GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences
Interesting article. http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/ An hour’s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem. The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor née Vogelman, 82, now rents it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It’s the kind of place you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest neighbor is a mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000 people. It is real, rural America; in fact, it’s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States. But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor’s land find themselves in a technological horror story. For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat. --Chris
TL;DR: GeoIP put unknown IP location mappings to the 'center of the country' but then rounded off the lat long so it points at this farm. Cant believe law enforcement is using this kind of info to execute searches. Wouldnt that undermine the credibility of any evidence brought up in trials for any geoip locates? Seems to me locating unknowns somewhere in the middle of a big lake or park in the center of the country might be a better idea. /kc On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 11:55:11AM -0500, Chris Boyd said:
Interesting article.
http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
An hour???s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem.
The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor n??e Vogelman, 82, now rents it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It???s the kind of place you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest neighbor is a mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000 people. It is real, rural America; in fact, it???s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States.
But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor???s land find themselves in a technological horror story.
For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They???ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They???ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They???ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.
--Chris
On Apr 11, 2016, at 10:02 AM, Ken Chase <math@sizone.org> wrote:
Cant believe law enforcement is using this kind of info to execute searches. Wouldnt that undermine the credibility of any evidence brought up in trials for any geoip locates?
What overworked and underpaid public defender is going to know enough to challenge the “evidence?” What judge is going to know enough to call BS on the search warrant affidavit? A good number of the judges in Oregon used to work for one of the DA’s offices, you think they question law enforcement affidavits very aggressively?
/kc -- Jeremy McDermond (NH6Z) Xenotropic Systems mcdermj@xenotropic.com
On Mon 2016-Apr-11 13:02:14 -0400, Ken Chase <math@sizone.org> wrote:
TL;DR: GeoIP put unknown IP location mappings to the 'center of the country' but then rounded off the lat long so it points at this farm.
Cant believe law enforcement is using this kind of info to execute searches. Wouldnt that undermine the credibility of any evidence brought up in trials for any geoip locates?
Seems to me locating unknowns somewhere in the middle of a big lake or park in the center of the country might be a better idea.
...how about actually marking an unknown as...oh, I dunno: "unknown"? Is there no analogue in the GeoIP lookups for a 404?
/kc
-- Hugo Slabbert | email, xmpp/jabber: hugo@slabnet.com pgp key: B178313E | also on Signal
On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 11:55:11AM -0500, Chris Boyd said:
Interesting article.
http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
An hour???s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem.
The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor n??e Vogelman, 82, now rents it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It???s the kind of place you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest neighbor is a mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000 people. It is real, rural America; in fact, it???s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States.
But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor???s land find themselves in a technological horror story.
For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They???ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They???ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They???ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.
--Chris
Or 0,0, send the FBI to Africa on a boating trip. that would probably be easier than "unknown" or "null". Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373 On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 1:11 PM, Hugo Slabbert <hugo@slabnet.com> wrote:
On Mon 2016-Apr-11 13:02:14 -0400, Ken Chase <math@sizone.org> wrote:
TL;DR: GeoIP put unknown IP location mappings to the 'center of the
country' but then rounded off the lat long so it points at this farm.
Cant believe law enforcement is using this kind of info to execute searches. Wouldnt that undermine the credibility of any evidence brought up in trials for any geoip locates?
Seems to me locating unknowns somewhere in the middle of a big lake or park in the center of the country might be a better idea.
...how about actually marking an unknown as...oh, I dunno: "unknown"? Is there no analogue in the GeoIP lookups for a 404?
/kc
-- Hugo Slabbert | email, xmpp/jabber: hugo@slabnet.com pgp key: B178313E | also on Signal
On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 11:55:11AM -0500, Chris Boyd said:
Interesting article.
http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
An hour???s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem.
The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor n??e Vogelman, 82, now rents it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It???s the
kind
of place you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest neighbor is a mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000 people. It is real, rural America; in fact, it???s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States.
But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor???s land find themselves in a technological horror story.
For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They???ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They???ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They???ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.
--Chris
Well they DO know the IP location is within the USA - many apps use the GeoIP API and require a lat/long returned, and some need one that lands within a country border (thus my suggestion of middle of a remote wilderness park - let the cops search some desolate remote desert in nevada amirite?) MaxMind might not want the quality hit for a 0,0 answer (as funny as that would be). (my 'middle of a lake in the middle of the country' retains some of that mischievous win however.) /kc On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 01:14:37PM -0400, Josh Luthman said:
Or 0,0, send the FBI to Africa on a boating trip. that would probably be easier than "unknown" or "null".
Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373
On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 1:11 PM, Hugo Slabbert <hugo@slabnet.com> wrote:
On Mon 2016-Apr-11 13:02:14 -0400, Ken Chase <math@sizone.org> wrote:
TL;DR: GeoIP put unknown IP location mappings to the 'center of the
country' but then rounded off the lat long so it points at this farm.
Cant believe law enforcement is using this kind of info to execute searches. Wouldnt that undermine the credibility of any evidence brought up in trials for any geoip locates?
Seems to me locating unknowns somewhere in the middle of a big lake or park in the center of the country might be a better idea.
...how about actually marking an unknown as...oh, I dunno: "unknown"? Is there no analogue in the GeoIP lookups for a 404?
/kc
-- Hugo Slabbert | email, xmpp/jabber: hugo@slabnet.com pgp key: B178313E | also on Signal
On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 11:55:11AM -0500, Chris Boyd said:
Interesting article.
http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
An hour???s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem.
The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor n??e Vogelman, 82, now rents it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It???s the
kind
of place you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest neighbor is a mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000 people. It is real, rural America; in fact, it???s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States.
But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor???s land find themselves in a technological horror story.
For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They???ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They???ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They???ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.
--Chris
On Apr 12, 2016, at 7:10 PM, Jean-Francois Mezei wrote:
On 2016-04-11 13:22, Ken Chase wrote:
Well they DO know the IP location is within the USA -
A friend in Australia was with an ISP onwed by a US firm and his IP address often geolocated to the USA.
Similarly, IPv6 space thats been originated by a Canadian org, in Canada for 4 or 5 years is still shown as in the USA.
On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 07:14:15PM -0500, Theodore Baschak wrote:
On Apr 12, 2016, at 7:10 PM, Jean-Francois Mezei wrote: On 2016-04-11 13:22, Ken Chase wrote:
Well they DO know the IP location is within the USA - A friend in Australia was with an ISP onwed by a US firm and his IP address often geolocated to the USA. Similarly, IPv6 space thats been originated by a Canadian org, in Canada for 4 or 5 years is still shown as in the USA.
There are similar problems with phone numbers. Google's libphonenumber, for example, will tell you that +1 855 266 7269 is in the US. It's not, it's Canadian. It appears that for any NANP "area code" that isn't assigned to a particular place libphonenumber just says "it's in the US" instead of "it's in one of the NANP countries". They appear to have a similar bug with Russia/Kazakhstan. -- David Cantrell
There are similar problems with phone numbers. Google's libphonenumber, for example, will tell you that +1 855 266 7269 is in the US. It's not, it's Canadian. It appears that for any NANP "area code" that isn't assigned to a particular place libphonenumber just says "it's in the US" instead of "it's in one of the NANP countries".
Actually, it's probably both US and Canadian. When you call an 8xx toll free number, the switch uses a database to route the call to whatever carrier handles it, who can then do whatever they want. The provider for that number, Callture, is in Ontario but they can terminate the calls anywhere, and send each call to a different lace. Also, in fairness, the US is about 90% of the NANP, so guessing that an 8XX number is in the US is usually correct. R's, John
On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 03:31:47PM -0000, John Levine wrote:
There are similar problems with phone numbers. Google's libphonenumber, for example, will tell you that +1 855 266 7269 is in the US. It's not, it's Canadian ... Actually, it's probably both US and Canadian. When you call an 8xx toll free number, the switch uses a database to route the call to whatever carrier handles it, who can then do whatever they want. The provider for that number, Callture, is in Ontario but they can terminate the calls anywhere, and send each call to a different lace.
I was careful to pick a number on a Canadian company's website.
Also, in fairness, the US is about 90% of the NANP, so guessing that an 8XX number is in the US is usually correct.
That's another way of saying that it's deliberately wrong 10% of the time for pan-NANP prefixes. Better to say "I don't know" than to just guess. -- David Cantrell | Official London Perl Mongers Bad Influence
Actually, it's probably both US and Canadian. When you call an 8xx toll free number, the switch uses a database to route the call to whatever carrier handles it, who can then do whatever they want. The provider for that number, Callture, is in Ontario but they can terminate the calls anywhere, and send each call to a different place.
I was careful to pick a number on a Canadian company's website.
Doesn't matter. In the NANP, toll free 8xx numbers are routed by carrier, not by geography, and it looks like this company handles traffic in the US, too. It's entirely possible that when you call that number during the day you get someone in Toronto, and when you call it at night, you get an answering service in the Phillipines.
Also, in fairness, the US is about 90% of the NANP, so guessing that an 8XX number is in the US is usually correct.
That's another way of saying that it's deliberately wrong 10% of the time for pan-NANP prefixes. Better to say "I don't know" than to just guess.
Really, they're not assigned to locations, they're assigned to carriers. They can even be assigned to different carriers in different countries although that's not common. More to the point, saying "somewhere in the US", even if it's occasionally wrong, will not send nitwits with guns to a particular location. NANP geographical numbers can be located to a switch (give or take number portability within a LATA), but non-geographic numbers can really go anywhere. On the third hand, it's still true that the large majority of them are in the U.S. R's, John
On Apr 13, 2016, at 12:15 , John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Actually, it's probably both US and Canadian. When you call an 8xx toll free number, the switch uses a database to route the call to whatever carrier handles it, who can then do whatever they want. The provider for that number, Callture, is in Ontario but they can terminate the calls anywhere, and send each call to a different place.
I was careful to pick a number on a Canadian company's website.
Doesn't matter. In the NANP, toll free 8xx numbers are routed by carrier, not by geography, and it looks like this company handles traffic in the US, too. It's entirely possible that when you call that number during the day you get someone in Toronto, and when you call it at night, you get an answering service in the Phillipines.
Also, in fairness, the US is about 90% of the NANP, so guessing that an 8XX number is in the US is usually correct.
That's another way of saying that it's deliberately wrong 10% of the time for pan-NANP prefixes. Better to say "I don't know" than to just guess.
Really, they're not assigned to locations, they're assigned to carriers. They can even be assigned to different carriers in different countries although that's not common.
More to the point, saying "somewhere in the US", even if it's occasionally wrong, will not send nitwits with guns to a particular location. NANP geographical numbers can be located to a switch (give or take number portability within a LATA), but non-geographic numbers can really go anywhere. On the third hand, it's still true that the large majority of them are in the U.S.
Would you agree that 408-921 is a geographic number? I guarantee you that there are phones within that prefix within US/Calif/LATA-1 and also some well outside of that, probably not even in the same country. I will also guarantee you that those phones move locations quite frequently. Owen
NANP geographical numbers can be located to a switch (give or take number portability within a LATA), but non-geographic numbers can really go anywhere. On the third hand, it's still true that the large majority of them are in the U.S.
Would you agree that 408-921 is a geographic number?
No. It's a prefix, assigned to the at&t switch in west San Jose.
I guarantee you that there are phones within that prefix within US/Calif/LATA-1 and also some well outside of that, probably not even in the same country.
Who said anything about phones? Could you describe what "geographic numbers can be located to a switch" means to you? Helpfully, John
On Apr 13, 2016, at 12:45 , John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
NANP geographical numbers can be located to a switch (give or take number portability within a LATA), but non-geographic numbers can really go anywhere. On the third hand, it's still true that the large majority of them are in the U.S.
Would you agree that 408-921 is a geographic number?
No. It's a prefix, assigned to the at&t switch in west San Jose.
I guarantee you that there are phones within that prefix within US/Calif/LATA-1 and also some well outside of that, probably not even in the same country.
Who said anything about phones? Could you describe what "geographic numbers can be located to a switch" means to you?
I guarantee you that many, if not most at this point, of those numbers are no longer actually handled by that switch most of the time. I suspect that there are more SS7 exceptions than default within that particular prefix which is why I chose it. Owen
On 4/13/2016 15:12, Owen DeLong wrote:
I guarantee you that many, if not most at this point, of those numbers are no longer actually handled by that switch most of the time.
I suspect that there are more SS7 exceptions than default within that particular prefix which is why I chose it.
I question whether (on a global scale) the odds are above 50-50 that a number (other than a test line) is served by the switch NANPA associates with the number. I am in frequent contact by a person that has a 917 NNX-XXXX-numbered telephone who spends a lot of time with a person that has a 408 NNX-XXXX-numbered telephone, and they both live in Metropolitan Boston The number I offer as my "home" telephone number "belongs" to a CO in a town 11 miles south of here and is not switched by the company that "owns" it. Knowing a telephone number or an IP address means that on a good day, you know how to make a connection with an instrument associated with it. Which may well be in the possession of Mrs. Calabash. -- sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)
I question whether (on a global scale) the odds are above 50-50 that a number (other than a test line) is served by the switch NANPA associates with the number.
The people on nanog are not typical. I looked around for statistics and didn't find much, but it looks like only a few percent of numbers are ported each month, and it's often the same numbers being ported repeatedly. I'd also expect to find a lot more porting in the highly competitive wireless industry than in the monopolistic wireline biz. R's, John
In a message written on Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 12:29:39AM -0000, John Levine wrote:
The people on nanog are not typical. I looked around for statistics and didn't find much, but it looks like only a few percent of numbers are ported each month, and it's often the same numbers being ported repeatedly.
It's a big issue for political pollers, and they have some data: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/05/pew-research-center-will-cal... "roughly half (47%) of U.S. adults whose only phone is a cellphone." "in a recent national poll, 8% of people interviewed by cellphone in California had a phone number from a state other than California. Similarly, of the people called on a cellphone number associated with California, 10% were interviewed in a different state." So maybe 10% of all cell phones are primarly used in the "wrong" area? -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 3:32 PM, Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote: .....
So maybe 10% of all cell phones are primarly used in the "wrong" area?
