What We Know About Evan Ratliff, So Far | Hacker News Reader

What We Know About Evan Ratliff, So Far

wired.com

22 pointsedw5199 comments

While it might be a fun game (more fun for Evan than for the rest of us, I'm sure) and I'm sure it's a great publicity stunt for Wired, I'm not sure what it's supposed to prove.

Playing hide-and-seek with a vanishingly small number of Wired readers who actually bothered to memorize what this guy looks like is very different from playing hide-and-seek with the police.

I think it's interesting. Not so much the ultimate question of whether they can find him, but rather the things we learn along the way about exactly how much a reader base with no special (e.g., law enforcement) privileges can dig up about someone they've never met. Not just general character facts about him (he's left handed), but also time- and date-stamped activities (he took a picture of his cat at this time and this place).

It would be a lot more interesting if each bullet point of information came with a link to a 'trail' describing how that factoid was uncovered. (For example, I'd be particularly interested in learning how we know about his ATM activity. Assuming no one got a court order, how we anyone get access to that info?)

he gave his editor access to his bank accounts before he left, and the editor has been posting data dumps regularly to the wired site.

You're right. But if they do find him, it will prove something.

That he's not trying very hard to vanish? The guy is still taking photos of his cat and uploading 'em to flickr. Also, he's hanging out in Wired reader central -- San Francisco and Santa Monica. If he really wanted to vanish he'd be camping in Utah by now.

Unless of course he's camping in Utah while leaving a false trail in California...

If he really wanted to disappear, he would delete his Flickr account, shut down his email address, and not say a word about where he is to anybody enough of an attention whore to pass the news along to Wired.

Part of the game is that he has to continue using Facebook, Flickr, his cell phone, etc.

http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/08/author-evan-ratliff-is-o...

Otherwise, he would just go sit in the woods for a month and it wouldn't be much of a game.

Surely someone who works at facebook/flickr/google/at&t can pinch his access logs...

He is using TOR for computer access, which is supposed to make it hard to determine point of entry(IP).

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