but there are things like CGNATs where multiple subscribers may share a single IPv4 address. And then there's IPv6 where it's not uncommon to see individual devices not having just one address, but a whole block of addresses.

[@rome8180]

"Kafkaesque" is absolutely an appropriate way to describe this.

[@kleshreen]

I fell prey to this "glitch" doing my own research. One day, my phone started getting text messages saying that someone had logged in to my MyVerizon account and changed the password and added a device to my plan. It gave me the IP address info and it said it was at this farm, and I contacted Verizon and also my local police to tell them about it and gave them that IP address and location. Fortunately, Verizon already knew it wasn't the correct location of the IP address, and the police department figured it out shortly after. There was nothing that could actually be done besides reverting the changes, but I'm glad no law enforcement showed up to these people's home like I tried to make happen lol

[@kaimacdonald3006]

plot twist: they actually i=figured out they can commit crimes because they will think the tracking is a mistake on the ip address

[@Whitewolf76802]

Aaaaaa

[@leochinchillaa]

you called the police because someone logged into your verizon account?

[@kleshreen]

@@leochinchillaa no I submitted a report for cyber crimes. The exact thing you're supposed to do lol

[@leochinchillaa]

@@kleshreen youre tellig me... you called special weapons officers to try and take down internet hackers on your sprint account? okayyyy buddy

[@HotrodHud]

Great video man! Thank goodness they kept sending them to that house and not to mine. I'mnwanted in 27 states for tax evasion Edit. Now it's 28

[@cdhill44]

Only 27?

[@fortnite-kq7ok]

Original and funny 😐😐

[@Gehajjs62727]

@@fortnite-kq7ok Very original and funny comment man.

[@rickrolled3666]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/gnmpkGdshauUi7M

[@testtest-je8xb]

@@Gehajjs62727 yes its ver ironic

[@Mindbender05]

So the FBI, instead of contacting the ISP and get the necessary information, contacts a dubious company claiming that is knows the exact geolocation of an IP?! Or is there any data protection law in the US that does not allow the ISP to share that data?

[@alexstewart9592]

Most ISPs won't actually have particularly good data on the physical location for their IP addresses - this is because the IP address of a device is automatically assigned by the router it is connecting to, which in turn got the pool of IP addresses it can assign (and the one it is using, because routers can be directly connected to, useful for network admins) automatically assigned by one of the routers IT is connected to, and so on back until you reach the point where the ISP's network connects to another one. And when any of the hardware in the network is replaced, there is a chance that it is given a different IP address (or address pool) than the unit it replaced, causing parts of the network to have their IP address reassigned, without the ISP nessesarily doing anything. This is also why there are so many IP addresses that don't have an exact location known by this company - unless they get pinpointed using one of the more dubious methods for locating where an IP address physically corresponds to, all they know is that said IP address is in the pool of IP addresses used by an ISP's network in a particular area. Some ISPs have seperate networks for each city, but some use a WAN (wide area network, fancy trick that sets up a network that internally looks like a LAN (local area network), but is actually made out of multiple seperate LANs connected over the internet (internal messages sent across the internet are encrypted using the same kind of methodology as a VPN)) to share a single pool of IP addresses over an entire country (note that this has no material impact on internet performance either way - communication to IP addresses outside a WAN act as though you are on your individual LAN and ignore other parts of the WAN, except in situations where the message would visit other segments of it even if they weren't part of the same WAN network).

[@traugdor]

@@alexstewart9592 My ISP knows exactly where I live. It's called the "service address". The company doesn't know the location of the IP addresses because the ISPs weren't sharing that data with the company.

[@alexstewart9592]

@@traugdor They may know where YOU live, but depending on how they are set up they might not know what IP address you have been assigned, because the thing that actually assigned it was a router inside their network, potentially even using code that is included as a standard part of the code for the IP network protocol and wasn't written by them.

[@TheMegaxPlus]

My guess is that in those particular cases, people using the service tipped the FBI the (wrongly parsed) geolocation info, rather than the IP.

[@traugdor]

@@alexstewart9592 Any ISP worth their salt knows what IP addresses have been assigned to their network and who they belong to unless it's something like dialup or DSL because they need your modem's MAC address to setup your account and allow it access to the network. Then if you change your modem it won't work anymore because the MAC address will change. Do you actually work for these ISPs that don't know who their customers are and where they live?