Obligatory xkcd ref: https://xkcd.com/1129/
All, Is NANOG really the best place for this discussion? On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 10:45 AM, Gary Buhrmaster <gary.buhrmaster@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 3:32 PM, Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote: .....
So maybe 10% of all cell phones are primarly used in the "wrong" area?
Obligatory xkcd ref: https://xkcd.com/1129/
On 4/14/2016 10:45, Gary Buhrmaster wrote:
On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 3:32 PM, Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote: .....
So maybe 10% of all cell phones are primarly used in the "wrong" area?
Obligatory xkcd ref: https://xkcd.com/1129/
I am reminded of incidents many years ago when I worked in a Revenue Accounting Office of a Bell System Operating Company. One of my duties involved dealing with the mostly-manually-processed toll calls originating or terminating at a Mobile Telephone System station in our area (whatever the word "area" turns out to mean). We wrote off a lot of revenue on calls that involved a company (if I remembered the name I still would not repeat it--ditto its location) which turn out to be pretty much one man who like to sell and install mobile radio telephone stations. And, it turns out, not even slightly interested in separations, bill an collecting, an other stuff that dominates an Operating Company's attentions. -- sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)
On 4/14/2016 15:10, Larry Sheldon wrote:
We wrote off a lot of revenue on calls that involved a company (if I remembered the name I still would not repeat it--ditto its location) which turn out to be pretty much one man who like to sell and install mobile radio telephone stations. And, it turns out, not even slightly interested in separations, bill and collecting, an other stuff that
I think I meant "settlements", not "separations". But I'm not sure.
dominates an Operating Company's attentions.
-- sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)
On 4/14/2016 10:32, Leo Bicknell wrote:
In a message written on Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 12:29:39AM -0000, John Levine wrote:
The people on nanog are not typical. I looked around for statistics and didn't find much, but it looks like only a few percent of numbers are ported each month, and it's often the same numbers being ported repeatedly.
It's a big issue for political pollers, and they have some data:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/05/pew-research-center-will-cal...
"roughly half (47%) of U.S. adults whose only phone is a cellphone."
"in a recent national poll, 8% of people interviewed by cellphone in California had a phone number from a state other than California. Similarly, of the people called on a cellphone number associated with California, 10% were interviewed in a different state."
So maybe 10% of all cell phones are primarly used in the "wrong" area?
OK, let us suppose I want to be a law biding, up right American and use only a cellphone for the "right" area. I drive a big truck OTR. I usually know what part of which state I am in, but I frequently do not know which part of what state I will be in in 24 hours. What should I do? Suppose I was, instead, an aircrew member and the only truly stable datum is "Planet Earth"? -- sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)
OK, let us suppose I want to be a law biding, up right American and use only a cellphone for the "right" area.
I drive a big truck OTR. I usually know what part of which state I am in, but I frequently do not know which part of what state I will be in in 24 hours.
What should I do?
As previous messages have explained, mobile 9-1-1 uses a variety of GPS and tower info to determine where you are. Telcos, stupid though they may be, have figured out that people with mobile phones are likely to be, you know, mobile. If you drive a big truck, you're likely to spend a lot of time on major highways, and many of those highways have signs that tell you what to dial to contact the appropriate police for that road, e.g. *MSP on the Mass Pike. R's, John
On Apr 14, 2016, at 14:01 , John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
OK, let us suppose I want to be a law biding, up right American and use only a cellphone for the "right" area.
I drive a big truck OTR. I usually know what part of which state I am in, but I frequently do not know which part of what state I will be in in 24 hours.
What should I do?
As previous messages have explained, mobile 9-1-1 uses a variety of GPS and tower info to determine where you are. Telcos, stupid though they may be, have figured out that people with mobile phones are likely to be, you know, mobile.
Now if they could only figure this out for VOIP clients. I realize that there are fixed-location VOIP phones and they may be the majority, but I also know that there are quite a few of us with VOIP clients that are as mobile as our mobile phones, sometimes more so since my VOIP client doesn’t turn into $2/min. when I enter the wrong country. Amusingly, 128k free data from T-Mo as a mobile hot spot in many countries is quite adequate for a VOIP client while making a call on the phone would cost $$.
If you drive a big truck, you're likely to spend a lot of time on major highways, and many of those highways have signs that tell you what to dial to contact the appropriate police for that road, e.g. *MSP on the Mass Pike.
Depends on where you are. I’ve never seen such a sign anywhere on any major highway in California and mobile 911 calls in this state often get “interesting” routing. Fortunately, I’ve never encountered a dispatcher that required answers to more than one additional question in order to comply with my request that they route to the correct agency (I usually start off with enough information to tell them I know why I want to speak to the agency I am specifying, such as “I’m reporting an incident on {US/Interstate/State Hwy specification, e.g. US 101}, please transfer me to CHP” (CHP = California Highway Patrol, which has dispatch jurisdiction for all state and federal highways within California). OTOH, I’ve been in parts of Canada where the signs merely specify that there is no 911 service beyond that point without offering any alternative. Of course most of those signs were encountered well after my mobile stopped having any service whatsoever, so I always found them mildly amusing. Most of them are a giant picture of a motorola Brick phone from the late ‘80s with the message “Leaving 911 service area”. I can’t find an appropriate image to reference in a google search, but I assure you that they were common place, at least last time I was in the Yukon. Owen
On 4/14/2016 16:01, John Levine wrote:
OK, let us suppose I want to be a law biding, up right American and use only a cellphone for the "right" area.
I drive a big truck OTR. I usually know what part of which state I am in, but I frequently do not know which part of what state I will be in in 24 hours.
What should I do?
As previous messages have explained, mobile 9-1-1 uses a variety of GPS and tower info to determine where you are. Telcos, stupid though they may be, have figured out that people with mobile phones are likely to be, you know, mobile.
If you drive a big truck, you're likely to spend a lot of time on major highways, and many of those highways have signs that tell you what to dial to contact the appropriate police for that road, e.g. *MSP on the Mass Pike.
I understand all that. I quoted somebody as saying that some percentage of people use a cellphone in the wrong area code. I want never be caught in the wrong area code in my nomadic life. I think my best shot is to convince people that telephone numbers are not addresses of people and like my SSAN is assigned by somebody, I don't care who.
On Thursday, 14 April, 2016 16:32, "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org> said:
So maybe 10% of all cell phones are primarly used in the "wrong" area?
Out of curiosity, does anyone have a good pointer to the history of how / why US mobile ended up in the same numbering plan as fixed-line? Over here in the UK we had a very different approach where mobile phones went into their own area codes from the start, hence no confusion as to what type of device you were calling, and it was trivial to put the increased cost of the call on the caller. (It's *incredibly* rare, if not non-existent, here for the mobile user to pay for incoming calls or SMS). Of course, we got our own set of problems once number portability kicked in - a lot of operators had set up "free / cheap on the same network" tarrifs, which was easy while you knew for sure that 07aaa nnnnnn was Orange but 07bbb nnnnnn was O2. Once you could take your number with you to another network, it became a lot more guesss-work as to how much you were going to be billed for any given call... Regards, Tim.
So maybe 10% of all cell phones are primarly used in the "wrong" area?
Out of curiosity, does anyone have a good pointer to the history of how / why US mobile ended up in the same numbering plan as fixed-line?
The US and most of the rest of North America have a fixed length numbering plan designed in the 1940s by the Bell System. They offered it to the CCITT which for political and technical reasons decided to do something else. (So when anyone complains that the NANP is "non-standard", you had your chance.) Fixed length numbers allowed much more sophisticated call routing with mechanical switches than variable length did. For reasons not worth rehashing, there was no possibility whatsoever of adding digits or otherwise changing the numbering plan. So if they were going to do caller pays mobile, they'd need to overlay mobile area codes on top of existing codes, and there weren't enough spare codes to do that. Putting mobiles into a handful of non-geographic codes as they do in Europe wouldn't work because the US is a very large country, long distance costs and charges were important, and they needed to be able to charge more for a mobile call across the country than across the street. (The distance from Seattle to Miami or Boston to San Francisco is greater than Lisbon to Moscow or Paris to Teheran.) In the US, mobile long distance charges have mostly gone away, but my Canadian mobile still charges more for a call to a different province than one to the same city. So rather than doing caller-pays as in Europe, North America does mobile-pays, with the mobile user charged for both incoming and outgoing calls. There turn out to be good economic reasons for that -- European mobile users imagine that incoming calls are "free", but in fact they are very expensive to the caller because the caller has no say in choosing the carrier or the price. For all its faults, the competition in US mobile service drove down prices much faster than in Europe, and US users use more minutes/month than Europeans do. If you want me to call you in the UK, I'm happy to call your landline for 1.3c/min, not so happy to call your mobile at 26c/min. ObNanog: E.164 and VoIP don't make this any easier. R's, John
On Friday, 15 April, 2016 15:51, "John R. Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> said:
The US and most of the rest of North America have a fixed length numbering plan designed in the 1940s by the Bell System. They offered it to the CCITT which for political and technical reasons decided to do something else. (So when anyone complains that the NANP is "non-standard", you had your chance.) Fixed length numbers allowed much more sophisticated call routing with mechanical switches than variable length did.
[and a bunch more stuff] Thanks John - no bashing was intended, genuinely interested in the different models / histories, and that helps. Regards, Tim.
On 15/04/16 17:51, John R. Levine wrote:
Putting mobiles into a handful of non-geographic codes as they do in Europe wouldn't work because the US is a very large country, long distance costs and charges were important, and they needed to be able to charge more for a mobile call across the country than across the street.
I would like to add that Russian mobiles in non-geographic codes and have free incoming calls (it wasn't until 2006) and also very large territory. But that created internal roaming prices within country. So if you are making call not from your home region you'll pay more also you may pay for incoming call too (unless you pay for such option to make your abroad incoming calls free)
In message <571105A6.3040607@nvcube.net>, Nikolay Shopik writes:
On 15/04/16 17:51, John R. Levine wrote:
Putting mobiles into a handful of non-geographic codes as they do in Europe wouldn't work because the US is a very large country, long distance costs and charges were important, and they needed to be able to charge more for a mobile call across the country than across the street.
I would like to add that Russian mobiles in non-geographic codes and have free incoming calls (it wasn't until 2006) and also very large territory. But that created internal roaming prices within country.
So if you are making call not from your home region you'll pay more also you may pay for incoming call too (unless you pay for such option to make your abroad incoming calls free)
Australia is about the area as the US and has always had caller pays and seperate area codes for mobiles. Call costs are independent of the mobiles location unless you are OS where the callee picks up the OS component of the voice call (incoming SMS's are usually free even if you are OS, they slug you with replies however). I've also got a US SIM and had my credit run to zero dollars with the phone turned off due to the sillyness of the US system. No calls or SMS being delivered but I'm still getting charged. Mark -- Mark Andrews, ISC 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: marka@isc.org
On Apr 15, 2016, at 12:09, Mark Andrews <marka@isc.org> wrote:
In message <571105A6.3040607@nvcube.net>, Nikolay Shopik writes:
On 15/04/16 17:51, John R. Levine wrote: Putting mobiles into a handful of non-geographic codes as they do in Europe wouldn't work because the US is a very large country, long distance costs and charges were important, and they needed to be able to charge more for a mobile call across the country than across the street.
I would like to add that Russian mobiles in non-geographic codes and have free incoming calls (it wasn't until 2006) and also very large territory. But that created internal roaming prices within country.
So if you are making call not from your home region you'll pay more also you may pay for incoming call too (unless you pay for such option to make your abroad incoming calls free)
Australia is about the area as the US and has always had caller pays and seperate area codes for mobiles. Call costs are independent of the mobiles location unless you are OS where the callee picks up the OS component of the voice call (incoming SMS's are usually free even if you are OS, they slug you with replies however).
AU has about the same area, but nowhere near the number/population density, so the comparison isn't particularly apt.
I've also got a US SIM and had my credit run to zero dollars with the phone turned off due to the sillyness of the US system. No calls or SMS being delivered but I'm still getting charged.
If you are going prepaid in the US, most likely you are transient (foreign traveler) or impoverished. As such, the companies want to collect something from you for the cost of keeping your account in the system. It's a way to avoid the costs associated with number abandonment. Usually within three months (or less) of your account going to $0, your number will be recycled and likely reissued to someone else within 60 days of being marked available. It's not so much silliness as a necessity in this market. Owen
I highly doubt that your SIM card is depleted due to the US mobile phone billing structure. Sounds like a bad contract with a carrier that is billing you for incoming calls even though you aren't on the network, or bills you a fee each month when your SIM is inactive. Don't blame a country's mobile telephone billing structure for a carrier's cell phone billing plan that seems confusing. That's like blaming the Department of Transportation for your faulty airbag. Beckman On Sat, 16 Apr 2016, Mark Andrews wrote:
I've also got a US SIM and had my credit run to zero dollars with the phone turned off due to the sillyness of the US system. No calls or SMS being delivered but I'm still getting charged.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Beckman Internet Guy beckman@angryox.com http://www.angryox.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Apr 15, 2016, at 3:09 PM, Mark Andrews <marka@isc.org> wrote:
Australia is about the area as the US and has always had caller pays and seperate area codes for mobiles.
Australia has fewer people than Texas, and is more than an order of magnitude smaller than the US by population. Effects of scale apply here in terms of path dependence for solutions. David Barak Sent from mobile device, please excuse autocorrection artifacts
In message <B29E85C0-81A5-4BDB-B821-9393EF5A85BB@yahoo.com>, David Barak writes :
On Apr 15, 2016, at 3:09 PM, Mark Andrews <marka@isc.org> wrote:
Australia is about the area as the US and has always had caller pays and seperate area codes for mobiles.
Australia has fewer people than Texas, and is more than an order of magnitude smaller than the US by population. Effects of scale apply here in terms of path dependence for solutions.
