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Evan Ratliff

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American journalist and author (born 1975)

Evan Ratliff
OccupationJournalist
Notable credit(s)The Atavist, Wired Magazine, The New Yorker

Evan Ratliff (born c. 1975) is an American journalist and author. He is CEO and co-founder of Atavist, a media and software company. Ratliff is a contributor to 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. His article "The Zombie Hunters: On the Trail of Cyberextortionists", written for The New Yorker in 2005, was featured in The Best of Technology Writing 2006. He is also the author of the book The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal, which profiles the criminal Paul Le Roux.

He is the writer and host of the podcasts Shell Game, in which he documents his experiments with an AI-generated voice clone, and Persona: The French Deception, an investigation into the French–Israeli scammer Gilbert Chikli. He was a co-host and founder of the podcast Longform.

"Vanishing" experiment

In August 2009, Ratliff and Wired magazine conducted an experiment, wherein Ratliff "vanished" as far as knowledge of his whereabouts. Wired offered a $5,000 reward for anyone who could find him before a month had passed. During the experiment, Ratliff remained "on the grid", communicating with his followers on Twitter. 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. NewsCloud set up its Facebook application community technology to report on the story and enhance community behind the #vanish hash tag. Ratliff used a specially created blog to taunt his "hunters" and Facebook groups emerged to team up and find him, while other groups formed to help him remain at large. He eventually was tracked and found on September 8, 2009, in New Orleans by @vanishteam, a group participating in the challenge to find him.

Ratliff left a coded message — 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.

References

  1. ^ Gillette, Felix. "Innovator: Evan Ratliff, Bloomberg Businessweek (Jan. 20, 2011).
  2. Martha Baer; Katrina Heron; Oliver Morton; Evan Ratliff (2005), Safe: the race to protect ourselves in a newly dangerous world, HarperCollins, ISBN 978-0-06-057715-5
  3. Ratliff, Evan (October 3, 2005). "The Zombie Hunters". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved August 26, 2019.
  4. Brendan I. Koerner, ed. (2006), The best of technology writing 2006, University of Michigan Press, p. 264, ISBN 978-0-472-03195-5
  5. Evan Ratliff (January 29, 2019). The Mastermind. Random House Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-399-59041-2.
  6. Lim, Louisa (September 28, 2024). "Shell Game probes the perils of AI". The Saturday Paper. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  7. Sawyer, Miranda (June 11, 2022). "The week in audio: Persona: The French Deception; Swindler. Saviour. Mobster. Spy?; Londongrad". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  8. Locker, Melissa (September 3, 2015). "Longform: the podcast about writing that uncovers the story behind the headlines". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  9. "Wired.com/vanish". Archived from the original on March 14, 2014. Retrieved March 6, 2017.
  10. Catch This Writer If You Can and Win $5k ABC News, Aug. 26, 2009
  11. @ev_rat (Evan Ratliff's Twitter account)
  12. Google Wave API group post
  13. VanishTeam
  14. "Newscould Launches Quick Response VanishTeam Facebook Application to Find Evan Ratliff in Wired's Vanishing Experiment," Newscloud blog (August 2009). Archived 2009-09-13 at the Wayback Machine
  15. EvanOffGrid Blog
  16. The Search for Evan Ratliff
  17. Run, Evan, Run!
  18. Thompson, Nicholas (September 8, 2009). "Evan Ratliff Is Caught!". Wired.
  19. @evansvanished
  20. "vanish.team". Archived from the original on July 17, 2011. Retrieved May 10, 2019.

External links

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