[@f4lc0n73]

Just imagining every law enforcement agency ever turning up at once with the Spider-Man imposter meme

[@JouvaMoufette]

As soon as I saw the title, I knew this was going to be about GPS data and lack of it. Kinda like when people's photos are tagged as being off the coast of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean

[@rickrolled3666]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/gnmpkGdshauUi7M

[@mrechonet]

awww yes, why is x out in the ocean???

[@zfox1]

Well west of Africa in the ocean are the coordinates 0;0

[@Wailwulf]

There was a picture site called Panorama, but the person posting images had to physically place the pin on a google map. That site had so many images of cities and landscapes pinned in the oceans and Visa Versa.

[@ConfusedAnt]

As an apprentice in application development (aka: coding), I'm shocked that some companies are okay with this kind of product. I mean I'd not even pass my class if I would just point an error to a coordinate or something, smh

[@DaemonsAdvocate]

if i made something like that people would be livid

[@RichConnerGMN]

nice pfp

[@welcomb]

It's not technically an error. The location always has some margin of error. But in this case it was thousand of miles.

[@weberman173]

i mean, its not an error Thats the "annoying" part, it IS an ip adress they know off, its an ip adress they know is in america as well, it is a valid request, and they have to give a valid answer It needs to spit out "something" and as said, the system was designed to always spit out coordinates as long as they could asociated the IP adress with "america"(which isnt a problem itself) The problem was that it just happend that a random coordinate happend to be the EXACT location of a familys farm. Someone should have checked the default location, yes. BUT i am almost certain that the data they gave DID specify "hey, there is a margin of error here the size of america" somewhere. just noone checked it

[@tentaclesmod]

"The system is designed to always spit a location". That's exactly the problem! Why the fuck is it designed to ALWAYS spit an exact location and never an approximate??? And this is not a problem affecting just one farm. The system probably just spits the middle of any approximate location, then when it detects somewhere in New York it will spit the middle of new york, and if it narrows to a neighborhood, it will spit the middle of the neighborhood. Is extremely irresponsible given that law enforcement uses this system.

[@DatsDoodoBaby]

I remember seeing this when I used to track IPs and it was always common sense to me that it just meant America since the coordinates were perfect and at almost dead center, so take that FBI! One upped

[@laurendelune7618]

I feel like they could be able to sue the IP tracker company or something for all the trouble they’ve went through for no reason but I also feel like that would be very complicated

[@heitorpedrodegodoi5646]

They sued.

[@theangryintern]

I actually found out about the MaxMind situation a while ago because I was curious why our SIEM tool at work was showing several of our users located smack dab in the middle of a big lake in Kansas. That led to finding out it used to be the poor Arnold's farm until MaxMind moved it to the nearby lake after the lawsuit. It's called Cheney Reservoir if anyone was curious.

[@modtwentyeight]

Had that happen to me too. Credit card fraud. Pointed to Cheney reservoir!!

[@OffGridSupplies]

A proper geo-location implementation would provide an estimated accuracy for the location, example +/-1000 miles, to indicate somewhere in the USA. Alternatively it could return the country code rather than a numeric value if no higher accuracy is available. Moving the point to a lake really isn't a good solution.

[@skylarsorell9212]

Presumably, this would have been happening long before they moved into that house. How hadn't any cops, first responders, fbi, etc not notice that they kept getting called out to the same place for all kinds of stuff?

[@57thorns]

Because there are thousands of these agencies in the US, and fierce territorial disputes between most of them, so even if one reacted, they would not inform the competition about the problem.

[@jcarm185]

@@57thorns Sad but true

[@jpablo700]

Ha. You think the government uses the data they already have collected. 😉

[@justamatchstick7535]

apparently it's true,the local sheriff department figuratively had to change their job description into protecting that specific farm house from other law enforcement agency because of this multiple issues. i mean he had to placed a sign at the end of the driveway warning people to stay away from the house and to call him with questions lmao

[@jcarm185]

@@justamatchstick7535 Oh wow - that's good of him; and a fascinating addition to this whole story. I swear there is movie potential in this whole adventure!