David Barak Sent from mobile device, please excuse autocorrection artifacts
NA has a 10 digit scheme (3 area code - 7 local) though most of the time you end up dialing the 10 digits. Australia has a 9 digit scheme (1 area code - 8 local) Yes the area codes are huge (multi-state) and some "local" calls are sometimes long distance. In my lifetime local calls have gone from 6 digits to 7 and then 8 digits. The last change got rid of lots of area codes and expanded all the local numbers to 8 digits. This allows you to use what was a Canberra number in Sydney as they are now all in the same area code. Canberra and Sydney are a 3 hour drive apart. We are no longer in a age where we need to route calls on a digit by digit basis. Mark -- Mark Andrews, ISC 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: marka@isc.org
On 2016-04-15 17:21, Mark Andrews wrote:
Yes the area codes are huge (multi-state) and some "local" calls are sometimes long distance.
Until early 1990s, the 819 area code spanned from the US/canada Border in Québec, around Montréal (514), included the Laurentians and just about everything north all the way to Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island north of the magnetic north pole. Some exchanges reacheable only via satellite (what is now Nunavut) and some are near urban centres. And I reemember when one could dial 4 digits to call anyone in the cottage village (omitting the 819-687 prefix). When bell Canada bought northwestel, it transfered what is now Nunavut territory to NWTel which moved the 819 telephone numbers to its 867 area code which now spans from the Yukon/Alaska border to the Canada/Greenland border.
Where I live (Europe) most plans include a ton of free minutes including free calls and data in many other countries. Therefore nobody cares who pays anymore. While this is not universal yet, it probably will be within a decade. Voice calls are simply silly small amount of data that it does not make sense to charge for it and at the same time have gigs of free data included. Technically it is the receiver that pays the cell tax when accepting SIP calls. But nobody cares unless roaming in countries where you still pay data roaming tax at a rate that ought to be illegal. Regards Baldur
NA has a 10 digit scheme (3 area code - 7 local) though most of the time you end up dialing the 10 digits.
Australia has a 9 digit scheme (1 area code - 8 local) ...
North America uses en bloc signalling, Australia uses CCITT style compelled signalling. That's why you have variable length numbers and the split between area code and local number can change.
We are no longer in a age where we need to route calls on a digit by digit basis.
Right. North America left that age in 1947, the rest of the world only caught up in the 2000s. R's, John
On Apr 15, 2016, at 2:21 PM, Mark Andrews <marka@isc.org> wrote:
In message <B29E85C0-81A5-4BDB-B821-9393EF5A85BB@yahoo.com>, David Barak writes :
On Apr 15, 2016, at 3:09 PM, Mark Andrews <marka@isc.org> wrote:
Australia is about the area as the US and has always had caller pays and seperate area codes for mobiles.
Australia has fewer people than Texas, and is more than an order of magnitude smaller than the US by population. Effects of scale apply here in terms of path dependence for solutions.
David Barak Sent from mobile device, please excuse autocorrection artifacts
NA has a 10 digit scheme (3 area code - 7 local) though most of the time you end up dialing the 10 digits.
Not an entirely accurate description. In fact, in the US, it’s more of a 3-tier mechanism… 3 area code, 3 prefix, 4 local. As a general rule, a prefix exists within a single CO (modulo cutouts for LNP, etc.). There are usually multiple prefixes per CO since most COs serve significantly more than 10,000 numbers. In the US, Area codes do not cross state lines and in most cases do not cross LATA boundaries, either. For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single local calling area (calls to/from anywhere in those three countries are the same price (generally included/free) as calls between two phones standing next to each other.
Australia has a 9 digit scheme (1 area code - 8 local)
Yes the area codes are huge (multi-state) and some "local" calls are sometimes long distance. In my lifetime local calls have gone from 6 digits to 7 and then 8 digits. The last change got rid of lots of area codes and expanded all the local numbers to 8 digits. This allows you to use what was a Canberra number in Sydney as they are now all in the same area code. Canberra and Sydney are a 3 hour drive apart.
We are no longer in a age where we need to route calls on a digit by digit basis.
While this is true, there are still significant differences in scale and cost structures between AU and US. Owen
On 2016-04-20 10:52, Owen DeLong wrote:
For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single local calling area
Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach other carriers for "free" Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at retail level ?
On Apr 20, 2016, at 7:59 AM, Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> wrote:
On 2016-04-20 10:52, Owen DeLong wrote:
For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single local calling area
Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach other carriers for "free"
Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at retail level ?
I think it boiled down to a recognition that the costs of billing were beginning to account for something like $0.99 of every $1 billed. Owen
On 4/20/2016 10:15, Owen DeLong wrote:
On Apr 20, 2016, at 7:59 AM, Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> wrote:
On 2016-04-20 10:52, Owen DeLong wrote:
For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single local calling area
Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach other carriers for "free"
Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at retail level ?
I think it boiled down to a recognition that the costs of billing were beginning to account for something like $0.99 of every $1 billed.
I wonder if the costs of avoiding-preventing-investigating toll fraud final grow to consume the profit in the product. I know that long ago there were things that I thought were insanely silly. A few examples: As an ordinary citizen I was amused and annoyed, in the case where a toll charge had been contested (and perforce refunded) there would often be several non-revenue calls to the protesting number asking whoever answered if they knew anybody in the called city, or if they knew who the called number belonged to. (Proper answer in any case: Who or what I know is none of your business.) Often there would calls to the called number (super irritating because the error was in the recording--later learned to be poor handwriting) asking the reciprocal questions except that often they had no idea that a call had been made. I was a Toll Transmissionman for a number or years back in the last iceage and one of the onerous tasks the supervisor had was "verifying the phone bill" which might be a stack as much as six inches tall. The evening shift supervisor (or one of them in a large office, like Los Angeles 1 Telegraph, where I worked for a while) would go through the bill, line by line, page by page, looking at the called number an d if he recognized it and placing a check mark next to it, If he did not recognize it, he would search the many lists in the office to see it was shown, and adding a check mark if a list showed it for a likely sounding legal call. If that didn't work he would probably have to call the number to see who answered (adding a wasted revenue-call path to the wreckage). Most often it would turn out to be the home telephone number of a repair supervisor in West Sweatsock, Montana, who had been called because a somebody who protested the policy that the repairman going fishing meant some problem would not be addressed for several days. So he put a check mark next to the number and moved on. Which meant the number would show up on the next month's bill. And it would again not be recognized from memory. And so forth and so on. Until eventually, after several months, the number would be recognized, check-marked without drama, and disappear forever from the bill. Lastly, in later years I was assigned to the the Revenue Accounting organization (to write programs for printing telephone books) and came to realize that there were a LOT of people in RA working with a LOT of people in the Chief Special Agents organization using a LOT of computer time to analyze Toll records for fraud patterns. Oops, not quite lastly.... Looking back at my Toll Plant days in the heyday of Captain Crunch--there were a lot engineering hours redesigning Toll equipment, and plant hours modifying or replacing equipment do defeat the engineering efforts of the Blue Box Boys. -- "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." --Albert Einstein
On Apr 26, 2016, at 12:10 , Larry Sheldon <larrysheldon@cox.net> wrote:
On 4/20/2016 10:15, Owen DeLong wrote:
On Apr 20, 2016, at 7:59 AM, Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> wrote:
On 2016-04-20 10:52, Owen DeLong wrote:
For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single local calling area
Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach other carriers for "free"
Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at retail level ?
I think it boiled down to a recognition that the costs of billing were beginning to account for something like $0.99 of every $1 billed.
I wonder if the costs of avoiding-preventing-investigating toll fraud final grow to consume the profit in the product.
IIRC, mostly it boiled down to the maintenance of the antiquated SMDR equipment and its interface to the even more antiquated billing systems was getting expensive to keep running and that there was no perceived potential whatsoever for ROI on building a new billing system or new SMDR capabilities.
I know that long ago there were things that I thought were insanely silly. A few examples:
As an ordinary citizen I was amused and annoyed, in the case where a toll charge had been contested (and perforce refunded) there would often be several non-revenue calls to the protesting number asking whoever answered if they knew anybody in the called city, or if they knew who the called number belonged to. (Proper answer in any case: Who or what I know is none of your business.) Often there would calls to the called number (super irritating because the error was in the recording--later learned to be poor handwriting) asking the reciprocal questions except that often they had no idea that a call had been made.
ROFLMAO… Yeah. Next time we’re in the same locale, ask me about my 2.5 year argument with Pacific Bell about direct dial calls to Vietnam and the Philippines from my apartment in Richmond. There should be alcohol involved.
I was a Toll Transmissionman for a number or years back in the last iceage and one of the onerous tasks the supervisor had was "verifying the phone bill" which might be a stack as much as six inches tall. The evening shift supervisor (or one of them in a large office, like Los Angeles 1 Telegraph, where I worked for a while) would go through the bill, line by line, page by page, looking at the called number an d if he recognized it and placing a check mark next to it, If he did not recognize it, he would search the many lists in the office to see it was shown, and adding a check mark if a list showed it for a likely sounding legal call. If that didn't work he would probably have to call the number to see who answered (adding a wasted revenue-call path to the wreckage). Most often it would turn out to be the home telephone number of a repair supervisor in West Sweatsock, Montana, who had been called because a somebody who protested the policy that the repairman going fishing meant some problem would not be addressed for several days. So he put a check mark next to the number and moved on.
Which meant the number would show up on the next month's bill. And it would again not be recognized from memory. And so forth and so on. Until eventually, after several months, the number would be recognized, check-marked without drama, and disappear forever from the bill.
Lastly, in later years I was assigned to the the Revenue Accounting organization (to write programs for printing telephone books) and came to realize that there were a LOT of people in RA working with a LOT of people in the Chief Special Agents organization using a LOT of computer time to analyze Toll records for fraud patterns.
Oops, not quite lastly.... Looking back at my Toll Plant days in the heyday of Captain Crunch--there were a lot engineering hours redesigning Toll equipment, and plant hours modifying or replacing equipment do defeat the engineering efforts of the Blue Box Boys.
I really liked it while my Blue Box still worked. lol For a while, SS7 was the bane of my existence. Fun times!! When a minute of long distance from California to New York was $0.35+, there was enough money in the billing process to cover the costs of tracking the minute. Once it got down to $0.03 and then $0.01, that really took a lot of the margin away. One thing I always found particularly amusing was that it used to be a toll call to call from San Jose East (408238) to Sunnyvale (I forget the NPA/NXX), but that there were several prefixes in San Jose West (e.g. 408360 IIRC) where it was free to call from San Jose East and could place a free call to Sunnyvale. I also discovered that a single line with call forwarding was relatively cheap per month and could forward many calls into a hunt group. So, we used to extend the toll-free reach of BBS systems by finding “friends” with houses in strategic prefixes and having them install a single telephone line with call forwarding. Then, once the line was installed, we’d run over to the location, program the forwarder to go to the BBS hunt lead number and voila… Instant toll free unlimited BBS calling for another 20-30 prefixes for less than $15/month and completely legal. At first, we thought we had to hide what we were doing as we were sure that the phone company would object, but we later discovered that absent a PUC proceeding to change the tariff they really didn’t have anything they could say about it. We started showing up on the day of install to dial in the forwarding and confirm functionality while the tech was still on site. You should have seen some of the reactions when we showed up with a butt set, set up call forwarding, told someone to make a test call and waited for positive confirmation. Priceless. Owen
On 27/04/16 09:16, Owen DeLong wrote:
One thing I always found particularly amusing was that it used to be a toll call to call from San Jose East (408238) to Sunnyvale (I forget the NPA/NXX), but that there were several prefixes in San Jose West (e.g. 408360 IIRC) where it was free to call from San Jose East and could place a free call to Sunnyvale.
I also discovered that a single line with call forwarding was relatively cheap per month and could forward many calls into a hunt group.
So, we used to extend the toll-free reach of BBS systems by finding “friends” with houses in strategic prefixes and having them install a single telephone line with call forwarding. Then, once the line was installed, we’d run over to the location, program the forwarder to go to the BBS hunt lead number and voila… Instant toll free unlimited BBS calling for another 20-30 prefixes for less than $15/month and completely legal.
At first, we thought we had to hide what we were doing as we were sure that the phone company would object, but we later discovered that absent a PUC proceeding to change the tariff they really didn’t have anything they could say about it. We started showing up on the day of install to dial in the forwarding and confirm functionality while the tech was still on site. You should have seen some of the reactions when we showed up with a butt set, set up call forwarding, told someone to make a test call and waited for positive confirmation. Priceless.
Similar things happened in Australia, with more than one ISP using this to offer lower-toll dial-in numbers to their customers back in the day.
On our VOIP service we include US, Canada and Puerto Rico as "local" calling. Regards, Ray Orsini – CEO Orsini IT, LLC – Technology Consultants VOICE DATA BANDWIDTH SECURITY SUPPORT P: 305.967.6756 x1009 E: ray@orsiniit.com TF: 844.OIT.VOIP 7900 NW 155th Street, Suite 103, Miami Lakes, FL 33016 http://www.orsiniit.com | View My Calendar | View/Pay Your Invoices | View Your Tickets -----Original Message----- From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces+ray=orsiniit.com@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Larry Sheldon Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2016 3:11 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences On 4/20/2016 10:15, Owen DeLong wrote:
On Apr 20, 2016, at 7:59 AM, Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> wrote:
On 2016-04-20 10:52, Owen DeLong wrote:
For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single local calling area
Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach other carriers for "free"
Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at retail level ?
I think it boiled down to a recognition that the costs of billing were beginning to account for something like $0.99 of every $1 billed.
