Evan Ratliff

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Evan Ratliff
Occupation
Wired Magazine, The New Yorker

Evan Ratliff (born c. 1975)

Wired Magazine and The New Yorker
. He has written one book and co-authored multiple others.

Career

Ratliff is one of the co-authors of Safe: the Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World.[2] His article "The Zombie Hunters: On the Trail of Cyberextortionists", written for The New Yorker in 2005,[3] was featured in The Best of Technology Writing 2006.[4]

He is also the author of the book The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal., which profiles the criminal Paul Le Roux.[5]

"Vanishing" experiment

In August 2009, Ratliff and Wired magazine conducted an experiment, wherein Ratliff "vanished" as far as knowledge of his whereabouts.[6] Wired offered a $5,000 reward for anyone who could find him before a month had passed.[7] During the experiment, Ratliff remained "on the grid", communicating with his followers on Twitter.[8] The Google Wave development group proposed using the exercise as a test case for the new technology pushing the frontier of real-time web activity.[9] NewsCloud set up its Facebook application community technology[10] to report on the story and enhance community behind the #vanish hash tag.[11] Ratliff used a specially created blog to taunt his "hunters"[12] and Facebook groups emerged to team up and find him,[13] while other groups formed to help him remain at large.[14] He eventually was tracked and found on September 8, 2009, in New Orleans by @vanishteam, a group participating in the challenge to find him.[15]

Ratliff left a coded message[16] — FaLiLV/tRD:aN/HA:aSaTS; TW—tRS/tEKAA/tBotV; FSF—TItN/tGG/tCCoBB; JC—LJ/HoD/aOoP; JM—JGS/MWS/tBotH — which has been translated to be the authors and titles of a variety of books.[17]

References

External links