[@Reclinesmc]

By far the best channel for learning things quickly while having a good time

[@ShaurryaSharma]

the sponser is META had me dying man, that was so unexpected and funny

[@katjagolden893]

I wanna know how the family kept their sanity for so long

[@rickrolled3666]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/gnmpkGdshauUi7M

[@Hans-gb4mv]

who says they did?

[@danese1636]

I'm more interested in how they didn't hear the front door break open, one of them goes for their shotgun, and the PD opens fire on "an armed and dangerous suspect wanted for multiple accounts of kidnapping."

[@KuK137]

@@danese1636 They weren't black or other minority. That's how. Also, how they never though to ask the police of FBI dudes why they are here. No one told them that shitty, useless website told them to go there? How they lived years with that?

[@alexcholagh8330]

@@KuK137 they live there for years with there family before GPS. GPS keeps giving away there location based on coordination which lead police ambulance/medical assistance FBI fire department and others to there location in the last 20 to 30 years since GPS became public

[@ChaplainDMK]

Imagine the same FBI agent coming for the 4th time "Uhm, Mr Arnold, are you by any chance involved in mass cocaine smuggling?"

[@fakiirification]

What did you do with the child this time, Mr Arnold?

[@spaceflight1019]

It's like being trapped in a real life version of "Clue".

[@Journey_Awaits]

Ok jokes over where’s your mass grave at

[@joecaner]

"Famously, police never make mistakes."

[@XTRvideos2024]

I thought it was going to be "MaxMind sounds like a tv show about a kid whose superpower is math, MaxMind is today's sponsor"

[@nbooth]

It's an example of "spurious precision", like when someone converts 100m to 328.084ft. The original number (100) only has one decimal place of precision, so all those decimals are false precision. The correct conversion is 100m is 300ft. Better yet express the quantity with explicit error: value±error. If all you know is that the address is in the US, then it should be something like (center of US)±(radius of US).

[@SystemfehlerK]

As a German, I can assure you that you used "Kafkaesque" correctly. The only way it could have been even more fitting is if the Arnolds would have been executed by the CIA in a nearby quarry.

[@pleasurereport]

and transformed themselves into bugs before that

[@coyotepeyote]

And they denied being guilty, which was used by the CIA to indicate that they were in fact guilty because denying their guilt is exactly what the guilty party would do.

[@sailordolly]

@@coyotepeyote Yes, because an innocent party would never deny being guilty.

[@velonicatgmaildotcom]

Danke!

[@LordInquisitor701]

Or scp foundation kidnaps them

[@danielhale1]

Business idea: Convert the farm into a tourist attraction for FBI Agents, Police, Fedex Drivers, etc. Fill it with tempting attractions like Torture the Detainee, Interrogate the Obviously Innocent Couple, Plant the Evidence, etc so that the visitors spend as much time at the park as possible, maximizing your profits. Then go public and sell your business, retiring to a nice farm near ground zero to laugh at the eternal madhouse.

[@CapCrunch45]

That’s a genius idea! 🤑 🤑

[@peachierose3356]

damn genius!

[@jonathankleinow2073]

"Hey, this is Josh, welcome back to Let's Game It Out. Today we're playing 'IP Address Geolocation Tycoon...'"

[@walterdayrit675]

That's actually not a bad idea!!

[@spaceflight1019]

Make it a tourist trap, and get it featured on Roadside America. I heard that Jimmy Hoffa's body was buried there...

[@philmastick2073]

"Middle of a lake with no nice families living in it" Nice fish families: "Bro wtf"

[@nvelsen1975]

We have a similar location around here, where map services like Google Maps have located an infinite amount of companies on a small rest area. It was in the Netherlands, along the N413 road from Soesterberg to Soest. It was fixed only earlier this year. Google Maps would just stall if you browsed over the location trying to load the hundreds upon hundreds of companies there.

[@TheArklyte]

That's not a glitch. This has a different name and is in fact covered by criminal law. If they weren't able to get reparations from multimillion company that turned their life into hell, that speaks a lot more about other topics. Specifically corruption.

[@eekee6034]

The corruption here is primarily in government agencies demanding answers rather than respecting the confidence value Maxmind supplies with the location. Yeah, Maxmind could have done better, but these are the same government agencies which demand forensic scientists just make stuff up about a skeleton's race.