I wonder if the costs of avoiding-preventing-investigating toll fraud final grow to consume the profit in the product. I know that long ago there were things that I thought were insanely silly. A few examples: As an ordinary citizen I was amused and annoyed, in the case where a toll charge had been contested (and perforce refunded) there would often be several non-revenue calls to the protesting number asking whoever answered if they knew anybody in the called city, or if they knew who the called number belonged to. (Proper answer in any case: Who or what I know is none of your business.) Often there would calls to the called number (super irritating because the error was in the recording--later learned to be poor handwriting) asking the reciprocal questions except that often they had no idea that a call had been made. I was a Toll Transmissionman for a number or years back in the last iceage and one of the onerous tasks the supervisor had was "verifying the phone bill" which might be a stack as much as six inches tall. The evening shift supervisor (or one of them in a large office, like Los Angeles 1 Telegraph, where I worked for a while) would go through the bill, line by line, page by page, looking at the called number an d if he recognized it and placing a check mark next to it, If he did not recognize it, he would search the many lists in the office to see it was shown, and adding a check mark if a list showed it for a likely sounding legal call. If that didn't work he would probably have to call the number to see who answered (adding a wasted revenue-call path to the wreckage). Most often it would turn out to be the home telephone number of a repair supervisor in West Sweatsock, Montana, who had been called because a somebody who protested the policy that the repairman going fishing meant some problem would not be addressed for several days. So he put a check mark next to the number and moved on. Which meant the number would show up on the next month's bill. And it would again not be recognized from memory. And so forth and so on. Until eventually, after several months, the number would be recognized, check-marked without drama, and disappear forever from the bill. Lastly, in later years I was assigned to the the Revenue Accounting organization (to write programs for printing telephone books) and came to realize that there were a LOT of people in RA working with a LOT of people in the Chief Special Agents organization using a LOT of computer time to analyze Toll records for fraud patterns. Oops, not quite lastly.... Looking back at my Toll Plant days in the heyday of Captain Crunch--there were a lot engineering hours redesigning Toll equipment, and plant hours modifying or replacing equipment do defeat the engineering efforts of the Blue Box Boys. -- "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." --Albert Einstein
I would imagine for VOIP that's because all three are country code 1 :) On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 7:50 PM, Ray Orsini <ray@orsiniit.com> wrote:
On our VOIP service we include US, Canada and Puerto Rico as "local" calling.
Regards,
Ray Orsini – CEO Orsini IT, LLC – Technology Consultants VOICE DATA BANDWIDTH SECURITY SUPPORT P: 305.967.6756 x1009 E: ray@orsiniit.com TF: 844.OIT.VOIP 7900 NW 155th Street, Suite 103, Miami Lakes, FL 33016 http://www.orsiniit.com | View My Calendar | View/Pay Your Invoices | View Your Tickets
-----Original Message----- From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces+ray=orsiniit.com@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Larry Sheldon Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2016 3:11 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences
On 4/20/2016 10:15, Owen DeLong wrote:
On Apr 20, 2016, at 7:59 AM, Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> wrote:
On 2016-04-20 10:52, Owen DeLong wrote:
For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single local calling area
Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach other carriers for "free"
Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at retail level ?
I think it boiled down to a recognition that the costs of billing were beginning to account for something like $0.99 of every $1 billed.
I wonder if the costs of avoiding-preventing-investigating toll fraud final grow to consume the profit in the product.
I know that long ago there were things that I thought were insanely silly. A few examples:
As an ordinary citizen I was amused and annoyed, in the case where a toll charge had been contested (and perforce refunded) there would often be several non-revenue calls to the protesting number asking whoever answered if they knew anybody in the called city, or if they knew who the called number belonged to. (Proper answer in any case: Who or what I know is none of your business.) Often there would calls to the called number (super irritating because the error was in the recording--later learned to be poor handwriting) asking the reciprocal questions except that often they had no idea that a call had been made.
I was a Toll Transmissionman for a number or years back in the last iceage and one of the onerous tasks the supervisor had was "verifying the phone bill" which might be a stack as much as six inches tall. The evening shift supervisor (or one of them in a large office, like Los Angeles 1 Telegraph, where I worked for a while) would go through the bill, line by line, page by page, looking at the called number an d if he recognized it and placing a check mark next to it, If he did not recognize it, he would search the many lists in the office to see it was shown, and adding a check mark if a list showed it for a likely sounding legal call. If that didn't work he would probably have to call the number to see who answered (adding a wasted revenue-call path to the wreckage). Most often it would turn out to be the home telephone number of a repair supervisor in West Sweatsock, Montana, who had been called because a somebody who protested the policy that the repairman going fishing meant some problem would not be addressed for several days. So he put a check mark next to the number and moved on.
Which meant the number would show up on the next month's bill. And it would again not be recognized from memory. And so forth and so on. Until eventually, after several months, the number would be recognized, check-marked without drama, and disappear forever from the bill.
Lastly, in later years I was assigned to the the Revenue Accounting organization (to write programs for printing telephone books) and came to realize that there were a LOT of people in RA working with a LOT of people in the Chief Special Agents organization using a LOT of computer time to analyze Toll records for fraud patterns.
Oops, not quite lastly.... Looking back at my Toll Plant days in the heyday of Captain Crunch--there were a lot engineering hours redesigning Toll equipment, and plant hours modifying or replacing equipment do defeat the engineering efforts of the Blue Box Boys.
-- "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."
--Albert Einstein
On our VOIP service we include US, Canada and Puerto Rico as "local" calling.
I would imagine for VOIP that's because all three are country code 1 :)
If you know a VoIP carrier that offers flat rates to 1-473, 1-664, and 1-767, I know some people who'd like to talk to you. At great length. R's, John
One toll defeat trick that worked in GTE land in Southern California was to call the operator, then silently wait for them to hang up. Rattle the receiver hook several times for them to come back on the line and they would not know the caller's telephone number. -----Original Message----- From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces+matthew.black=csulb.edu@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Larry Sheldon Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2016 12:11 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences On 4/20/2016 10:15, Owen DeLong wrote:
On Apr 20, 2016, at 7:59 AM, Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> wrote:
On 2016-04-20 10:52, Owen DeLong wrote:
For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single local calling area
Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach other carriers for "free"
Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at retail level ?
I think it boiled down to a recognition that the costs of billing were beginning to account for something like $0.99 of every $1 billed.
I wonder if the costs of avoiding-preventing-investigating toll fraud final grow to consume the profit in the product. I know that long ago there were things that I thought were insanely silly. A few examples: As an ordinary citizen I was amused and annoyed, in the case where a toll charge had been contested (and perforce refunded) there would often be several non-revenue calls to the protesting number asking whoever answered if they knew anybody in the called city, or if they knew who the called number belonged to. (Proper answer in any case: Who or what I know is none of your business.) Often there would calls to the called number (super irritating because the error was in the recording--later learned to be poor handwriting) asking the reciprocal questions except that often they had no idea that a call had been made. I was a Toll Transmissionman for a number or years back in the last iceage and one of the onerous tasks the supervisor had was "verifying the phone bill" which might be a stack as much as six inches tall. The evening shift supervisor (or one of them in a large office, like Los Angeles 1 Telegraph, where I worked for a while) would go through the bill, line by line, page by page, looking at the called number an d if he recognized it and placing a check mark next to it, If he did not recognize it, he would search the many lists in the office to see it was shown, and adding a check mark if a list showed it for a likely sounding legal call. If that didn't work he would probably have to call the number to see who answered (adding a wasted revenue-call path to the wreckage). Most often it would turn out to be the home telephone number of a repair supervisor in West Sweatsock, Montana, who had been called because a somebody who protested the policy that the repairman going fishing meant some problem would not be addressed for several days. So he put a check mark next to the number and moved on. Which meant the number would show up on the next month's bill. And it would again not be recognized from memory. And so forth and so on. Until eventually, after several months, the number would be recognized, check-marked without drama, and disappear forever from the bill. Lastly, in later years I was assigned to the the Revenue Accounting organization (to write programs for printing telephone books) and came to realize that there were a LOT of people in RA working with a LOT of people in the Chief Special Agents organization using a LOT of computer time to analyze Toll records for fraud patterns. Oops, not quite lastly.... Looking back at my Toll Plant days in the heyday of Captain Crunch--there were a lot engineering hours redesigning Toll equipment, and plant hours modifying or replacing equipment do defeat the engineering efforts of the Blue Box Boys. -- "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." --Albert Einstein
For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single local calling area
Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach other carriers for "free"
No, it's because fiber bandwidth is so cheap. It's equally cheap whether the framing is ATM or IP.
Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at retail level ?
Some of each. Some carriers do reciprocal compensation at very low rates, small fractions of a cent per minute, some do bill and keep with no settlements at all. The history of settlements is closely tied to the history of the Internet. Before the Bell breakup separations (within Bell) and settlements (between Bell and independents) were uncontentious, moving money around to make the rate of return on invested capital at each carrier come out right. Then when cell phones were new, the Bell companies observed that traffic was highly imbalanced, far more cell->landline than the other way, so they demanded high reciprocal compensation, and the cellcos were willing to pay since it gave the Bells the incentive to build the interconnecting trunks. One of Verizon's predecessors famously derided "bilk and keep." Then the dialup Internet became a big thing, the Bells ignored it as a passing fad (which it was, but not for the reasons they thought), and CLECs realized they could build modem banks and make a lot of money from the incoming calls from Bell customers to the modems. So the Bells did a pirouette and suddenly discovered that bill and keep was a law of nature and recip comp was a quaint artifact that needed to be snuffed out as fast as possible. These days the FCC likes to see cost justifications for settlements, and the actual per-minute cost of calls is tiny compared to the fixed costs of the links and equipment. The main place where you see settlements is to tiny local telcos with very high costs, with the per minute payments a deliberate subsidy to them. Then some greedy little telcos added conference call lines to pump up their incoming traffic ... R's, John
Great explanation! Remember that LECs (Local Exchange Carrier, CenturyLink, Verizon, etc.) typically get to decide how this all works... ATT is still an 800 pound gorilla and a couple years ago stopped ALL payments to CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier, buy wholesale from LECs), took them all to court (which for a CLEC, it is almost impossible to find a good lawyer not on retainer to a LEC) and basically just told everyone what they would pay... Since all the LECs started offering unlimited long distance, they could not afford the termination fees. So... They changed them!!! Telco is very different from data, not in the physical aspects, but in the business and political areas. On 4/20/16 9:20 AM, John Levine wrote:
For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single local calling area Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach other carriers for "free" No, it's because fiber bandwidth is so cheap. It's equally cheap whether the framing is ATM or IP.
Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at retail level ? Some of each. Some carriers do reciprocal compensation at very low rates, small fractions of a cent per minute, some do bill and keep with no settlements at all.
The history of settlements is closely tied to the history of the Internet. Before the Bell breakup separations (within Bell) and settlements (between Bell and independents) were uncontentious, moving money around to make the rate of return on invested capital at each carrier come out right.
Then when cell phones were new, the Bell companies observed that traffic was highly imbalanced, far more cell->landline than the other way, so they demanded high reciprocal compensation, and the cellcos were willing to pay since it gave the Bells the incentive to build the interconnecting trunks. One of Verizon's predecessors famously derided "bilk and keep."
Then the dialup Internet became a big thing, the Bells ignored it as a passing fad (which it was, but not for the reasons they thought), and CLECs realized they could build modem banks and make a lot of money from the incoming calls from Bell customers to the modems. So the Bells did a pirouette and suddenly discovered that bill and keep was a law of nature and recip comp was a quaint artifact that needed to be snuffed out as fast as possible.
These days the FCC likes to see cost justifications for settlements, and the actual per-minute cost of calls is tiny compared to the fixed costs of the links and equipment. The main place where you see settlements is to tiny local telcos with very high costs, with the per minute payments a deliberate subsidy to them. Then some greedy little telcos added conference call lines to pump up their incoming traffic ...
R's, John
Dan, I think that you mean that AT&T is the 1-800 pound gorilla. I know engineers at AT&T that are bitter about that whole arrangement this many years on. I miss the glory days of everyone and their uncle spinning up a CLEC in the mid-90's. It made the ordering process complicated, especially if you were looking for local loop diversity and had to dig into which ILEC circuit things wee riding. Of course we were still doing lots of ISDN and the introduction of DSL was making life interesting for the smaller regional ISPs as well. Cheers, RT Sent from my PINE emulated client
On Apr 20, 2016, at 12:02 PM, Dan Lacey <daniel.p.lacey@gmail.com> wrote:
Great explanation!
Remember that LECs (Local Exchange Carrier, CenturyLink, Verizon, etc.) typically get to decide how this all works... ATT is still an 800 pound gorilla and a couple years ago stopped ALL payments to CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier, buy wholesale from LECs), took them all to court (which for a CLEC, it is almost impossible to find a good lawyer not on retainer to a LEC) and basically just told everyone what they would pay...
Since all the LECs started offering unlimited long distance, they could not afford the termination fees. So... They changed them!!!
Telco is very different from data, not in the physical aspects, but in the business and political areas.
On 4/20/16 9:20 AM, John Levine wrote:
For the most part, “long distance” calls within the US are a thing of the past and at least one mobile carrier now treats US/CA/MX as a single local calling area Is this a case of telcos having switched to IP trunks and can reach other carriers for "free" No, it's because fiber bandwidth is so cheap. It's equally cheap whether the framing is ATM or IP.
Or are wholesale long distance still billed between carriers but at prices so low that they can afford to offer "free" long distance at retail level ? Some of each. Some carriers do reciprocal compensation at very low rates, small fractions of a cent per minute, some do bill and keep with no settlements at all.
The history of settlements is closely tied to the history of the Internet. Before the Bell breakup separations (within Bell) and settlements (between Bell and independents) were uncontentious, moving money around to make the rate of return on invested capital at each carrier come out right.
Then when cell phones were new, the Bell companies observed that traffic was highly imbalanced, far more cell->landline than the other way, so they demanded high reciprocal compensation, and the cellcos were willing to pay since it gave the Bells the incentive to build the interconnecting trunks. One of Verizon's predecessors famously derided "bilk and keep."
Then the dialup Internet became a big thing, the Bells ignored it as a passing fad (which it was, but not for the reasons they thought), and CLECs realized they could build modem banks and make a lot of money from the incoming calls from Bell customers to the modems. So the Bells did a pirouette and suddenly discovered that bill and keep was a law of nature and recip comp was a quaint artifact that needed to be snuffed out as fast as possible.
These days the FCC likes to see cost justifications for settlements, and the actual per-minute cost of calls is tiny compared to the fixed costs of the links and equipment. The main place where you see settlements is to tiny local telcos with very high costs, with the per minute payments a deliberate subsidy to them. Then some greedy little telcos added conference call lines to pump up their incoming traffic ...
R's, John
In a message written on Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 09:49:37AM +0100, tim@pelican.org wrote:
Out of curiosity, does anyone have a good pointer to the history of how / why US mobile ended up in the same numbering plan as fixed-line?
