How Wired's Hiding Writer Was Found 83
newscloud writes "A twitter-savvy, gluten-free pizza shop nabbed missing Wired magazine writer Evan Ratliff in New Orleans early on Tuesday to win the $5,000 Vanish contest. Ratliff was ensnared in part by repeated non-TOR visits to our Facebook application, launched to support the contest's tracker community, and his secret travel journal on Twitter. 'The Vanish Team application became part of the game — essentially a trap for Evan — one he stumbled into each day knowingly and willingly. This is something that we would never do with our Facebook technology if Evan hadn't asked us to pursue him - but it's a useful reminder of "relative" anonymity on the Web.'"
Mouse Trap (Score:5, Funny)
Well this pretty much reminds me of game, Mouse Trap.
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The only difference is that Wired probably took in half a million in sponsorships, naming right, etc. I'm surprised it wasn't called the "Apple iPhone Vanish Contest". But I bet the prize money is paid out in gift certificates to Best Buy or shares in Conde Nast.
You know how they found out that some huge percentage of US currency has traces of cocaine? Well, 95% of the copies of Wired have traces of the spooge of Slashdot readers and advertising account executives. Mixed together.
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What a cool story! Wish I'd known it was going on.
That is a cool story. Equally insightful: I just learned that there was a recession. I turned on the TV and some guy said something about a recession.
I also learned about a moon landing that took place 50 years ago.
If you don't yet get the point: why does this poster get a 3 for insightful? since when is a statement of ignorance insightful?
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Actually, the moderation *system* works fine. It's the moderators who are broken.
Incidentally, in this case, I agree with the mods; GP was off topic. So, in this case, it's your opinion that's broken.
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There was a Slashdot article when the contest started, too:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/08/19/1626217/Wired-Writer-Disappears-Find-Him-and-Make-5k [slashdot.org]
Umm, hello (Score:2)
I posted this very article, http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/08/19/1626217/Wired-Writer-Disappears-Find-Him-and-Make-5k?art_pos=2 [slashdot.org]. Looks like someone spends too much time working and not enough time on /.! Get off my lawn!
Fembot?!? (Score:5, Funny)
Twitter seems as appealing to me as gluten-free pizza, so presumably a "fembot" is some Twitterism with which I'm unfamiliar, and not an actual fembot?
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A female /r9k/ user perhaps. I guess Evan was a bit depressed about everything and created an advice thread on 4chan.
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I don't know what a fembot OR a "female /r9k/" user is... jesus am I old?
does someone want to provide another definition for the over-30 crowd?
Re:Fembot?!? (Score:5, Informative)
"/r9k/", or ROBOT9000, is a board on 4chan (like "/b/"), which centres around a script [xkcd.com] written by Randall Munroe of xkcd (basically, something can only be said once). Male users of said board often refer to each others as "robots", while the comparatively few female users of /r9k/ are generally called "fembots".
--- Mr. DOS
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Rule 30:
There are no women on the internet.
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Hooray!
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Ok.
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Too easy (Score:1)
Sounds like this guy wasn't even trying very hard. If I were trying to vanish, I sure as hell wouldn't be running scripts on facebook or updating twitter. It sounded like an interesting contest, they should do it again with someone who really knows how to hide.
Re:Too easy (Score:5, Informative)
If you'd RTFA, you'd see that the whole point of the challenge was to "vanish" while staying active online.
How hard is it to use bots? (Score:2)
Seriously, how hard would it be to use an anonymous remailer bot? These bots can post all over usenet, and on some forums.
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Great! Now all three people on usenet can still hear from you even though you're in hiding! I hope you don't know anyone else...
The first rule of not being seen: Don't stand up. (Score:5, Interesting)
Second rule: Don't make daily visits to a web community dedicated to tracking you down. Fail.
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Unless everyone else is standing up, in which case sitting down might be a giveaway...
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But what should I do when one half is standing, and the other half is sitting?
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The first rule of Hiding Club is no one talks about Hiding Club.
Re:The first rule of not being seen: Don't stand u (Score:5, Funny)
He fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is never use facebook.
Re:The first rule of not being seen: Don't stand u (Score:5, Informative)
He was purposely making the same sorts of mistakes that people make when they try to disappear. I mean, he was, for example, posting his travels to a twitter account, and following several businesses local to where he was ultimately found.
Being an author who just wrote about the sorts of mistakes people make under these circumstances, he was clearly laying down a bread crumb trail for people to pick up. The point wasn't for him to outsmart the world (honestly anybody can do that for a month if they're really dedicated, just stay offline), the point was to give people a glimpse of what it's like.
If you're really on the run, staying anonymous for one month shouldn't be too hard. It's when it's been a year, or two, or ten, when you start to wonder how your family is doing, etc. that you start to get into trouble. Creating those connections to your former life is what gets people caught.
I'm not surprised... (Score:2)
If I'd been responsible for "Time Speeder", I'd've gone into hiding too.