[@RealJohnnyDingo]

I pity the fool who has 867-5309, probably has a similar problem

[@juliogonzo2718]

Yup elderly woman driving around a wide load escort and into a submarine propeller is worth $790M to the victims family, but angry possibly armed people showing up at your house ain't worth anything. Weird priorities

[@juliogonzo2718]

@@RealJohnnyDingo I randomly met the guy who wrote that song

[@daddysempaichan]

They got sued for 75k. Yes, 75k, that's how much the Arnolds asked for and received. Why didn't they ask for more I do not know.

[@huebeyduebey3493]

I grew up like 30 minutes from Potwin and used to drive around in the country for hours smoking weed. I remember learning to avoid the area because I very often ran into police even though it should of been the middle of nowhere. Now I finally know why 😂

[@temosofthecommunistrepubli2637]

You poor stoner .

[@chrismay2298]

How are you aware of his financial situation? 🤡

[@temosofthecommunistrepubli2637]

@@chrismay2298 oh hi mr. troll

[@temosofthecommunistrepubli2637]

@@chrismay2298 and bye 👍🏼

[@NoOne-ev7vj]

Lol, me too, maybe a little farther but my buddies grandma lived in Potwin so we frequently smoked weed in the country out there so I feel you.

[@sophdog2564]

I have watched so much KZbin that as soon as I heard "company...specializes...ip address...." I thought it was a vpn ad and started skipping through. I had to go back when i realized it was part of the story 😂

[@HalNordmann]

Me too

[@TomSedgman]

2:16 you missed the obvious gotta cache them all pun

[@vladimirenlow4388]

Anyone else find it interesting how a video detailing how shoddy information provided by a corporation nearly ruined peoples' lives is sponsored by another company that wants us to fork over information about our life goals and personal habits in the name of making their lives better?

[@narfharder]

Eh, maybe half-interesting.

[@renakunisaki]

And hosted by yet another company that makes their money off your information...

[@ddegn]

And made from almost entirely stock video.

[@Dornul]

We pretty much have the exact same thing in the Netherlands in a place called Dronten. Only difference is, nobody's doing anything about it, so the family is basically screwed.

[@irrelevant_noob]

Well at least it's not "the exact same thing" since if they "rounded off" some GPS coordinates by *_more than 1 degree_* in both directions (!) it would likely be closer to a border than to the center. :-B

[@mrteacup1769]

This is my first video I’ve seen from you and I gotta say good vid I love the quality

[@rodrigoalvarosantosd6892]

For the family who became prey to this ip glitch: How to make MaxMind bankrupt: - build house on state center - put it on sale - wait till MaxMind gets sued and state center gets relocated - demolish house - repeat until MaxMind goes bankrupt

[@christopherg2347]

If you want to indicate "somewhere in America", you return "Somewhere in America". As a string if need be! *You do not use* your normal normal return values for error reporting! (and yes, this is a error - unable to narrow it down) And then the did it again, sending Ambulances into lakes.

[@jackielinde7568]

It's not that simple. Chances are MaxMind's system isn't directly interactable through a human interface. It's probably fed as a pair of floating point values (Longitude and Latitude) to secondary systems not controlled by MaxMind. Trying to feed that data into a database (with strict data integrity rules) would cause the database to explode and fail the import. And even a good database analyst or programmer would probably convert those values into a bogus set of coordinates as well. It's well known that programmers use bogus values like "99999" and "01/01/1901" when "you need a value here, but there's no value for here" situations. In this case it was much easier to just create a dumping grounds for the unknown location IP Addresses. However, they should have 1. Checked the location to prevent knock on effects. 2. PUBLISHED THIS PRACTICE HEAVILY to prevent it causing issues. and 3. Had a Boolean value that indicates the location information is suspect.

[@SlurMaster9000]

@@jackielinde7568 I would think MaxMind would have access to some sort of data on confidence interval as well, so couldn't they just have their API add that information to the query and return a string if the CI is wider than some arbitrary threshold? Seems like there should be ways to handle this on the backend without touching the DB schema.

[@angolin9352]

Not every programming language is dynamically typed. There are more languages than just Javascript, and despite the opinions of soydevs, Javascript is not the only good programming language.

[@eekee6034]

Someone who used to use MaxMind's data reported they do return another value: a radius indicating level of confidence. However, US police have a history of demanding info from forensic scientists when the data just isn't there; they're not going to tolerate programs telling them "we don't really know". See: determining a skeleton's race.