The other answers address the history here better than I ever good, but I wanted to point out one example I hadn't seen mentioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_code_917 917 was originally a mobile only area code overlay in New York City. For reasons that are unclear to me, after that experiement it was decided that the US would never do that again. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
This makes me wonder what the 'market value' of a 212 DID is. I have seen them anywhere from $55 to $600 from providers specifically saying "buy this DID and port it out to your carrier of choice". On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 7:06 AM, Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote:
In a message written on Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 09:49:37AM +0100, tim@pelican.org wrote:
Out of curiosity, does anyone have a good pointer to the history of how / why US mobile ended up in the same numbering plan as fixed-line?
The other answers address the history here better than I ever good, but I wanted to point out one example I hadn't seen mentioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_code_917
917 was originally a mobile only area code overlay in New York City. For reasons that are unclear to me, after that experiement it was decided that the US would never do that again.
-- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
The other answers address the history here better than I ever good, but I wanted to point out one example I hadn't seen mentioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_code_917
917 was originally a mobile only area code overlay in New York City. For reasons that are unclear to me, after that experiment it was decided that the US would never do that again.
The FCC found in 1999 that service-specific overlays are "unreasonably discriminatory and anti-competitive." I gather the thinking at the time was that 917 was full of pagers, voice mail, and car phones, while "real" phones were in 212. Times have changed and they're now prepared to approve an overlay in Connecticut that would cover the whole state, both area codes 203 and 860, with the new area code used for services that are not location specific, for which they give mobile phones and Onstar as examples. R's, John
On 4/13/16 4:28 PM, Larry Sheldon wrote:
I am in frequent contact by a person that has a 917 NNX-XXXX-numbered telephone who spends a lot of time with a person that has a 408 NNX-XXXX-numbered telephone, and they both live in Metropolitan Boston
When either of those people dial 9-1-1, where does the ambulance show up? -- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay@impulse.net Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/ Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV
On Wed, 13 Apr 2016, Jay Hennigan wrote:
On 4/13/16 4:28 PM, Larry Sheldon wrote:
I am in frequent contact by a person that has a 917 NNX-XXXX-numbered telephone who spends a lot of time with a person that has a 408 NNX-XXXX-numbered telephone, and they both live in Metropolitan Boston
When either of those people dial 9-1-1, where does the ambulance show up?
I suspect your response was sarcastic, but when you dig into what really happens, it's not nearly as sophisticated as one might hope. If the numbers are land or VoIP lines, and the address associated with the numbers are registered with the Automatic Location Information (ALI) database run by ILECs or 3rd parties to fetch the address keyed on the calling number, and the 911 PSAP is E911 capable, they operator will see the ALI address. If they are mobile devices, it depends. Basic gives you nothing (all phones since 2003 should have GPS, but people hang on to phones a long time..); Phase I Enhanced gives you the location of the cell site/tower, Phase II gives you lat/lon within 50 to 300 meters within 6 minutes of a request by the PSAP. Yep, the PSAP has to make a request for the phone location to the carrier, in which they have 6 minutes to reply. I assume this is or can be automated. After 6 minutes, you could be a long way away from where you started the call. If the phone numbers are not in the ALI, or are not wireless, or the PSAP (Public Safety Answering Point, the 911 office) is not set up for e911, they probably get nothing, relying solely on the caller to provide location information. Beckman --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Beckman Internet Guy beckman@angryox.com http://www.angryox.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 4/13/16 8:54 PM, Peter Beckman wrote:
On Wed, 13 Apr 2016, Jay Hennigan wrote:
When either of those people dial 9-1-1, where does the ambulance show up?
I suspect your response was sarcastic, but when you dig into what really happens, it's not nearly as sophisticated as one might hope.
If the numbers are land or VoIP lines, and the address associated with the numbers are registered with the Automatic Location Information (ALI) database run by ILECs or 3rd parties to fetch the address keyed on the calling number, and the 911 PSAP is E911 capable, they operator will see the ALI address.
If they're land lines, the NPA/NXX will be local to the CO so you won't have out-of-area numbers other than a rare corner case of a very expensive foreign exchange line. If they're VoIP lines, the address is *supposed* to be so registered, but softphones and even VoIP handsets tend to move around without the user considering 9-1-1. VoIP was the scenario to which I was referring. A VoIP phone native to 408-land that moves with a remote office worker to Boston without a conscious effort on his company and VoIP provider to track it down and update ALI will reach a PSAP in San Jose or thereabouts. The PSAPs have forwarding capability but generally only to neighboring PSAPs with a single button. How quickly will they be able to get the call routed to Boston, if at all? And as we saw at the beginning of the thread, forget geo-IP. The ambulance goes to the Vogelmans' farm. If a remote office worker, it could be VPN back to the VoIP PBX in 408-land anyway. So, it isn't just IP addresses that aren't easily geo-referenced. It's also phone numbers. The number may start as a well-referenced PRI going to an IP-PBX after which all bets are off. If the ANI is the company's HQ main number where the PRI and IP-PBX are located, then it's just about impossible to route 9-1-1 from a worker's IP phone in Boston to the right PSAP.
If they are mobile devices, it depends. Basic gives you nothing (all phones since 2003 should have GPS, but people hang on to phones a long time..);
Mobile is a separate case where it's expected that the NPA-NXX isn't going to be tied to a location. In California, mobile 9-1-1 goes to the CHP and not the local PSAP based on the cell tower or GPS for that reason. If not a traffic incident, they forward to the appropriate PSAP based on the caller's info or perhaps whatever ALI (or estimate) they get from the cellular provider. -- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay@impulse.net Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/ Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV
If they're land lines, the NPA/NXX will be local to the CO so you won't have out-of-area numbers other than a rare corner case of a very expensive foreign exchange line. If they're VoIP lines, the address is *supposed* to be so registered, but softphones and even VoIP handsets tend to move around without the user considering 9-1-1.
VoIP was dragged kicking and screaming into E911, so now they charge extra and are quite clear about it. My VoIP provider regularly reminds me to update my 9-1-1 address, but since I don't have to pay the 9-1-1 fee if I lie and say I'm outside North America, that's what I do. Since I also have a classic CO-powered copper landline (1/4 mile from the CO, no concentrators or repeaters) and a couple of cell phones, I think we're covered. R's, John
On Apr 14, 2016, at 05:46 , John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
If they're land lines, the NPA/NXX will be local to the CO so you won't have out-of-area numbers other than a rare corner case of a very expensive foreign exchange line. If they're VoIP lines, the address is *supposed* to be so registered, but softphones and even VoIP handsets tend to move around without the user considering 9-1-1.
VoIP was dragged kicking and screaming into E911, so now they charge extra and are quite clear about it. My VoIP provider regularly reminds me to update my 9-1-1 address, but since I don't have to pay the 9-1-1 fee if I lie and say I'm outside North America, that's what I do. Since I also have a classic CO-powered copper landline (1/4 mile from the CO, no concentrators or repeaters) and a couple of cell phones, I think we're covered.
With my VOIP provider, I didn’t quite have to lie. I generally don’t need my VOIP number when I’m in the US (cell is free here), so I simply told them “I do not intend to use this number or this service within the US”. The first time I sent them a marked-up contract, they contacted me with questions. The following year, the new version of the contract reflected my changes to their original wording. Since then, I’ve been pretty much satisfied with my service from callcentric and the price is right. Owen
On 4/14/2016 12:09, Owen DeLong wrote:
On Apr 14, 2016, at 05:46 , John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
If they're land lines, the NPA/NXX will be local to the CO so you won't have out-of-area numbers other than a rare corner case of a very expensive foreign exchange line. If they're VoIP lines, the address is *supposed* to be so registered, but softphones and even VoIP handsets tend to move around without the user considering 9-1-1.
VoIP was dragged kicking and screaming into E911, so now they charge extra and are quite clear about it. My VoIP provider regularly reminds me to update my 9-1-1 address, but since I don't have to pay the 9-1-1 fee if I lie and say I'm outside North America, that's what I do. Since I also have a classic CO-powered copper landline (1/4 mile from the CO, no concentrators or repeaters) and a couple of cell phones, I think we're covered.
With my VOIP provider, I didn’t quite have to lie.
I generally don’t need my VOIP number when I’m in the US (cell is free here), so I simply told them “I do not intend to use this number or this service within the US”.
The first time I sent them a marked-up contract, they contacted me with questions. The following year, the new version of the contract reflected my changes to their original wording.
Since then, I’ve been pretty much satisfied with my service from callcentric and the price is right.
Quick question: What happens (in the purely hypothetical case, I sincerely hope) if the building is on fire and it turns out that the VOIP-phone is the only one that works? Do you leave it turned off? -- sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)
On 2016-04-14 16:14, Larry Sheldon wrote:
Quick question: What happens (in the purely hypothetical case, I sincerely hope) if the building is on fire and it turns out that the VOIP-phone is the only one that works?
VOIP: Not purely theoretical situation. 911 where I live would take about 10 minutes of repeating my address and spelling it out to different people as I got passed around until I finally got to fire dept where I could finally and one last time spell out address. (I live on Fairwood, there is a street near here Sherwood). My ISP geolocates to a different down in south shore of montreal). What I do now: I have the actual telephone number for the fire station 3 blocks from where I live. When appt building alarm rings (we're not directly connected), I call the actual dept "have you received a call for <address>, we're on fire". They say "no, we haven't". I say "expect one in about 10 minutes once I get through the 911 bozos". When you call 911, you first have to select from a gazillion languages. Cell phone: Got hit by hit and run, but managed to stay on my bike. Arm hurt like hell. Was mad as hell. Made mistake of calling 911 who refused to pass me to Sureté du Québec police (rural area). I was hoping they had a car that was in area and could intercept that white car as it intersected with main road a few km down the road. 911 insisted they send an ambulance, that I was in shock etc etc. They asked me to spell out the street I was on. Told them I had to get to the next intersection with a country rd to see the spelling. (meanwhile, they insist I don't move because they want to send ambulance, not believing I was still on my bike rolling at low speed). At no point did they give me ANY indication they had my location from towers or my iphone. When I finally go through to the SQ, we arranged to meet at intersection with main road. They saw my bruised arm, and saw I was quite mad/nervous/in shock. They told me to bypass 911 alltogether and call *4141 to get them right away and that they have the same tools to locate a call. ((in hindsight, drunk young guys accelerated to high speed and passed right next to me and threw something at me which it my arm at high speed. Initially though I had hit their mirror but mirror t low to have hit near shoulder).
On Apr 14, 2016, at 13:14 , Larry Sheldon <larrysheldon@cox.net> wrote:
On 4/14/2016 12:09, Owen DeLong wrote:
On Apr 14, 2016, at 05:46 , John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
If they're land lines, the NPA/NXX will be local to the CO so you won't have out-of-area numbers other than a rare corner case of a very expensive foreign exchange line. If they're VoIP lines, the address is *supposed* to be so registered, but softphones and even VoIP handsets tend to move around without the user considering 9-1-1.
VoIP was dragged kicking and screaming into E911, so now they charge extra and are quite clear about it. My VoIP provider regularly reminds me to update my 9-1-1 address, but since I don't have to pay the 9-1-1 fee if I lie and say I'm outside North America, that's what I do. Since I also have a classic CO-powered copper landline (1/4 mile from the CO, no concentrators or repeaters) and a couple of cell phones, I think we're covered.
With my VOIP provider, I didn’t quite have to lie.
I generally don’t need my VOIP number when I’m in the US (cell is free here), so I simply told them “I do not intend to use this number or this service within the US”.
The first time I sent them a marked-up contract, they contacted me with questions. The following year, the new version of the contract reflected my changes to their original wording.
Since then, I’ve been pretty much satisfied with my service from callcentric and the price is right.
Quick question: What happens (in the purely hypothetical case, I sincerely hope) if the building is on fire and it turns out that the VOIP-phone is the only one that works?
That would be an interesting phenomenon since my VOIP clients are both dependent on data services working on one of laptop, iPad, iPhone.
Do you leave it turned off?
Of course not, but since the building in question is very unlikely to have been any address I would have filed on said contract, it’s far better that the person at the other end is having to ask me for the address than to have emergency workers respond to some location that I’m not at. If, OTOH, the building in question is my home, I’m more likely to get a faster response by banging on a neighbors door than by struggling to get the VOIP phone up and running on some alternative connectivity. Owen
On Wed, 13 Apr 2016, John R. Levine wrote:
NANP geographical numbers can be located to a switch (give or take number portability within a LATA), but non-geographic numbers can really go anywhere. On the third hand, it's still true that the large majority of them are in the U.S.
Would you agree that 408-921 is a geographic number?
No. It's a prefix, assigned to the at&t switch in west San Jose.
And further to that, throw in Local Number Portability (LNP) and you really need to know the full number in order to know which switch the specific number is assigned to. Not all 408-921 prefixed numbers will go to that switch in West San Jose.
I guarantee you that there are phones within that prefix within US/Calif/LATA-1 and also some well outside of that, probably not even in the same country.
Who said anything about phones? Could you describe what "geographic numbers can be located to a switch" means to you?
In the same way that an IP address and it's "location" is amorphous, the physical location in which a phone call to a given phone number is answered could be anywhere. There could be a forward on it that sends a call made to US number +1 408-192-4135[1] to a phone in Latvia. Or it rings to a computer in London, which forwards it to Brussels. A phone number, like an IP address, can only imply a physical location. It is not a guarantee, and that hint can range from moderately accurate to wildly wrong. Beckman [1] Intentionally invalid NANPA, for example purposes only --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Beckman Internet Guy beckman@angryox.com http://www.angryox.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2016-04-13 16:18, Peter Beckman wrote:
And further to that, throw in Local Number Portability (LNP) and you really need to know the full number in order to know which switch the specific number is assigned to. Not all 408-921 prefixed numbers will go to that switch in West San Jose.
Is there the equivalent of BGP for number portability where every telco has the full table of who owns each prefix as well as individual routes for ported numbers ? Or is there a central database that is consulted before a dialed number starts to be connected so originating telco knows to send call ? Or does the originating telco route the call to the original onwer of the prefix and lets that original owner figure out how to terminate the call ?