So don't use the web, try usenet. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you think the web isn't anonymous enough with all the cookies and hidden tracking features of firefox, just log onto usenet and load your anonymous remailer, use your digital signature as your name, and communicate behind that.
And if you have to use a tor like proxy service there are ways to use it properly and ways to use it improperly.
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
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One of the five people playing won!
From the summary it looks like the five players teamed up to find him.
Re:Great! (Score:4, Funny)
So everyone wins, then! :)
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Celiac Disease giveaway (Score:2)
When I saw in his profile in the mag that he had Celiac Disease (I have it as well), my first thought was well, this just got about 50% easier for the searchers. The dude's gotta eat/buy food. Not that he couldn't make it eating out of a normal supermarket -- just assumed he would stick with what he knew to some extent for his diet.
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Or am I completely off on the character you meant?
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I understand your point, and for the most part think you are absolutely correct. But when you disappeared would you also stop eating? If you were diabetic, when you disappeared would you also stop being diabetic?
My point was that by having CD, his options were inherently more limited. He's going to gravitate to places that are 'celiac friendly', if you will.
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The whole experiment is an interesting way of pointing out how intertwined we all are today. 150 years ago it was trivial for someone to head into the west and reinvent themselves as whatever they wanted to be; nowadays, that would be nigh impossible. I almost wonder if we've lost something because of that.
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Diabetes would be a bitch. It's one of the reminders that life isn't all that bad. What I got isn't great, but I'll take it. It's a cakewalk compared to so many things.
And a sort of spin on your analogy, just 20 years ago a person could head off to college and, in a sense, do the same. Ditch the past baggage/people/that nickname you hated, and become whomever you wanted. Option to report back in 20 for the reunion.
I wonder how kids today ever break away from their existing circle with facebook and all.
Deja Vu? (Score:2)
Sounds like a new episode of Majestic [wikipedia.org]
First rule of TOR - disable all plugins (Score:1)
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Not everything is compatible however - i.e FTP - protocols not compatible will just not work (if you have setup your entire network to use the tor/privoxy proxy).
To be safe try about:plugins (in firefox) to ensure that no plugins are available.
The whole thing is ridiculous... (Score:4, Interesting)
Where do I begin? The pretext of the competition is to vanish while staying active online? Who would ever want to do that??? I want to completely disconnect from society except I want to stay connected to everyone?? Then on top of that, they give out a $5K prize...if you're working on this for a month, that hardly motivates anyone to drop their day job. So to make it actually possible, the guy has to join the freaking facebook group of the only group of people tracking him?? The thing is so contrived it's just worthless.
Fish, Barrel, Boom.
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Cost: $5K.
Advertising potential: The term "Hidden Wired Editor" will now show up on hundreds of blogs, techie news articles, watercooler discussions, etc. Wired initiates its Facebook presence with more reason to "Become a Fan" than just following Wired's articles. The TwitterNet is all, well, a-Twitter, albeit briefly, about it. The name "Wired" has received some significant eyeball time.
Sounds like a damned cheap ad to me, even at twice the price.
Re:The whole thing is ridiculous... (Score:5, Insightful)
I tried asking a Democratic reformer in China, an atheist Iranian, a member of the Tibetan independence movement and a North Korean, but none of them could think of a situation where this might be useful.
If anyone can think of a situation where a person would want to be active online without being found, please post it here. My four friends and I are super-curious now.
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What bad things did those people do? You're argument is works against cars, knives, fertilizer, etc. who cares if you can do some bad things if you can do 10 orders of magnitude above that in good things?
Re:The whole thing is ridiculous... (Score:5, Funny)
I tried asking a Democratic reformer in China, an atheist Iranian, a member of the Tibetan independence movement and a North Korean, but none of them could think of a situation where this might be useful.
I was hoping that they were about to walk into a bar ...
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That would hurt, though.
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I tried asking a Democratic reformer in China, an atheist Iranian, a member of the Tibetan independence movement and a North Korean, but none of them could think of a situation where this might be useful.
Er, North Koreans (outside the ruling class) don't have Internet access, at least not if they are still in North Korea.
And as for all those other people, if they have access to Internet still, then they are too small a fish to have mattered in the first place.
In the rare case when an influential persona is trying to stay on the Internet while avoiding the government tracking him, this contest is, again, useless. The guy didn't take the first precautions anyone trying to stay anonymous should (on purpose, wh
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It's not, because people on the run often do try to get information about who is tracking them down.
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It also is the dietary trend of the day. Its is absolutely bizarre how many people have food allergies these days, when I was in college 3-4 years back, around 1/3rd of everyone claimed to be allergic to something interesting. Most of them were gluten, though there were people with "meat" allergies, wheat allergies, pineapple allergies... Where the hell did these people come from, a quick scan of history shows this is all very recent. Its gotten to the point where going out to eat with people is a rem
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It also is the dietary trend of the day.