[@1pcfred]

You return coordinates if you want to get paid.

[@AwokenEntertainment]

What a nightmare it would be to accidentally buy that house.. the stress...

[@jcarm185]

Someone needs to buy up that farm and build something there... Either go completely boring and make it an agricultural field or a grazing pasture. OR - go bonkers and build a max security gated facility just to make it look "legit". Then all the agencies and people who try and come there could "have fun" figuring it out.

[@thatsawesome2060]

Buy it, and everytime you get raided file a lawsuit imagine the settlement, you get rich in no time.

[@byronlaw6724]

@@jcarm185 I would go the route of a garrish max security facility and call it Nefarious Criminal Lair! Adorn it with a lot of cartoon villains. Especially Wil E Coyote.

[@jcarm185]

@@byronlaw6724 YES! I love it - sounds like loads of fun!

[@tymon102e6]

how do you accidentally buy a house?

[@tommyhuffman7499]

Fell over from laughter, when you said, "Brings me to our sponsor, Meta."

[@tashkent561]

The TVs in the back at 1:27 have a loading screen from CoD: Modern Warfare.

[@justdoingitjim7095]

One week after buying my new home the finance company called and said I was two months behind on my payments and were going to foreclose if I didn't pay up within two days. After taking off work to talk to the finance company (this was before computers) I finally found out that the credit company had me and another person with the same exact name mixed up. The only difference was our SSN's. I had to physically drive to the finance company and show them my birth certificate and SSN card, to prove I was who I said I was. This wasn't the first or only time credit reporting companies screwed me around! The sad part was the consumer is not allowed to sue them for damages. Politicians made that possible by passing legislation against consumers!

[@mattyb9991]

The politicians were paid millions of dollars by those credit companies to do so. Get money out of politics, end lobbying completely, and you won’t have problems like this

[@nunyabitnezz2709]

I had a bottled water delivery service make all kinds of threats for non-payment. Turns out there are six people in my town with my name, and I’m the only one who isn’t a deadbeat criminal. This guy lived at 5110 West xxxx street and I lived at 5110 East xxxx street. That was very hard to unscrew, believe me.

[@johnmccarthy9529]

I have this problem quite often I ignore them what's the worst that can happen they take me the wrong person to court. My lawyers and local news would have a field day

[@pinsonraphael4873]

I once recieved a letter by the mail containing a law degree, which is pretty weird considering i'm a math major. Turns out someone with the same name as me got his law degree, and the university didn't bother to check the address before sending it to him, so I guess i'm a lawyer now?

[@AdamEmond]

Sam: IP Addresses are unique to your computer NAT: Guess I'll just die?

[@chriku]

On the other hand he is talking to "people on the internet". I assume you could find hundereds of viewers who couldn't tell the difference between computer and monitor.

[@plplplplplpl7336]

Ipv6 in the future: I do not suffer from such weaknesses

[@pierreuntel1970]

CGNAT

[@allangibson2408]

@@plplplplplpl7336 IPv6 has exactly the same issues. There are just more addresses but they are still set dynamically…

[@plplplplplpl7336]

@@allangibson2408 but ipv6 has no such need for NAT as there is so many addresses that every device can have a unique address

[@skylaneav8r902]

Evidently your “Fabulous” app needs a chapter on “slow the hell down so people can understand what you’re saying”. 😳 Very interesting video. It is infuriating these big tech firms are allowed to make people’s lives a living hell for the convenience of the .gov. Not entirely surprised as my experience with IT developers has always been to spend 3 weeks in countless “touchpoint calls” debating which font and color to use while real issues such as the one in this video go unanswered and unresolved. Little or no regard for downstream effects of their actions.

[@nomore-constipation]

The really fun part is this happens on some cellular phone tower locations too However the GPS location is put in the middle of the desert, but not in the states.

[@rustymacshackleford6276]

The "professional" agencies should be held accountable for their actions. Same with the IP algorithm company, they're all responsible for that farms hell.

[@boldCactuslad]

you'll be happy to know they were found guilty of trying to do their jobs and given a life sentence of being employed ;(

[@Chris44sun]

@@boldCactuslad That is some immense ineptitude by all parties involved tho. Law enforcement doing next to no due diligance on their info gathering and the company for not checking those cords or making it clear what they meant. Just everyone involved, my God.

