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.'"
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.
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.
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.