“Digital Hell”: A Glitch Linked This Couple’s House to 600 Million IP Addresses

But don’t they call this the “smart grid”?

If it’s connected to the Internet, rule of thumb: it can be hacked and there will be glitches. That means you. We’re just starting to find out all the ways this can go wrong…

Via Foss Bytes:

A couple residing in the remote areas of Kansas has been visited by various police and federal officials on a regular basis. They are not some retired high-rank officials. The visits were made to enquire about missing persons, digital fraud cases, and even child pornography cases.

More than 600 million IP addresses are linked to the house of this couple, James and Theresa Arnold. The couple shifted to the farm house in 2011. So, what was being baked inside the house? It was the result of a technical issue with an IP mapping company MaxMind. The couple’s house is located somewhere near the geographical center of the United States of America. The company was using this location as default to map IP addresses for which the location couldn’t be identified.

The consequences of the technical glitch were horrendous and affected the lives of the couple. Frequent visits–the very first one happened almost a week after the couple shifted to their farm house–of security officials regarding missing persons, vehicles, etc. were a common schedule for the Arnolds. The couple had no option but to file a lawsuit against MaxMind for the digital hell they had been into.

“Threats began to be made against the plaintiffs by individuals who were convinced that the perpetrator of internet scamming lived at the residence. State investigators — convinced that the plaintiffs had been involved in an identity theft — came to the residence to take pictures of assets,” — according to the court documents.

(read more)

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