From a long distance billing point of view, if Bell Canada connects to a number originally onwed by AT&T but ported to Verizon, with whom would Bell share long distance revenues ?
On Apr 13, 2016, at 13:34 , Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> wrote:
On 2016-04-13 16:18, Peter Beckman wrote:
And further to that, throw in Local Number Portability (LNP) and you really need to know the full number in order to know which switch the specific number is assigned to. Not all 408-921 prefixed numbers will go to that switch in West San Jose.
Is there the equivalent of BGP for number portability where every telco has the full table of who owns each prefix as well as individual routes for ported numbers ?
Sort of, but it’s called SS7 and it’s really more like multiple layers of DNS than like BGP.
Or is there a central database that is consulted before a dialed number starts to be connected so originating telco knows to send call ?
Well, yes and no, but AIUI, the common SS7 database is a lot more like the DNS root zone.
Or does the originating telco route the call to the original onwer of the prefix and lets that original owner figure out how to terminate the call ?
Generally within a country code (NANP is one country code even though it’s many countries (US, CA, much of the Caribbean), the central SS7 database will do a longest-match pointed to the correct Telco and possibly the correct switch at that telco. However, there are all kinds of different redirects possible within said telco as well, such as call forwarding (in multiple forms), cellular registration, VOIP gateways with portable SIP registrations, etc.
From a long distance billing point of view, if Bell Canada connects to a number originally onwed by AT&T but ported to Verizon, with whom would Bell share long distance revenues ?
Generally, Verizon. AT&T won’t usually participate in the call process at all. (see above). Owen
Is there the equivalent of BGP for number portability where every telco has the full table of who owns each prefix as well as individual routes for ported numbers ?
Not really. There's a switch database used for routing calls, but that's different from LNP which is a layer sort of above that.
Or is there a central database that is consulted before a dialed number starts to be connected so originating telco knows to send call ?
Often, if the switch can't tell that the number hasn't been ported.
Or does the originating telco route the call to the original onwer of the prefix and lets that original owner figure out how to terminate the call ?
That's called Onward Routing. They do it some places but not in North America. See RFC 3482 for a well written overview of number portability.
From a long distance billing point of view, if Bell Canada connects to a number originally onwed by AT&T but ported to Verizon, with whom would Bell share long distance revenues ?
They pay whatever long distance company they use, and that company pays the owner of the switch to which it's delivered. The long distance company also pays a very small amount to Telcordia which runs the LNP database to tell whether the number's been ported and if so to which switch. R's, John
And further to that, throw in Local Number Portability (LNP) and you really need to know the full number in order to know which switch the specific number is assigned to. Not all 408-921 prefixed numbers will go to that switch in West San Jose.
Right, like I said three messages ago but that some people seem to have missed: NANP geographical numbers can be located to a switch (give or take number portability within a LATA),
A phone number, like an IP address, can only imply a physical location. It is not a guarantee, and that hint can range from moderately accurate to wildly wrong.
Quite right. US mobile carriers let you take your phone number anywhere in the country, so people do. There's also a fair amount of VoIP where again the phone need not be anywhere near the switch -- I have landline phone numbers in NYC, Santa Cruz, Monreal, and Cambridge UK, and don't live in any of those places. Bonus question: is there any way to find out whether and where a number's been ported without spending telco level amounts of money? Free would be nice. R's, John
John Levine:
Bonus question: is there any way to find out whether and where a number's been ported without spending telco level amounts of money? Free would be nice.
https://www.npac.com/the-npac/access/permitted-uses-of-user-data-contact-lis... Matthew Kaufman (Sent from my iPhone)
On 4/13/2016 14:45, John R. Levine wrote:
NANP geographical numbers can be located to a switch (give or take number portability within a LATA), but non-geographic numbers can really go anywhere. On the third hand, it's still true that the large majority of them are in the U.S.
Would you agree that 408-921 is a geographic number?
No. It's a prefix, assigned to the at&t switch in west San Jose.
I guarantee you that there are phones within that prefix within US/Calif/LATA-1 and also some well outside of that, probably not even in the same country.
Who said anything about phones? Could you describe what "geographic numbers can be located to a switch" means to you?
Lemmee see, the issue is, whose barn do we burn down, based on the telephone number associated with it--the one the with the switch or the one with the telephone? There right answer is predicated on the the facts that the number (IP or telephone or serial number plate) is of NO use what ever in locating anything, certainly not as a cause for action. Anybody who acts different;y should have painful things done to them. I don't care what expert tells you different. A case in point--the other day I had need for the ZIP code for the house I lived in at age 10. So I Binged the address for a ZIP code and got one. Along with a Googlish picture that goes with the address. When I was 10, the address was for one of four tiny houses on a small city lot. (Which, I discovered in later years was in a barrio, and populated by people at of below the poverty line, if anybody had used that terminology then.) The picture was of a KITCHEN! that appeared to be bigger than the house I lived in--the Zillow entry for the property now was 3/4 of a million dollars. Knowing the address of a place is not definitive of the place. Period. -- sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)
Or (90S,0), so they get a bit of fresh air and have some time think during the voyage :-) On 4/11/16 2:14 PM, Josh Luthman wrote:
Or 0,0, send the FBI to Africa on a boating trip. that would probably be easier than "unknown" or "null".
Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373
On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 1:11 PM, Hugo Slabbert <hugo@slabnet.com> wrote:
On Mon 2016-Apr-11 13:02:14 -0400, Ken Chase <math@sizone.org> wrote:
TL;DR: GeoIP put unknown IP location mappings to the 'center of the
country' but then rounded off the lat long so it points at this farm.
Cant believe law enforcement is using this kind of info to execute searches. Wouldnt that undermine the credibility of any evidence brought up in trials for any geoip locates?
Seems to me locating unknowns somewhere in the middle of a big lake or park in the center of the country might be a better idea.
...how about actually marking an unknown as...oh, I dunno: "unknown"? Is there no analogue in the GeoIP lookups for a 404?
/kc
-- Hugo Slabbert | email, xmpp/jabber: hugo@slabnet.com pgp key: B178313E | also on Signal
On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 11:55:11AM -0500, Chris Boyd said:
Interesting article.
http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
An hour???s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem.
The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor n??e Vogelman, 82, now rents it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It???s the
kind
of place you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest neighbor is a mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000 people. It is real, rural America; in fact, it???s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States.
But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor???s land find themselves in a technological horror story.
For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They???ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They???ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They???ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.
--Chris
On Apr 11, 2016, at 10:11 AM, Hugo Slabbert <hugo@slabnet.com> wrote:
On Mon 2016-Apr-11 13:02:14 -0400, Ken Chase <math@sizone.org> wrote:
TL;DR: GeoIP put unknown IP location mappings to the 'center of the country' but then rounded off the lat long so it points at this farm.
Cant believe law enforcement is using this kind of info to execute searches. Wouldnt that undermine the credibility of any evidence brought up in trials for any geoip locates?
Seems to me locating unknowns somewhere in the middle of a big lake or park in the center of the country might be a better idea.
...how about actually marking an unknown as...oh, I dunno: "unknown"? Is there no analogue in the GeoIP lookups for a 404?
It's not unknown - it's (according to the DB, anyway, which has a bunch of flaws) "in the US somewhere". The problem with MaxMind (and other geoip databases I've seen that do Lat/Long as well as Country / State / Town) is that the data doesn't include uncertainty, so it returns "38.0/-97.0" rather than "somewhere in a 3000 mile radius circle centered on 38.0/-97.0". Someone should show them RFC 1876 as an example of better practice. Cheers, Steve
The problem with MaxMind (and other geoip databases I've seen that do Lat/Long as well as Country / State / Town) is that the data doesn't include uncertainty, so it returns "38.0/-97.0" rather than "somewhere in a 3000 mile radius circle centered on 38.0/-97.0".
Someone should show them RFC 1876 as an example of better practice.
Oh, heck, you know better than that. You can put in all the flags and warnings you want, but if it returns an address, nitwits will show up at the address with guns. Bodies of water probably are the least bad alternative. I wonder if they're going to hydrolocate all of the unknown addresses, or only the ones where they get publically shamed. R's, John
On 2016-04-11 18:15, John Levine wrote:
Bodies of water probably are the least bad alternative. I wonder if they're going to hydrolocate all of the unknown addresses, or only the ones where they get publically shamed.
R's, John
I imagine some consumers of the data will 'correct' the position to fall on the nearest road in front of the nearest house. -Laszlo
On Mon, 11 Apr 2016, Laszlo Hanyecz wrote:
I imagine some consumers of the data will 'correct' the position to fall on the nearest road in front of the nearest house.
If GeoIP insists on giving a specific lon/lat, instead of an uncertaintity how about using locations such as the followign as the "default I don't know where it is" United States: 38.8899 N, 77.0091 W (U.S. Capital Building) Missouri: 38.5792 N, 92.1729 W (Missouri State Capital Building) After the legislators get tired of the police raiding the capital buildings, they will probably do something to fix it.
In a message written on Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 03:10:44PM -0400, Sean Donelan wrote:
If GeoIP insists on giving a specific lon/lat, instead of an uncertaintity how about using locations such as the followign as the "default I don't know where it is"
United States: 38.8899 N, 77.0091 W (U.S. Capital Building) Missouri: 38.5792 N, 92.1729 W (Missouri State Capital Building)
After the legislators get tired of the police raiding the capital buildings, they will probably do something to fix it.
Massachusetts: 42.376702 N, 71.239076 W (MaxMind Corporate HQ) Maybe after seeing what it's like to be on the receiving end of their own inaccuracy they will be a bit more motivated to fix it. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
On 4/12/2016 08:31, Leo Bicknell wrote:
In a message written on Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 03:10:44PM -0400, Sean Donelan wrote:
If GeoIP insists on giving a specific lon/lat, instead of an uncertaintity how about using locations such as the followign as the "default I don't know where it is"
United States: 38.8899 N, 77.0091 W (U.S. Capital Building) Missouri: 38.5792 N, 92.1729 W (Missouri State Capital Building)
After the legislators get tired of the police raiding the capital buildings, they will probably do something to fix it.
Massachusetts: 42.376702 N, 71.239076 W (MaxMind Corporate HQ)
Maybe after seeing what it's like to be on the receiving end of their own inaccuracy they will be a bit more motivated to fix it.
BINGO!!! -- sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)
All GeoIP services would be forced to document their default lat/long values so that users know that when these values, they know it is a generic one for that country. (or supply +181.0000 +91.00000 which is an invalid value indicating that there is no lat/long, look at country code given).
I like (sarcasm) how everybody here either wants to point fingers at MaxMind or offer up coordinates to random places knowing that it will never happen. What ever happened to holding people responsible for being stupid. When did it start becoming ((fill in the blank)) coffee shop’s for you burning your tongue on your coffee, etc. I’ve seen/used all sorts of geolocation solutions and never once thought to myself that when a map pin was in the middle of a political boundary, that the software was telling me anything other than the place was somewhere within the boundary. Furthermore, most geolocation services will also show a zoomed-out/in map based on certainty. So if you can see more than a few hundred miles in the map that only measures 200x200 pixels, then it probably isn’t that accurate. As to a solution, why don’t we just register the locations (more or less) with ARIN? Hell, with the amount of money we all pay them in annual fees, I can’t imagine it would be too hard for them to maintain. They could offer it as part of their public whois service or even just make raw data files public. Just a though —Todd
+1; had similar thoughts, even when reading the article. However, I don't really get especially angry/frustrated with the individual idiots who ignorantly used some sort of geolocation service to try to hunt down and exact revenge on somebody whom they *thought* they were being victimized by. I'm not saying what they did was acceptable, but I fully expect that kind of behavior from the average joe. What I do get upset hearing about, though, is law enforcement agencies using that kind of data in order to execute a warrant. There is nothing actionable there, and yet from the sounds of it, some LEAs are getting search warrants or conducting raids on houses where they believe they have a solid 1-to-1 mapping of IP address to physical address. Which is absolutely inexcusable. The one area where a company like MaxMind might have some potential blame to shoulder is their marketing. I know next-to-nothing about them and their product, having only heard about them for the first time in the context of this story, so I have no idea how they represent their solutions to prospective users. And maybe it wasn't even them exaggerating what is technically possible, but some other front-end service that uses their APIs and their data. But one has to wonder how someone in law enforcement might have gotten the idea that you can plug an IP address into a service like this and get back a lat/long that accurately represents to within a few meters where that traffic originated. -- Nathan -----Original Message----- From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Todd Crane Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2016 10:58 PM To: Jean-Francois Mezei Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences I like (sarcasm) how everybody here either wants to point fingers at MaxMind or offer up coordinates to random places knowing that it will never happen. What ever happened to holding people responsible for being stupid. When did it start becoming ((fill in the blank)) coffee shop’s for you burning your tongue on your coffee, etc. I’ve seen/used all sorts of geolocation solutions and never once thought to myself that when a map pin was in the middle of a political boundary, that the software was telling me anything other than the place was somewhere within the boundary. Furthermore, most geolocation services will also show a zoomed-out/in map based on certainty. So if you can see more than a few hundred miles in the map that only measures 200x200 pixels, then it probably isn’t that accurate. As to a solution, why don’t we just register the locations (more or less) with ARIN? Hell, with the amount of money we all pay them in annual fees, I can’t imagine it would be too hard for them to maintain. They could offer it as part of their public whois service or even just make raw data files public. Just a though —Todd
On Wed, 13 Apr 2016, Nathan Anderson wrote:
What I do get upset hearing about, though, is law enforcement agencies using that kind of data in order to execute a warrant. There is nothing actionable there, and yet from the sounds of it, some LEAs are getting search warrants or conducting raids on houses where they believe they have a solid 1-to-1 mapping of IP address to physical address. Which is absolutely inexcusable.
Just watch any more or less recent CSI / crime TV show. They have "an IP", enter it into some gizmo, and it spits out the address, mostly shown on a nice sat image. That is so "normal" in TV that for Bully Policeman it just has to exist, and the reaction to a webform where you can enter an IP and get an address will just be "great, now I also have this" - no further thinking to be expected. And finding a Judge signing off nearly any warrant put in front of them is also not new. c'ya sven-haegar -- Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. - Ben F.
