Loading AI tools
Evan Ratliff (born c. 1975)[1] is an American journalist and author. He is CEO and co-founder of Atavist, a media and software company.[1] Ratliff is a contributor to Wired Magazine and The New Yorker. He has written one book and co-authored multiple others.
Evan Ratliff | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Notable credit(s) | The Atavist, Wired Magazine, The New Yorker |
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]
He is the writer and host of the podcasts Shell Game, in which he documents his experiments with an AI-generated voice clone,[6] and Persona: The French Deception, an investigation into the French–Israeli scammer Gilbert Chikli.[7] He was a co-host and founder of the podcast Longform.[8]
"Vanishing" experiment
In August 2009, Ratliff and Wired magazine conducted an experiment, wherein Ratliff "vanished" as far as knowledge of his whereabouts.[9] Wired offered a $5,000 reward for anyone who could find him before a month had passed.[10] During the experiment, Ratliff remained "on the grid", communicating with his followers on Twitter.[11] 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.[12] NewsCloud set up its Facebook application community technology[13] to report on the story and enhance community behind the #vanish hash tag.[14] Ratliff used a specially created blog to taunt his "hunters"[15] and Facebook groups emerged to team up and find him,[16] while other groups formed to help him remain at large.[17] He eventually was tracked and found on September 8, 2009, in New Orleans by @vanishteam, a group participating in the challenge to find him.[18]
Ratliff left a coded message[19] — 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.[20]
Wikiwand in your browser!
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Every time you click a link to Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Wikiquote in your browser's search results, it will show the modern Wikiwand interface.
Wikiwand extension is a five stars, simple, with minimum permission required to keep your browsing private, safe and transparent.