[@slslbbn4096]

Wait a minute.. and we have the gall to accuse the Chinese of spying? Sounds more and more like a distraction tactic to me. What next? Security Backdoors on Android and Apple phones?? ... Oh wait a minute

[@JonasWilms]

They could just go to the ISP and ask for the address, but instead use a reverse IP lookup service? That's a special kind of intelligence.

[@ShadNex]

@@Chris44sun dont forget the farm owners for doing absolutely nothing whenever police fbi etc come to there home 24/7

[@briangonigal3974]

I remember when I went on the tour of Hoover Dam, which stretches across the border between Nevada & Arizona (AKA the Colorado River). The parking lot was right at the lip of the border and a bit later when I checked my phone there was a notification from Google Maps trying to helpfully remind me exactly where I had parked (as it does), but apparently because of some confusion from being so close to the border of two different States, plus possibly not great cell phone tracking in the general area to begin with (or possibly even GPS data for the area being degraded to a low resolution for security reasons, as I did have to subject my camper van to a quick search at a security checkpoint approaching the dam), whatever the reason, the best Google Maps could tell me in their notification was that I was parked "Near North America".

[@tentaclesmod]

Aaaand, ironically, this is exactly what the software in the video SHOULD do. Google maps for some reason couldn't determine your exact location, so rather than spit a bullshit location it gave you it's best approximate, which left a lot to be desired but was very transparent.

[@plumjet0930]

Wait, NEAR North America?

[@plumjet0930]

"It seems you have parked in the middle of the Pacific Ocean"

[@eekee6034]

@@plumjet0930 I know, right? XD I've seen a ridiculous use of the word "near" in some app, too, but can't remember where, now.

[@centauria9122]

Are you sure you didn't park it in either South America, Asia, or out somewhere in the Arctic ocean hence "Near North America?"

[@lh8664]

“Which brings us to our sponsor, Meta” 💀💀💀💀💀

[@TrasherBiner]

1:54 this is Barcelona, Spain as seen from the Tibidabo peak.

[@wilianrodrigues5280]

Honestly right The Arnold Family could sue them for so much more because of how many records they had basically planted on the family and how much harassment, threats, and interrogations they have faced.

[@reinbeers5322]

They sued for $75k, any more and it would drag on for years in federal court. At $75k or lower it stays in a local court where it was basically a quick and guaranteed win.

[@borg286]

MaxMind threw away a golden opportunity. Default to the MaxMind HQ and report anyone coming there for idiocy. Great way to work from the bottom up and work out any company that isn't using your company's services in a mindful way.

[@kayemni]

I think it waa their fault to begin with, it's clwarly a bad software design... They should've returned an error or at least a precision value with the ip address

[@whatusernameis5295]

@@kayemni yeah but also tbf look up your location (assuming you don't give the website location access) it tries using your ISP to get it but it just shows where your ISP is instead of your actual location

[@kayakr17]

I'm not familiar with their company culture, but I'm pretty sure if be fired for anything that made both the FBI and the IRS show up several times at the office.

[@HudsonGTV]

According to another commenter, Garmin does this for their GPS tracking system.

[@eDoc2020]

@@kayemni Apparently they do provide precision data along with the location but this was ignored.

[@carsofsouthernmaryland4066]

I have family in Potwin and have spent so much time in and around the Potwin/Sedgwick area

[@anonymouskoala2497]

Your use of Kafkaesque was not just correct, but extremely well suited to the situation!

[@2adamast]

It's weird that the FBI or whoever kept repeating the same wild goose chase without an ounce of curiosity about why

[@FalbertForester]

Because it was different agents / officers / agencies every time. And agencies don't share their info.

[@angolin9352]

No it's not. The cops don't care about getting it wrong because there are never any negative consequences, even when they ruin lives due to gross negligence. They just hide behind their shield of "but what if there was ACTUALLY something horrible happening this time?" They also don't care about wasting the government's money because it's not their money.

[@MrTheHillfolk]

@@angolin9352 this is the correct answer

[@muchotexto4248]

"Damn ths guy's unstoppable. This is his 39th murder of the week and it's Monday"

[@joecaner]

"Famously, police never make mistakes."