Really? - You want RIRs to now perpetuate an application of IPs they are not designed for? The activities of MaxMind and similar need to be exposed so people understand the problem. No matter how Geo IP businesses might back peddle and say they never intended their services to be considered as authoritative etc the fact is people including law enforcement and presumably General Hayden and friends are buying into the fallacy that IP addresses are fit for the purpose of geo location. Let's put this another way. How many LIRs accounting systems use IPs as billing / account identifiers? No? I wonder why not..... C Todd Crane <mailto:todd.crane@n5tech.com>
13 April 2016 at 06:57 I like (sarcasm) how everybody here either wants to point fingers at MaxMind or offer up coordinates to random places knowing that it will never happen. What ever happened to holding people responsible for being stupid. When did it start becoming ((fill in the blank)) coffee shop’s for you burning your tongue on your coffee, etc. I’ve seen/used all sorts of geolocation solutions and never once thought to myself that when a map pin was in the middle of a political boundary, that the software was telling me anything other than the place was somewhere within the boundary. Furthermore, most geolocation services will also show a zoomed-out/in map based on certainty. So if you can see more than a few hundred miles in the map that only measures 200x200 pixels, then it probably isn’t that accurate.
As to a solution, why don’t we just register the locations (more or less) with ARIN? Hell, with the amount of money we all pay them in annual fees, I can’t imagine it would be too hard for them to maintain. They could offer it as part of their public whois service or even just make raw data files public.
Just a though
—Todd
Jean-Francois Mezei <mailto:jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> 13 April 2016 at 01:17 All GeoIP services would be forced to document their default lat/long values so that users know that when these values, they know it is a generic one for that country. (or supply +181.0000 +91.00000 which is an invalid value indicating that there is no lat/long, look at country code given).
-- Christian de Larrinaga FBCS, CITP, ------------------------- @ FirstHand ------------------------- +44 7989 386778 cdel@firsthand.net -------------------------
On 2016-04-13 05:57, Todd Crane wrote:
As to a solution, why don’t we just register the locations (more or less) with ARIN? Hell, with the amount of money we all pay them in annual fees, I can’t imagine it would be too hard for them to maintain. They could offer it as part of their public whois service or even just make raw data files public.
Just a though
—Todd
Ultimately these services want to locate users, not routers, servers, tablets and such. If you want to answer the question "where is the user?" then you have to ask them - only they know the answer - not their ISP, not ARIN, not DNS. If you really insist on using the IP address, then maybe you could connect to it and ask it, like an identd scheme. This could be built into a web browser and prompt the user asking permission. As long as we're using a static list of number -> location we will just be guessing and hoping they stay near the assumed location and we're not too wrong. This whole practice of trying to map network numbers is the problem. Also note that one of the things that wasn't explicitly mentioned in the original article but was hinted at was the use of something similar to Skyhook, another static list of address -> location. It sounded like the 'find my phone' services were leading people to an Atlanta home based on having a wireless access point that was recorded as being there. This is similarly wrong, but not the same as geolocating IP addresses. It geolocates wireless AP MAC addresses. You can really see this break down when the wireless AP is on a bus. -Laszlo
On Tue, 12 Apr 2016 22:57:42 -0700, Todd Crane said:
.What ever happened to holding people responsible for being stupid. When did it start becoming ((fill in the blank)) coffee shop for you burning your tongue on your coffee
Whatever happened to holding people responsible for fact checking before they post? :) You *do* realize that the woman in the McDonald's case got *third degree* burns and required skin grafts, right? Water at 180F is hot enough to burn you - we even have a word for it: scalding. And unlike sipping too-hot coffee, where you can spit it out quickly, hot water spilled on clothing continues to burn until the clothing is removed or cooled off - neither of which is feasible when you're elderly and seated in a car. And that she originally only sued for the cost of her medical bills, and the jury increased it with punitive damages when presented evidence that over 700 other people had received burns? Now go and get informed, and commit this sin no more :) https://www.caoc.org/?pg=facts - how that lawsuit *actually* played out.
You do realize that this is the exact kind of thing that caused this discussion in the first place. I'm well familiar with that case. I was talking about my own experiences in the food service industry, but of course you barely read a sentence and set on a war path accusing me of not checking my facts, quite like somebody googling a geolocation for an ip and harnessing/threatening the other side. As to the case, it had its merits, but since then it has spawned a whole bunch of people trying to get rich quick. Now every company has to put these warning labels to appease their insurance companies. Now we have people that can't think for themselves that NEED labels. It's much like the debate about trying to legislate common sense. Todd Crane
On Apr 13, 2016, at 6:25 AM, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
On Tue, 12 Apr 2016 22:57:42 -0700, Todd Crane said:
.What ever happened to holding people responsible for being stupid. When did it start becoming ((fill in the blank)) coffee shop for you burning your tongue on your coffee
Whatever happened to holding people responsible for fact checking before they post? :)
You *do* realize that the woman in the McDonald's case got *third degree* burns and required skin grafts, right? Water at 180F is hot enough to burn you - we even have a word for it: scalding. And unlike sipping too-hot coffee, where you can spit it out quickly, hot water spilled on clothing continues to burn until the clothing is removed or cooled off - neither of which is feasible when you're elderly and seated in a car.
And that she originally only sued for the cost of her medical bills, and the jury increased it with punitive damages when presented evidence that over 700 other people had received burns?
Now go and get informed, and commit this sin no more :)
https://www.caoc.org/?pg=facts - how that lawsuit *actually* played out.
On Thu, 14 Apr 2016 16:43:00 -0700, Todd Crane said:
You do realize that this is the exact kind of thing that caused this discussion in the first place. I'm well familiar with that case. I was talking about my own experiences in the food service industry, but of course you barely read a sentence and set on a war path accusing me of not checking my facts
Sorry. You are *literally* the first person I've seen who's put "hot coffee" and "responsible for being stupid" in a sentence who was actually familiar with the case in question, and thought that the case had merit, and was (apparently) actually talking about the follow-on cases rather than the original case that made the news. In addition, you didn't make it very clear that you weren't talking about the original case.
On 4/13/16 6:25 AM, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
You *do* realize that the woman in the McDonald's case got *third degree* burns and required skin grafts, right? Water at 180F is hot enough to burn you - we even have a word for it: scalding. And unlike sipping too-hot coffee, where you can spit it out quickly, hot water spilled on clothing continues to burn until the clothing is removed or cooled off - neither of which is feasible when you're elderly and seated in a car.
And that she originally only sued for the cost of her medical bills, and the jury increased it with punitive damages when presented evidence that over 700 other people had received burns?
Now go and get informed, and commit this sin no more :)
https://www.caoc.org/?pg=facts - how that lawsuit *actually* played out.
and http://www.stellaawards.com/ lists dozens of other lawsuits spawned by that result, as well as commentary on the McDonald's case. Last updated 2008 but I'm sure examples are still flooding in to a courtroom near you. -- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay@impulse.net Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/ Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV
On 2016-04-13 09:11, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
On Tue, 12 Apr 2016 20:17:03 -0400, Jean-Francois Mezei said:
All GeoIP services would be forced to
How?
Fair point. However, considering more and more outfits block content based on IP geolocation, once has to wonder if an outfit such as the FTC could mandate certain standards and disclosure of inaccuracy of IP geolocation. Or the other way around (shudded) mandate that outfits such as ARIN ensure IP blocks are accurately configured/registered to provide accurate geolocation within state/province for instance. By documenting that IP blocks only resolve to state/province, this would set the implicit standard that any IP geolocation service that claims more precise gelocation is bogus. And mandating IP blocks be limited to state/province would be a big enough headache-causing undertaking as large number of ISPs and organisations span this and want to have abilityto move blocks around to cope with demand increasing more in one state than the other etc. So that leaves ARIN mandating and documenting that IP blocks be accurately registered on a country basis within its territory. This would allow proper geolocation/blocking for outfits like Netflix but be documented as being unusable to track an IP down to state, city, street/home. When ARIN makes IP block database available for download, it should have an "agree" button to terms and conditions that would prevent the user of the data from claiming accuracy greater than "countrty". Just an idea.
On 11 April 2016 at 20:15, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Oh, heck, you know better than that. You can put in all the flags and warnings you want, but if it returns an address, nitwits will show up at the address with guns.
Bodies of water probably are the least bad alternative. I wonder if they're going to hydrolocate all of the unknown addresses, or only the ones where they get publically shamed.
They should stop giving out coordinates on houses period. Move the coordinate to the nearest street intersection if you need to be that precise (I would prefer nearest town square). Anything more than that should be illegal. Regards, Baldur
* baldur.norddahl@gmail.com (Baldur Norddahl) [Mon 11 Apr 2016, 21:02 CEST]:
They should stop giving out coordinates on houses period. Move the coordinate to the nearest street intersection if you need to be that precise (I would prefer nearest town square). Anything more than that should be illegal.
That's going to make USPS's and FedEx's lives a lot harder. -- Niels.
On Mon, 11 Apr 2016 21:13:48 +0200, Niels Bakker said:
* baldur.norddahl@gmail.com (Baldur Norddahl) [Mon 11 Apr 2016, 21:02 CEST]:
They should stop giving out coordinates on houses period. Move the coordinate to the nearest street intersection if you need to be that precise (I would prefer nearest town square). Anything more than that should be illegal.
That's going to make USPS's and FedEx's lives a lot harder.
Are they in the habit of delivering to a location identified by an IP address? I've never managed to get either one to deliver to anything other than a street address (and in fact, we recently had to assign street addresses to all the buildings on campus because too many GPS-based programs only work on street addresses, not building names).
In article <20160411191347.GC4087@excession.tpb.net> you write:
* baldur.norddahl@gmail.com (Baldur Norddahl) [Mon 11 Apr 2016, 21:02 CEST]:
They should stop giving out coordinates on houses period. Move the coordinate to the nearest street intersection if you need to be that precise (I would prefer nearest town square). Anything more than that should be illegal.
That's going to make USPS's and FedEx's lives a lot harder.
Please don't guess (like, you know, MaxMind does.) USPS has its own database of all of the deliverable addresses in the country. They have their problems, but give or take data staleness as buildings are built or demolished, that's not one of them. R's, John
On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 3:55 AM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Please don't guess (like, you know, MaxMind does.) USPS has its own database of all of the deliverable addresses in the country. They have their problems, but give or take data staleness as buildings are built or demolished, that's not one of them.
A qualifier. USPS has a database of *most* of the deliverable addresses in the country. I'm in an unorganized borough. The USPS actually has no mandate, funding or lever that I can pull (that I can find) to keep their database up to date. Easily 30% of the legitimate addresses in my area are not geocodable nor in the USPS database. I suspect that there are areas of my state with an even worse percentage of unavailable data. UPS and FedEx rely on the USPS database, but will not lift a finger to fix this gap. Even as a municipal body there is no available federal mechanism for updating the database. I've tried multiple times over 15+ years. </rant> So yeah, USPS' database does have its problems. -- Jeremy Austin (907) 895-2311 (907) 803-5422 jhaustin@gmail.com Heritage NetWorks Whitestone Power & Communications Vertical Broadband, LLC Schedule a meeting: http://doodle.com/jermudgeon
Note that for E911 purposes we are required to use the MSAG (http://netorange.com/nena-reference/index.php?title=Master_Street_Address_Gu...)) to verify street addresses. From what my co-workers at my $DAYJOB tell me, there are many new addresses that are not resolvable. Despite those shortcomings, E911 calls are responded to and US postal mail is delivered, specifically because a human remains involved in interpreting the information. The same needs to be done with GeoIP results. Frank -----Original Message----- From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy Austin Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2016 8:55 AM To: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> Cc: niels=nanog@bakker.net; NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 3:55 AM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Please don't guess (like, you know, MaxMind does.) USPS has its own database of all of the deliverable addresses in the country. They have their problems, but give or take data staleness as buildings are built or demolished, that's not one of them.
A qualifier. USPS has a database of *most* of the deliverable addresses in the country. I'm in an unorganized borough. The USPS actually has no mandate, funding or lever that I can pull (that I can find) to keep their database up to date. Easily 30% of the legitimate addresses in my area are not geocodable nor in the USPS database. I suspect that there are areas of my state with an even worse percentage of unavailable data. UPS and FedEx rely on the USPS database, but will not lift a finger to fix this gap. Even as a municipal body there is no available federal mechanism for updating the database. I've tried multiple times over 15+ years. </rant> So yeah, USPS' database does have its problems. -- Jeremy Austin (907) 895-2311 (907) 803-5422 jhaustin@gmail.com Heritage NetWorks Whitestone Power & Communications Vertical Broadband, LLC Schedule a meeting: http://doodle.com/jermudgeon
On Apr 11, 2016, at 12:01 , Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl@gmail.com> wrote:
On 11 April 2016 at 20:15, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Oh, heck, you know better than that. You can put in all the flags and warnings you want, but if it returns an address, nitwits will show up at the address with guns.
Bodies of water probably are the least bad alternative. I wonder if they're going to hydrolocate all of the unknown addresses, or only the ones where they get publically shamed.
They should stop giving out coordinates on houses period. Move the coordinate to the nearest street intersection if you need to be that precise (I would prefer nearest town square). Anything more than that should be illegal.
Regards,
Baldur
The thing I find particularly amusing having just looked up my own IP addresses is the following: 1. My addresses are tied to my actual address in whois. 2. That is not the address linked to in any of the GeoIP databases I know how to check. 3. The address is only a few blocks away, but where an ambiguity is provided, it is sufficient to cover most of the city of San Jose, including my house of course. Needless to say, it’s not confidence inspiring. I might look to see whose house it does send me to later if I feel inclined, just for amusement. Owen
On Apr 11, 2016, at 11:15 , John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
The problem with MaxMind (and other geoip databases I've seen that do Lat/Long as well as Country / State / Town) is that the data doesn't include uncertainty, so it returns "38.0/-97.0" rather than "somewhere in a 3000 mile radius circle centered on 38.0/-97.0".
Someone should show them RFC 1876 as an example of better practice.
