Wired Writer Disappears, Find Him and Make $5k

carp3_noct3m writes "A freelance Wired magazine journalist has decided to see what it is like to disappear from normal life, all while staying on the grid. The catch, is that he is challenging anyone and everyone to find him, take a picture, and speak a special codeword to him. If you can do that, you can make 5000 dollars, which happens to come out of his paycheck for the article he'll be writing. Oh, and to top it all off, whoever finds him gets pictures and interviews in Wired. He has been posting to his Twitter, using TOR for internet, and the Wired website will be posting his credit card transactions."

Comments

Re:Taking all the fun out of it

[sgauss]

Well, if I believe my television, you should still be able to waterboard him!

Why this fails

[popo]

The problem, as any Wired writer should know -- is that information wants to be free.

As the writer himself has observed: Contacting his family or breaking the law are easy ways to retrieve the information.

Those activities may disqualify the offending "player", but they do not disqualify the underlying data -- which wants to be free -- and can easily be passed on to any party in order to claim the prize.

So like most "hacks", social-engineering will trump using the "grid".

And the take-away here is this: There are no rules. There is only data, and it will be free.

The poor writer is going to find much of his personal life violated, I'm afraid. But the blame falls to him. He should have known better.