[@labrat256]

If anyone wants to hear more about this, this is also the topic of the great podcast Reply All, episode 53 In The Desert. The podcast interviews the victims and tries to identify their problem.

[@matthewbloom3869]

PIN THIS

[@Cwlcymro]

I think they were different people suffering a similar problem though right? If I remember right they were not on a farm, but in a suburb somewhere like Arizona and it was Find my Phone that kept locating their house not police.

[@labrat256]

@@Cwlcymro They were - yeah. Different people, different service, but it was the same problem caused by a default map location

[@melamino]

I skipped the whole maxmind section thinking it was an sponsor ad, then I got to the actual sponsored ad and felt very confused.

[@generictimestamperstupendi9021]

"is that a question or a threat" got me

[@lindsaycooper3213]

I recall this story from a few years back. The local Sheriff's department ended up intercepting a lot of the law enforcement and such that showed up at the property.

[@Slayer119988]

Wow. I hope these poor tortured farmers were compensated big time for the stress this caused.

[@khloeratzlaff]

I’ve heard of this, I like in Kansas. Always been creeped out and so confused

[@SSXVegeta]

I used to live in a place where I had something similar happen a lot, my ip range was apparently placed on a scammer center list, which some companies would use to block them from using their service. So once in a while I would just randomly be blocked from things it was dumb af

[@jasonpark5906]

This was happening to me with stolen cellphones. I share property lines with the property of a cell phone tower. When someone is trying to find there phone but the phone is off the signal pings the tower by my house instead of the phone. I had to hang a sign on my front door explaining that I don’t have any stolen phones and the cell tower is behind my house and pinging the closest address which is my house.

[@Big-AL6789]

I work for Amazon and this keeps happening to everyone and still brings us to that place

[@Jabooty_Williams]

Imagine pulling up with your broken toilet to see the FBI, a police helicopter, and an ambulance all fighting to get inside.

[@ryantbrothers]

"Strangers angrily searching through their barn" in Kansas normally ends up with "Strangers angrily bleeding from gun shot wounds"

[@mekaerwin7187]

And conspicuous mounds of earth lining up next to each other on the back 40.

[@Kayenne54]

@@mekaerwin7187 Lots of Koi fish ponds, you mean.

[@limeyfox]

4:25 That lake is now full of crashed cop cars and helicopters

[@CurledRuby85_2]

That implies that helicopters just nosedived into the lake thinking "yeah, this is what I'm supposed to do."

[@HANKSANDY69420]

Lmfao

[@HANKSANDY69420]

@@CurledRuby85_2 LOL

[@monowavy]

the moment you said Kafkaesque I immediately thought how it had nothing to do with anything. Good job.

[@luisderivas6005]

Gives a whole new meaning to "be careful when setting initial conditions" aka "Defaults".

[@himarei]

You'd think that the first time they sent officers to that house and figured they had it wrong, they would have seen the problem and fix it? Then again, having worked for the government, if something isn't in your job description it doesn't exist, if there is a mistake or error, you simply pass it along until no one knows who's fault it was. Then you all you have to do is use taxpayers money to "fix" the problem.

[@natchu96]

A first time occurrence could easily just be a single case database error of some sort, nothing to really fix until you're sure the error is consistent. Which it was (well the program is technically doing exactly what it's supposed to), but that would take quite a few repeat cases from the same users to notice.

[@napalm_lipbalm86]

That is pretty much any job😂😂😂

[@Ssarevok]

Thing is: it's probably different officers and agencies every time. So each individual agent just goes "oh, minor glitch, no big deal", because to them it's just that one incident. :(

[@fakiirification]

that describes just about every job ever. Everyone is overtasked and understaffed. if theres something you can ignore or pass along, you damn well do it.

[@eDoc2020]

The company probably didn't even know their data was being used this way.

[@danielweston9188]

That reminds me of an Air Force software programming error for a poseidon Missile. If you double hit the decimal point while entering the coords it would drop the first digit and add a zero to the end. 115.1234e would turn into 151.2340e That would not be good. Boy did they fix that quickly and added the enter twice prompt.

[@renakunisaki]

I heard about a rocket badly missing its target because the system had been left on for too long, so floating point rounding errors had accumulated in its timing...

[@dbeekman9738]

This missile will destroy Chicago. Are you sure? Well ... ... heck yeah.

