MaxMind
Company that provides location data for IP addresses
MaxMind, Inc. is a Massachusetts-based data company that provides location data for IP addresses and other data for IP addresses, and fraud detection data.
01History
MaxMind was founded in 2002 by Thomas "TJ" Mather and is based in Malden, Massachusetts, United States. The company sells IP geolocation and other IP address related data under the GeoIP brand. In 2004, MaxMind began offering the minFraud service, a transactional risk analysis service.
Kansas glitch
In an unusual technical glitch, a farmstead about 4 miles (6.4 km) northeast of Potwin, Kansas, became the default site of 600 million IP addresses when the digital mapping company changed the putative geographic center of the contiguous United States from 39°50′N 98°35′W / 39.833°N 98.583°W / 39.833; -98.583 (1918 center of the Contiguous US) to 38°N 97°W / 38°N 97°W / 38; -97 (MaxMind "Center" of the Contiguous United States). The IP addresses were frequently used by suspected criminals and other nefarious actors, which would subsequently be mapped to the Kansas farm from MaxMind's data. Law enforcement and other individuals frequently contacted or visited the property owners in connection with acts linked to the IP addresses. The owners of the property at those coordinates filed a lawsuit against MaxMind. MaxMind moved the geographic location of the default IP address to the middle of a Kansas lake and settled the case via alternative dispute resolution in September 2017.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “MaxMind”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- MaxMind logo.png by MaxMind, Fair use
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