Kansas home wound up with 600 million IP addresses and a world of trouble – The Denver Post
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Joyce Vogelman Taylor’s grandfather built the house in 1902, and her father spent 85 years living in it. Last week, the Arnolds filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for Kansas against MaxMind, a digital company that maps IP addresses and who the Arnolds claim is responsible for turning their pastoral home into a digital age horror story.
By The Washington Post | The Washington Post<br>PUBLISHED: August 10, 2016 at 10:51 PM MDT | UPDATED: August 15, 2016 at 2:30 PM MDT
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...<br>A two-hour drive from the geographic center of the United States sits a quiet farmhouse near Potwin, Kansas. Joyce Vogelman Taylor’s grandfather built the house in 1902, and her father spent 85 years living in it.
She remembered a moment in 1942 — the end of World War II not yet in sight — when he purchased a Delco electric generator, light bulbs and a toaster. It was a massive technological upgrade for the house.
More than 70 years later, technology made the 82-year-old’s life — and those of her renters James and Theresa Arnold — a digital age horror story.
For reasons soon to be explained, the little house in the center of the country became the crossroads of the Internet, with unimaginable consequences, also soon to be explained.
The discovery was made by Kashmir Hill of Fusion who broke the story in April.
Last week, the Arnolds filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for Kansas against MaxMind, a digital company that maps IP addresses and who the Arnolds claim is responsible for turning their pastoral home into a digital age horror story.
The first time Taylor realized something was amiss was when she received a call in 2011 from a small business owner who angrily blamed her for his customers’ email problems.
The conversation shocked Taylor. She owned a Gateway computer, which she used almost like a typewriter — for composing Sunday school lessons and letters. She barely browsed the Internet, much less used it to overload a small business’s email servers.
"The first call I got was from Connecticut," Taylor told Fusion. "It was a man who was furious because his business internet was overwhelmed with emails. His customers couldn’t use their email. He said it was the fault of the address at the farm. That’s when I became aware that something was going on."
After that initial strange call to Taylor, complaints started pouring in, often with distressing and sometimes criminal accusations aimed at the Arnolds, the Wichita Eagle reported.
In May 2011 police and sheriff’s officers knocked on their door, looking for a stolen truck.
"This scenario repeated itself countless times over the next five years," the lawsuit stated.
Officers would show up, accusing them of harboring runaway children. Of keeping girls in the house to make pornographic films. Ambulances appeared, prepared to save suicidal persons. FBI agents, federal marshals and IRS collectors have all appeared on their doorstep. So have angry Internet users, who claimed they were ripped off by the Arnolds.
"Law enforcement officials came to the residence all hours of the day or night," the lawsuit stated.
At least once, the Arnolds were doxxed, meaning hackers posted their names and personal details across the Internet, Fusion reported.
One day, a broken toilet was left in the driveway without explanation.
Neither the Arnolds nor Taylor had any idea of what was happening.
The genesis of what actually happened was 2002, when a company called MaxMind was founded. It maps IP addresses, a notoriously unreliable practice. Many can’t be directly linked to an address, only a state or even a country.
For its tech to work, MaxMind matched each IP address to a set of coordinates. This presented a problem when the company didn’t have an exact location.
Sometimes, it could only determine than an IP address was in the U.S. In those cases, the company mapped that address to a specific set of coordinates: 38(degree)N 97(degree)W or, in the parlance of digital maps, 38.0000,-97.0000.
That just happens to be the front yard of the house where the Arnolds resided.
More than 600 million IP addresses were mapped to that yard.
And no one connected with the farmhouse knew this until Fusion’s Hill, who had been investigating the practice of mapping IP addresses, searched through MaxMind’s database, discovered the 600 million IP addresses at the Kansas location and gave Taylor, the...