[@ElNeroDiablo]

@@renakunisaki Yeahh... NT 3.5 through NT4.0 (and Win95 through ME) had a similar problem. and then there was the FDIV error in the P5 Pentium, "Pentium Bug"...

[@KB4QAA]

DW: The Poseiden missile was a Navy submarine launched ballistic missile.

[@danielweston9188]

@@KB4QAA The system used the XN6 Autonavigator managed by the U.S. Air Force known as Navaho2 and built by NAA.

[@km077]

"Shouldn't we just say "It's in da US, yo."?" "Nah, just point them to this nice farm over here."

[@frog2931]

Kafka-esque is more meant to describe a impossibly confusing set of problems or loopholes, usually being used in the sense of a complicated bureaucratic process.

[@grassdungeon8433]

Honestly, “kafkaesque” only 100% correctly applies to such specific (and seemingly few) situations, I think you did a pretty good job. Usually it involves the government/ bureaucracy/ workplace sort of thing

[@funkmasterdub]

My sister in law was searched by a financial debt recovery company (whos name i won't mention) but because she shared the same name of the debter and the company that was chasing the owed cash basically checked out everyone In England with that name hoping to find the lady in question. Unfortunately on the search with my sister in law, someone pressed a wrong button and linked the debtor and all the addresses that she owed money to back onto my brother and sister in laws address. They started to get a lot of letters demanding money for the outstanding balances and yet despite my family providing proof that they didn't and never have lived in the area of the debts it didn't stop there. People inckuding bailiffs kept coming round demanding payments. She showed them her birth certificate, National Insurance number (etc) that proved that despite the name being the same., the person that they needed was soneone else. She had to write letters and send emails to everyone and yet the hassle continued for two years. By sheer fortune they found out that the addresses and names had been linked through one small debt collection agency who apologised, removed the trace and then it all stopped. I insisted that my brother and his wife should take them to court due to all the hassle and stress and sleepness nights that it caused but they were so worn out by it they was just glad that contacts had just stopped. Also too. The company in question that inadvertently started the witch hunt was a very small organisation operated by a much larger one that we're happy to liquidate the smaller parts so my brother and his wife coukd have got a solicitor, paid for them to build a case only to see it fall apart as the company in question no longer operated, thus causing them more problems, sleepiness nights and hassle and thousands of pounds out to solicitors for no recompense. The people who chase debts are bottom feeders of the lowest order and terrible as this sounds, they seem to he the only ones that seem to win. Despicable.

[@spaceflight1019]

A few months after we moved into our house in 1986 we began getting threatening phone calls from some bank in Miami. Seems that the previous owner had defaulted on a loan and the bank was coming after us. I came home from work one day and my wife was in tears from the harassment. When the phone rang I picked it up and a collection man was on the other end and he started threatening me. I told him that I didn't have a problem but he was going to have a bigger problem because I traveled for a living and was coming to Miami if I heard his voice on my phone again. Feeling brave due to distance, he laughed. I told him that I had bought title insurance and hung up. Never heard from him again. I was a violent man in my younger days.

[@funkmasterdub]

@@spaceflight1019 it's crazy isn't it. I mean through Covid more billionaires have been made in the shortest period of time in human history. Most of the world are fighting to maintain a good salary through this crisis yet some lucky people just get money thrown their way.

[@luggy9256]

@@funkmasterdub most of those lucky people are related to pharmaceuticals though aren’t they? Or maybe online shopping lol

[@inconnu69]

I was arrested for bouncing checks due to having the exact same name as the guy who was doing it. I was in California, in my 20s, and he was in Florida in his 50s. Wasted a couple hours of my day and scared the shit out of me. At least the cops drove me back to my car and didn't give me the ticket I got pulled over for.

[@qoobe]

i skipped through like half the video thinking maxmind was a sponsor

[@fabiorutichelli7006]

“The prize is raising my comment engagement”🤣🤣 at least he’s honest

[@c1ph3rpunk]

I use MaxMind in our cyber-security systems, mainly to ID country for detections, we know it’s only around 90% accurate. Why the FBI wouldn’t know this is disturbing.

[@fort809]

The FBI knows, they don’t care. Same agency that killed Randy weaver’s whole family because they sent him the wrong court date and he didn’t show up