Highlights in Fedora 26

Posted Jul 26, 2017 13:30 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Highlights in Fedora 26 by mathstuf
Parent article: Highlights in Fedora 26

If you paid for the full geolocation product in question, you did get an error bar (my employer does, and at the time of the story, I looked at our data to see that the product in the news gave us the location as longitude, latitude and 1,500km by 1,000km error radius for the problem IPs). The trouble was that there was a much cheaper (possibly even free - I can't remember at this remove) product that would give you the longitude and latitude of the centre of the ellipse they drew on the map, but not the error radiuses. Combine the cheap product with people ignoring the warning that you had no error bars, and you got into a mess; IIRC, some companies even drew on the underlying data feed, but hid the warning about no error bars on the cheap product from the user.

Plus, too many people have a "computer says so, must be true" attitude to precise results from a computer. This was a precise result, as it was stripped of the error radiuses, ergo it must be accurate.