Oh, heck, you know better than that. You can put in all the flags and warnings you want, but if it returns an address, nitwits will show up at the address with guns.
I hear this argument about various things over and over and over again. However, my home address has been published in multiple whois databases since I moved here in 1993. Not once has a nitwit with a gun shown up on my doorstep as a result. (I have had visits from nitwits with guns, but they were the results of various local oddities unrelated to the internet). Examples: 1. A neighbor managed to get the SJPD (most common example of nitwits with guns in this area) to darken my doorstep because he spotted (and complained about) a dog in my yard being out of control and not on a leash or supervised. (Not sure why they thought it was my dog, as I have never owned a dog at this address). 2. I opened my front door to be greeted by a nitwit with a gun (again, SJPD) telling me to go back inside while they completed an arrest nearby. So, apparently there still aren’t enough nitwits with guns operating enough typewriters to fulfill this bit of conventional wisdom as yet. Owen
Oh, heck, you know better than that. You can put in all the flags and warnings you want, but if it returns an address, nitwits will show up at the address with guns.
* owen@delong.com (Owen DeLong) [Tue 12 Apr 2016, 00:02 CEST]:
I hear this argument about various things over and over and over again.
However, my home address has been published in multiple whois databases since I moved here in 1993.
Not once has a nitwit with a gun shown up on my doorstep as a result.
I think you miss the point. Your geocoordinates were not mistakenly associated with nigh infinite amounts of internet abuse. This thread has (mostly) been about wrong information being published, not information being published at all. -- Niels.
On Apr 11, 2016, at 15:23 , Niels Bakker <niels=nanog@bakker.net> wrote:
Oh, heck, you know better than that. You can put in all the flags and warnings you want, but if it returns an address, nitwits will show up at the address with guns.
* owen@delong.com (Owen DeLong) [Tue 12 Apr 2016, 00:02 CEST]:
I hear this argument about various things over and over and over again.
However, my home address has been published in multiple whois databases since I moved here in 1993.
Not once has a nitwit with a gun shown up on my doorstep as a result.
I think you miss the point. Your geocoordinates were not mistakenly associated with nigh infinite amounts of internet abuse. This thread has (mostly) been about wrong information being published, not information being published at all.
I didn’t miss the point, but the specific statement quoted is patently false in both cases (the article itself admits that the vast majority of such “victim” households contacted had not suffered any ill effects). Owen
Owne, * Owen DeLong (owen@delong.com) wrote:
However, my home address has been published in multiple whois databases since I moved here in 1993.
Not once has a nitwit with a gun shown up on my doorstep as a result. (I have had visits from nitwits with guns, but they were the results of various local oddities unrelated to the internet).
I'm glad to hear you've not had the joy of such an experience. I nearly had one, but I managed to convince the nitwit to not to show up, but it took a few hours on the phone. He had seen my email address fly across while Linux was booting (thanks to a Netfilter module I had written which had been included) on some device he had he wasn't technical, so it wasn't easy for me to work out what he was talking about, except that it was very clearly something he was trying to "fix" to get his internet working again. From that, he looked up my domain via whois and got my phone number and address and called me and accused me of being with various three-letter government organizations, said he had found proof that he was being spied on and a litany of similar concerns. Ultimately, I got him to believe (or at least, it seemed so) that I was just some technical guy that wrote some code for a company that built the device and got off the phone with him hours later. On the plus side of this particular story, a few Airbus planes were built with a version of Linux which displayed the boot messages during startup on the in-seat displays and my name and email have shown up for the reason on those devices, leading to emails from a few strangers around the world with pictures of the boot process showing my email. I'm not quite sure that the up-side out-weighs the down in this particular story, but there it is. Thanks! Stephen
On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 06:15:08PM -0000, John Levine wrote:
The problem with MaxMind (and other geoip databases I've seen that do Lat/Long as well as Country / State / Town) is that the data doesn't include uncertainty, so it returns "38.0/-97.0" rather than "somewhere in a 3000 mile radius circle centered on 38.0/-97.0".
Someone should show them RFC 1876 as an example of better practice.
Oh, heck, you know better than that. You can put in all the flags and warnings you want, but if it returns an address, nitwits will show up at the address with guns.
Bodies of water probably are the least bad alternative. I wonder if they're going to hydrolocate all of the unknown addresses, or only the ones where they get publically shamed.
I personal favor setting the generic location as a certain set of roundish holes in the ground up in the northern plains. Let the government raid itself for once. --- Wayne Bouchard web@typo.org Network Dude http://www.typo.org/~web/
Re: Sending police to middle of a lake.. Puts new meaning to a fishing expedition for police :-)
On Apr 11, 2016, at 10:26 , Steve Atkins <steve@blighty.com> wrote:
On Apr 11, 2016, at 10:11 AM, Hugo Slabbert <hugo@slabnet.com> wrote:
On Mon 2016-Apr-11 13:02:14 -0400, Ken Chase <math@sizone.org> wrote:
TL;DR: GeoIP put unknown IP location mappings to the 'center of the country' but then rounded off the lat long so it points at this farm.
Cant believe law enforcement is using this kind of info to execute searches. Wouldnt that undermine the credibility of any evidence brought up in trials for any geoip locates?
Seems to me locating unknowns somewhere in the middle of a big lake or park in the center of the country might be a better idea.
...how about actually marking an unknown as...oh, I dunno: "unknown"? Is there no analogue in the GeoIP lookups for a 404?
It's not unknown - it's (according to the DB, anyway, which has a bunch of flaws) "in the US somewhere".
The problem with MaxMind (and other geoip databases I've seen that do Lat/Long as well as Country / State / Town) is that the data doesn't include uncertainty, so it returns "38.0/-97.0" rather than "somewhere in a 3000 mile radius circle centered on 38.0/-97.0".
Someone should show them RFC 1876 as an example of better practice.
Cheers, Steve
So really, what is needed is two additional fields for the lat/lon of laterr/lonerr so that, for example, instead of just 38.0/-97.0, you would get 38.0±2/-97.0±10 or something like that. This seems reasonable to me. Owen
On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 3:09 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
So really, what is needed is two additional fields for the lat/lon of laterr/lonerr so that, for example, instead of just 38.0/-97.0, you would get 38.0±2/-97.0±10 or something like that.
It does seem needed to the geo location companies too, at least several of them provide this - and it's been this way for a long time. I didn't remember if Maxmind does or not, so I just checked. From some of their documentation, the field "accuracy_radius" is returned which is "The radius in kilometers around the specified location where the IP address is likely to be." See http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/web-services/#location . I don't think it's in their free stuff (you get what you pay for, it seems). It doesn't show up on their web interface to "try" the service nor does it give a warning that these things can be wrong, but IMHO probably wouldn't be a bad idea to say "Don't go show up at this address - it might not be right!"
Has happened in Atlanta, too, due to (what I think) was a lookup on the ASN's whois, which wasn't specific: http://fusion.net/story/214995/find-my-phone-apps-lead-to-wrong-home/ On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 9:55 AM, Chris Boyd <cboyd@gizmopartners.com> wrote:
Interesting article.
http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
An hour’s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem.
The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor née Vogelman, 82, now rents it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It’s the kind of place you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest neighbor is a mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000 people. It is real, rural America; in fact, it’s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States.
But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor’s land find themselves in a technological horror story.
For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.
--Chris
Just so everyone is clear, Maxmind is changing their default locations. " Now that I’ve made MaxMind aware of the consequences of the default locations it’s chosen, Mather says they’re going to change them. They are picking new default locations for the U.S. and Ashburn, Virginia that are in the middle of bodies of water, rather than people’s homes."
So they launch exhaustive and expensive searches of lakes instead? :-) ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest Internet Exchange http://www.midwest-ix.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Mikulasik" <Steve.Mikulasik@civeo.com> To: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Monday, April 11, 2016 12:34:35 PM Subject: RE: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Just so everyone is clear, Maxmind is changing their default locations. " Now that I’ve made MaxMind aware of the consequences of the default locations it’s chosen, Mather says they’re going to change them. They are picking new default locations for the U.S. and Ashburn, Virginia that are in the middle of bodies of water, rather than people’s homes."
I imagine it might look something like this http://i.imgur.com/HlpOXP0.jpg -----Original Message----- From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Mike Hammett Sent: Monday, April 11, 2016 11:39 AM Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences So they launch exhaustive and expensive searches of lakes instead? :-) ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest Internet Exchange http://www.midwest-ix.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Mikulasik" <Steve.Mikulasik@civeo.com> To: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Monday, April 11, 2016 12:34:35 PM Subject: RE: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Just so everyone is clear, Maxmind is changing their default locations. " Now that I’ve made MaxMind aware of the consequences of the default locations it’s chosen, Mather says they’re going to change them. They are picking new default locations for the U.S. and Ashburn, Virginia that are in the middle of bodies of water, rather than people’s homes."
On Apr 11, 2016, at 1:34 PM, Steve Mikulasik <Steve.Mikulasik@civeo.com> wrote:
Just so everyone is clear, Maxmind is changing their default locations.
" Now that I’ve made MaxMind aware of the consequences of the default locations it’s chosen, Mather says they’re going to change them. They are picking new default locations for the U.S. and Ashburn, Virginia that are in the middle of bodies of water, rather than people’s homes."
The middle of lake superior and hudson bay would be good choices for the US and Canada. Quick, run a commercial diving team with on-call at the nearest ports. - Jared
Why not use the locations of their own homes? They're indirectly sending mobs to randomly chosen locations. There's enough middle men involved so they can all say they're doing nothing wrong, but wrong is being done. -Laszlo On 2016-04-11 17:34, Steve Mikulasik wrote:
Just so everyone is clear, Maxmind is changing their default locations.
" Now that I’ve made MaxMind aware of the consequences of the default locations it’s chosen, Mather says they’re going to change them. They are picking new default locations for the U.S. and Ashburn, Virginia that are in the middle of bodies of water, rather than people’s homes."
On 2016-04-11 13:34, Steve Mikulasik wrote:
Mather says they’re going to change them. They are picking new default locations for the U.S. and Ashburn, Virginia that are in the middle of bodies of water,
Why not the White House or Wahington Monument ? Or better yet, some large office complex in Fort Meade MD :-)
On Mon, 11 Apr 2016 12:55:11 -0400, Chris Boyd <cboyd@gizmopartners.com> wrote:
Interesting article.
http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/ ...
"Until you reached out to us, we were unaware that there were issues..." Bull! I can dig up dozens (if not hundreds) of emails from coworkers and customers who have complained to MaxMind about their asinine we-don't-have-a-frakin-clue results. They've known for years! They're paid for a definitive answer, not an "unknown", which is why the default answer is the same near-the-center-of-the-country lat/lon. He, personally, may have had no idea, but MaxMind The Company did/does.
On 12/04/2016 00:41, Ricky Beam wrote:
On Mon, 11 Apr 2016 12:55:11 -0400, Chris Boyd <cboyd@gizmopartners.com> wrote:
Interesting article.
http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/ ...
"Until you reached out to us, we were unaware that there were issues..."
Bull! I can dig up dozens (if not hundreds) of emails from coworkers and customers who have complained to MaxMind about their asinine we-don't-have-a-frakin-clue results. They've known for years! They're paid for a definitive answer, not an "unknown", which is why the default answer is the same near-the-center-of-the-country lat/lon. He, personally, may have had no idea, but MaxMind The Company did/does.
Its called class action lawsuit. -Hank
On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 08:08:29AM +0300, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
On 12/04/2016 00:41, Ricky Beam wrote:
On Mon, 11 Apr 2016 12:55:11 -0400, Chris Boyd <cboyd@gizmopartners.com> wrote:
Interesting article.
http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/ ...
"Until you reached out to us, we were unaware that there were issues..."
Bull! I can dig up dozens (if not hundreds) of emails from coworkers and customers who have complained to MaxMind about their asinine we-don't-have-a-frakin-clue results. They've known for years! They're paid for a definitive answer, not an "unknown", which is why the default answer is the same near-the-center-of-the-country lat/lon. He, personally, may have had no idea, but MaxMind The Company did/does.
Its called class action lawsuit.
Yep. It's also effectively the inverse of the Streisand Effect since the news articles (and hopefully law suit) can only help people in that situation since it's the only way they'd get wide enough coverage of the issue to warn amateur sleuths that any trail that leads there is a dead end. It really says it all when the local sherriff says that his job now includes defending the house against all other law enforcement, state and federal. It's good that they're doing it, but ridiculous that they have to. Regards, Ben
On 4/11/2016 11:55, Chris Boyd wrote:
Interesting article.
http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/
An hour’s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem.
The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor née Vogelman, 82, now rents it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It’s the kind of place you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest neighbor is a mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000 people. It is real, rural America; in fact, it’s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States.
But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor’s land find themselves in a technological horror story.
And not even slightly funny. What happened to Truth. If you do not know, say "I don't know." Or be silent.
For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.
--Chris
-- sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)
participants (52)
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Baldur Norddahl -
Ben McGinnes -
Blair Trosper -
Carlos M. Martinez -
Chris Boyd -
Christian de Larrinaga -
Dan Lacey -
David Barak -
David Cantrell -
Eric Kuhnke -
frnkblk＠iname.com -
Gary Buhrmaster -
Hank Nussbacher -
Hugo Slabbert -
Jared Mauch -
Jay Hennigan -
Jean-Francois Mezei -
Jeremy Austin -
Jeremy McDermond -
Joel Maslak -
John Levine -
John R. Levine
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Josh Luthman -
Josh Reynolds -
Julien Goodwin -
Ken Chase -
Larry Sheldon -
Laszlo Hanyecz -
Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr.
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Leo Bicknell -
Mark Andrews -
Matthew Black -
Matthew Kaufman -
Mike Hammett -
Nathan Anderson -
Niels Bakker -
Nikolay Shopik -
Owen DeLong -
Peter Beckman -
Ray Orsini -
Ricky Beam -
RT Parrish -
Sean Donelan -
Stephen Frost -
Steve Atkins -
Steve Mikulasik -
Sven-Haegar Koch -
Theodore Baschak -
tim＠pelican.org -
Todd Crane -
Valdis.Kletnieks＠vt.edu -
Wayne Bouchard