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:this makes me smile (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
Re:Great! (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the five people playing won!
From the summary it looks like the five players teamed up to find him.
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.
Re:The whole thing is ridiculous... (Score:3, Insightful)
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?