Gregoryisgodistan wrote:Why does that link think I'm in Wichita, Kansas? I most certainly am not.
It's a well-known issue in the United States relating to how digital mapping company MaxMind set up the IP mapping process in 2002.
IP mapping isn’t an exact science. At its most precise, an IP address can be mapped to a house. (You can try to map your own IP address here.) At its least precise, it can be mapped only to a country. In order to deal with that imprecision, MaxMind decided to set default locations at the city, state and country level for when it knows only roughly where the IP address lives. If it knows only that an IP address is somewhere in the U.S., and can’t figure out anything more about where it is, it will point to the center of the country.
As any geography nerd knows, the precise center of the United States is in northern Kansas, near the Nebraska border. Technically, the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the center spot are 39°50'N, 98°35'W. In digital maps, that number is an ugly one: 39.8333333, -98.585522. So back in 2002, when MaxMind was first choosing the default point on its digital map for the center of the U.S., it decided to clean up the measurements and go with a simpler nearby latitude and longitude: 38°N, 97°W or 38.0000, -97.0000.
As a result, for the past 14 years, every time MaxMind's database has been queried about the location of an IP address in the United States it can't identify, it has spat out the default location of a spot two hours away from the geographic center of the country. This happens a lot: 5,000 companies rely on MaxMind's IP-mapping information, and in all, there are now more than 600 million IP addresses associated with that default coordinate. If any of those IP addresses is used by a scammer, or a computer thief, or a suicidal person contacting a help line, MaxMind's database places it at the same spot: 38.0000,-97.0000.
The center of the United States is therefore defined by IP mapping software as a small town called Potwin in Kansas - the closest major urban centre just happens to be Wichita.
Therefore, US IP address mapping software sometimes defaults to Wichita, regardless of where an individual is actually based.
As a byproduct, the owners of a family farm 4 miles outside of Potwin have inadvertently found themselves the subject of any number of cybercrime investigations:
http://theweek.com/articles/624040/how- ... gital-hell