Not quite. See we Celiac folk (myself included) who truly suffer take great offense to the "trend" notion. You know why? Becaue while more and more people are trying it out (to see if it will help) the disease actually exists. Its not a 'South Beach' or 'Atkins' fad when you are stuck doing it for the rest of your life. Please, cut us some slack or at least acknowledge that people may really suffer from something like this and are not just 'food fadsters'.
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Please, cut us some slack or at least acknowledge that people may really suffer from something like this and are not just 'food fadsters'.
I did... I used the term "also", I recognize that their are people who are adversely effected by gluten, and people who have genuine food allergies, but they a minority. Most of the people I know with food allergies have insubstantial complaints like "it gives me gas", or "it makes my palms slightly itchy).
Sorry for sounding cranky, it seemed like a good time for a ran
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With celiac disease, that's often exactly how it presents itself: "insubstantial complaints". I was diagnosed with it about 10 years ago, but I spent several years with various digestive and bowel problems that were dismissed by my doctor as nothing serious, just transient issues. It was caught almost by accident, because my doctor noticed that for a couple of consecutive annual checkups, I got blood work back showing a slightly elevated white blood cell count. He referred me to a hematologist for furth
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It's not a fad, and it's not a choice.
I'm sorry, again, for implying that all cases of this (and other food allergies) are purely mental, or trendy. But MOST of them are, you might not fall into this group, and then I have genuine sympathy for you. Again, also, my choice in wording was a bit harsh, since I chose the term "also" to say "sans the people with actual, proven, medical problems not related to modern trends", this was bad word choice on my behalf.
I feel, though, that you and the person I was resp
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It's not a fad, and it's not a choice.
I'm sorry, again, for implying that all cases of this (and other food allergies) are purely mental, or trendy. But MOST of them are
You'd have to back that assertion up, I think.
One of the reasons Celiac might appear to be a "new thing" or even a fad is because for a long time it wasn't diagnosed properly in the US, and a lot of medical professionals simply didn't know anything about it, or else only recognized one possible set of symptoms, and only looked for it in children.
I have heard that in Italy, for instance, Celiac awareness (including among medical professionals) has historically been much better than in the US.
As for pizza: I
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On what are you basing those assertions? There's nothing special about being gluten intolerant or having celiac disease.
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Where the hell did these people come from, a quick scan of history shows this is all very recent.
It's a combination of better reporting of real allergies, access to more exotic foods, specialised health care and many misdiagnosed people.
In the 1950's how many people living in Tulsa ever ate a Kiwi fruit? Now they have a Whole Foods.
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Where the hell did these people come from, a quick scan of history shows this is all very recent.
It's a combination of better reporting of real allergies, access to more exotic foods, specialised health care and many misdiagnosed people.
In the 1950's how many people living in Tulsa ever ate a Kiwi fruit? Now they have a Whole Foods.
Access is not an issue with Gluten - it's in practically everything, by way of wheat...
Diagnosis is really the bigger issue. Doctors in the US previously expected Celiac Sprue to only show up in kids - and lead to emaciation-like symptoms. But the symptoms, their severity, and their consequences can vary by individual and over time. The real danger, for those who don't know, isn't in the IBS-type symptoms that immediately follow contamination, but rather in the long-term damage that can come from the aut
evil gluten is poison! (Score:2)
It also is the dietary trend of the day. Its is absolutely bizarre how many people have food allergies these days, when I was in college 3-4 years back, around 1/3rd of everyone claimed to be allergic to something interesting. Most of them were gluten, though there were people with "meat" allergies, wheat allergies, pineapple allergies... Where the hell did these people come from, a quick scan of history shows this is all very recent. Its gotten to the point where going out to eat with people is a remarkable act of planning, since no one can eat anything. I generally shrug, tell them to go bugger off, and grab a cheeseburger and a nice beer.
Its like this silly "aspergers" and "adult ADD" trend, where the hell were these people in any time before the last 20 years?
These people were in the same place 20 years ago as they were now - just undiagnosed, suffering various symptoms and maybe not knowing anything was wrong... at best maybe realizing they "didn't like" certain foods, at worst being compelled to eat them anyway.
As for the "remarkable act of planning" - welcome to my life. :) But it's really not so bad - at least when you just live with one food-tolerance issue. Lots of beer places also serve hard cider or GF beer or other drinks... Lots of pizza places are
life insurance investigators track people too (Score:2)
Privacy is dead. Get over it. (Score:2)
Steve Rambam, a private investigator, gives talks at the 2600 HOPE conferences. In 2006, he gave a talk called, "Privacy is Dead, Get Over It." He makes a convincing case that in the age of the Internet, 20 bucks will get you access to everything you ever wanted to know about someone. Not just pseudo-personal information like address, date of birth, SSN, phone numbers, and so on, but their complete financial history including credit records, bank accounts, loans, and major purchases; magazine subscriptions;