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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,-97.0000 if no location was defined. That's rounded from 39.8333333,-98.585522, which is the center point of the United States.

That happened to be smack bang where James and Theresa Arnold were living. And a lot of IP addresses defaulted to their house. As a result, since 2011 when they moved in, police and investigators have repeatedly turned up at their home after wrongly tracing criminals' internet connections to their physical address via MaxMind's geoIP databases.

According to their lawsuit, filed on Friday in a Kansas district court:

The first week after the Arnolds moved in, two deputies from the Butler County Sheriff’s Department came to the residence looking for a stolen truck. This scenario repeated itself countless times over the next 5 years. The plaintiffs were repeatedly awakened from their sleep or disturbed from their daily activities by local, state or federal officials looking for a runaway child or a missing person, or evidence of a computer fraud, or call of an attempted suicide. Law enforcement officials came to the residence all hours of the day or night.

Threats began to be made against the [Arnolds] by individuals who were convinced that the perpetrator of internet scamming lived at the residence. State investigators – convinced that the [Arnolds] had been involved in an identity theft – came to the residence to take pictures of assets.

The married couple want at least $75,000 in damages. MaxMind has updated its databases to move the default location away from their home, although not all of its customers who buy copies of the datasets will have picked up the tweak. ®

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