…and here’s a generic entry for Panama.
{‘city’: None, ‘region_code’: None, ‘area_code’: 0, ‘time_zone’: ‘America/Panama’, ‘dma_code’: 0, ‘metro_code’: None, ‘country_code3’: ‘PAN’, ‘latitude’: 9.0, ‘postal_code’: None, ‘longitude’: -80.0, ‘country_code’: ‘PA’, ‘country_name’: ‘Panama’, ‘continent’: ‘NA’}
The lat / lon is only in the middle of the US if the IP is known to be in the US, but more specific info is not available.
Bingo! Simple incompetence.
Could not this farm sue MaxMind for damages?
Doesn’t that depend entirely on whether they advertise that you can accurately narrow a location down to an individual house with their data?
I think they should be liable as well, but they probably have more money to defend themselves than the poor folks at the default location. Although I’m sure that if it were a company or law firm at the default Maxmind would be sued.
Am I the only one who thinks a solution here is enforcement of the anti-harassment laws so that people don’t get the impression this behavior is okay?
Ehh, Stephenson is far too competent to dream up something that works this ineptly.
It’s not that it works ineptly, it’s a use case problem. People are using a geolocation data set that has varying degrees of accuracy and treating it like it’s a phone book.
Yes, in which case when they “don’t know” is they should say “don’t know.”
Its as if every time the telephone cannot connect a call, instead of giving a tone indicating failure, your telephone company dials a specific number: 415-623-来䙶碇覘.
I’m not a lawyer, but it seems like there’s a clear cause of action here.
I posted entries from the database above. The ones that have less specific info have “None” listed in multiple fields. You can also see they used fewer digits for the lat / lon in the more general cases. It’s not “we don’t know”, it’s “we know less precise info in this case”. If some jackwagon decides to use a weedwhacker to trim their nails, I don’t have a lot of sympathy.
ETA: I do have sympathy for the poor folks that live at that location, since apparently people can’t be arsed to use tools properly.
Yes, and they could find some way of indicating it was generically in the US without giving a number that idiots idiotically follow to this farm in Kansas.
removing the lat / lon would cause issues in all sorts of software that relies on the field being there. Blaming them for having the data field there when all of the other fields indicate it’s a rough approximation is the same as blaming someone for using a pointer in a presentation and saying USA as they tap the pointer on Kansas and somebody decides to drill down in Google Earth where they tapped and claim they meant a specific house. If the company ever claimed they had that sort of accuracy, I’d see a problem.
If it’s displaying the results simply as a point, then that’s spectacularly idiotic. Serving up a map point for data that can have radically different degrees of accuracy masks that fact and fails to convey what degree is being displayed. That’s simply not a form of display appropriate for the data being conveyed.
Not if you’re not making it clear what the data means. A point indicate a level of specificity far beyond that of simply indicating a country. Then, as in this case, it becomes the opposite of useful - it becomes actively misleading.
It’s raw data. It’s entirely up to the person that uses their products to determine what it “means”. Would you look at the record above and think it refers to a house?
I love apologists for software designers. (Are you a Windows user?) Yes. Of course. The only possible solution that the software possibly can provide, when it does not have an accurate answer, is this farm in Kansas. You really can’t think of another solution? I can. And those software designers could.
It’s somewhat difficult to blame the designers for the initial error, but now that it is evident that there is a problem, they can easily engineer a remedy. Your (non-)fix seems to be to just do nothing, shrug your shoulders, and blame the idiot users who are idiots.
Here’s a free solution: When you don’t have an accurate answer and you dont want to be harassing Kansas farmers, set the Lat/Lon to 0/0. To make it pretty, you can still point to the middle of the US if there is a graphical interface, but the Kansas farmer will be left alone.
It’s not software. It’s a data set. It’s not about designers, at least where MaxMind seems to come in. If a designer of software relied on their data and provided an erroneous result based upon a poor understanding of what the data set was, and could do, that’s their problem. They can be held accountable as well. I’m asking why the provider of the data is being held accountable for it’s interpretation, not being an apologist for coders. Do you get the difference?
Setting the lat /lon to 0 / 0 doesn’t point at the country. Look at my Panama example as well. Might be useful for coding, and not supposed to be an adress book for where to find IPs. End of story.
So, youre saying software programmers that use MaxMind’s dataset have to:
keep a file with an entry for each of the 196 countries on earth. For each, they determine what the “NULL” value for each country is (in the USA, its this Kansas farm). Or does MaxMind give semi-inaccurate values for counties, states, regions as well?
Whenever they are returned a “NULL” value by MaxMind, they do not use it in their software.
Why should they have to resort to this semi-accurate algorithm? Why cant MaxMind return 0 or “0” or “NULL” or 0/0 or 80085 when they do not have an accurate answer in their dataset?
The point is, there is a way of specifying the country itself without giving a Lat/Long. Are you a Windows user?
They’re pointing at the country, not a house. What don’t you get about that?
That’s the point you miss entirely! They ARE pointing to a house.
