The Strange Disappearance of Dancho Danchev 160
rudy_wayne writes "ZDNet is reporting that Zero Day blogger and malware researcher Dancho Danchev has gone missing since August of last year. Dancho, who was relentless in his pursuit of cyber-criminals, last blogged here on August 18. His personal blog has not been updated since September 11, 2010. 'At ZDNet, we made multiple attempts to contact him, to no avail. Telephone numbers are going to Bulgarian language voicemails and our attempts to reach him via a snail mail address also came up empty. Just recently, a trusted member of the malware research community reached out to us to say he had received a troubling letter from Dancho on September 9, 2010, about the threat of persecution in Bulgaria.'"
Re:So he is not missing. (Score:4, Informative)
It's Bulgaria -- it's *extremely* rare, almost unheard of, for the police to be able to keep anybody in jail for longer than 72 hours, especially for a non-violent crime accusation. I haven't seen anything in the Bulgarian news about this guy either -- and there would be, given that again, this is Bulgaria and you can't keep anything quiet. The fact that officials there are corrupt does not mean that everyone doesn't know who is corrupt in exactly what way...
Twitter (Score:5, Informative)
He seems to have been active on his twitter until the 20th of October:
http://twitter.com/danchodanchev [twitter.com]
thus invalidating the September 9's menace hypothesis.
He may simply have found a new job, and lost interest in updating his blog, or he may be paranoid and is hiding himself, by stopping all his online activities.
Using Twitter is not really the best way to stay discreet and anonymous.
Re:Tin foil hats (Score:5, Informative)
I like to reward folks for being funny.
While that's very considerate of you, a funny post marked as 'Informative' is more than likely to get subsequently modded down; messages with comedic substance tend to come across as wholly incorrect assertions when read from sources being represented as useful information.
Re:Tin foil hats (Score:4, Informative)
Impossible! On the night in question, the devil was with me. We were in a painting class at the local community college.
Re:Tin foil hats (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Tin foil hats (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed, which is why you look to see if it's already been moderated funny. If it hasn't you moderate it 'funny', if it has you moderate it 'underrated', giving karma without changing the way the post is described.