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.'"
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.
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
Re:this makes me smile (Score:3, Informative)
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]
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.