Evan Ratliff is a contributor to Wired Magazine and one of the coauthors of Safe: the race to protect ourselves in a newly dangerous world.[1] His article The Zombie Hunters: On the trail of cyberextortionists, written for The New Yorker in 2005,[2] was featured in The best of technology writing 2006.[3]
He conducted an experiment by vanishing as far as knowledge of his physical whereabouts.[4] Wired offered a $5000 reward for anyone who could find him.[5] During the experiment, he was still "on the grid" and communicating with his followers on Twitter.[6] The Google Wave development group has proposed using the phenomenal ploy as a test case for the new technology pushing the frontier of real-time web activity.[7] NewsCloud set up its Facebook application community technology [8] to report on the story and enhance community behind the #vanish hash tag. Ratliff used his specially created blog to taunt the "hunters",[9] and Facebook groups emerged to team up and find him [10] and others groups formed to help him remain at large [11] He was tracked to and found on September 8, 2009 in New Orleans by @vanishteam, a group participating in the challenge to find him.[12]
Ratliff left a coded message [13] 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 the authors and titles of books.
Wired also released a playlist of songs from Evan which can be listened to and downloaded.
The @runningratliff may also be Evan posting and includes the DVD Pursuit, a 1972 Michael Crichton film featuring Martin Sheen - set in San Diego. @runningratliff also mentions SDIA (thought to be San Diego International Airport). See Is Evan in San Diego?