Slashdot Mirror
Stay Off the Grid, Win $10,000
DariusD writes "Last summer, Wired writer Evan Ratliff wrote a story about how people erase their identities and start over. After it ran, he tried to disappear — spending 25 days on the lam until a few enterprising Wired readers tracked him down through some brilliant hacking and sleuthing. Now we're going to try the experiment again. Evan, Wired, Loneshark Games and I are working with Universal Pictures to do another, similar contest connected to the new film Repo Men, and this time we want you to go on the run. We need four applicants willing to disappear from their lives from late February to late March. If they can stay hidden for that time period, they'll end up with $10,000 each."
This is a great opportunity for those unemployed to ,well, still be unemployed!
Easy with one caveat. It would only be easy for people who wouldn't want to take part in the first place.
For the twittering, facebooking, wannabe internet-celebrity, attention whores, who would take part; they'd blow it.
Osama's in.... Already for several years, btw...
I'm guessing he'll be getting the 10 grand.
As capable as I am at winning this challenge, I'll have to spectate from behind dual LCD panels, as my job will not permit (and 10k isnt much more than the salary I'd make in the same time period). Good luck to all who have the means to slack for 30+ days!
"To err is human, to mod Funny divine."
I'll be out of the office for a month. Please ignore the anonymous person checking stuff into the svn repo, I swear it isn't me...
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
there are a good many people with the know how and the skill to pull this off. Unfortunately, they make over 10K/mo.
Just get enough money in cash, go to mexico/canada which ever is farther from your normal place of residence and spend the time at campgrounds.
Camp out in the mountains of the middle east. You can hide away from everyone for decades!
Don't run.
You don't have to chase me.
You don't have to run.
Everybody runs.
The summary seems misleading. From what I understand, you aren't allowed to actually drop off the grid - they want you to actually perform certain activities, check in, provide clues, etc.
Otherwise I'd just take a month off of work and buy a ton of food and go wilderness camping somewhere (Canada would be nice, but not in Feb). There is almost no way anybody would be able to track you down.
On the other hand, I'd never take a month of vacation time just to live like a hermit and maybe win $10k - they really need to up the ante if they want people to do this for real.
It sounds like the contest is just about lying low, but posting hints. That obviously makes you far more detectable than if you were allowed to participate without any constraints.
I will definitely apply,
just let me finish moving my stuff back into mom's basement.
1) Collude with a very good friend. Live in their basement the entire month and never going outside. Split the prize with them at the end.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
disappearing into Death Valley for a month. Good luck finding me :-)
That's fine, I'll also ignore sending pay-checks to this anonymous fellow as well, as he clearly isn't you.
I hope the website gets $10,000 for going into hiding like that!
Site comes up with a 'suspended' page... maybe he should cancel the contest and use the 10k to pay off the bandwidth overages he probably just incurred from this... not to mention the resource spike i'm sure he just hit. looks to have been a shared hosting server. Ouch.
http://wiredinsider.com/repomen/
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Honestly, how hard could it be? 1 new identity, 16 cases of beer. yes please.
I have seen this setup many times before. Once you sign up you are soon hunted for sport by wealthy businessmen and heads of state. You will disappear forever and "win" the $10,000, but your stuffed and mounted corpse won't be able to spend it from the underground chamber it is displayed in. I have seen this happen; beware.
Don't blame me, I voted for Cthulhu.
Have gnu, will travel.
Maybe it knows the importance of not being seen...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Just join the club of anonymous, though be careful since the NSA will be calling you a terrorist ;)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I could probably make an easy 10k even if I had a GPS locater on me. Of coarse I live in Wyoming though...so I can't really win either way
I read the Wired article, and I never really figured out what he was trying to accomplish with his little experiment. Can anybody fill in the blanks for me?
Comment of the year
First, Slashdot the grid...
http://www.howtobeinvisible.com/
After several months of unemployment, I landed a job a couple weeks ago otherwise this would be a cakewalk.
1. Pay cash for EVERYTHING.
2. If you must use a PC, use a foreign proxy. (To check in by the rules, etc.)
3. If you must use a phone, keep the battery removed unless required by the rules to check in.
4. Don't frequent places you normally do. (If you play tennis a lot, take up bowling, etc.)
5. Head back-country for some extended camping. Alaska, Montana, Idaho, Minnesota or the Dakotas come to mind.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
"Applicants must include at least 3 recent pictures and 2 minutes of video of themselves taken within the past year."
That alone disqualifies me :)
eliphas
Sign up just before beginning a deployment on a nuclear missile sub.
I mean really - 4 weeks? I'd pull a thousand bucks out of the bank, rent a car, drive a few hundred miles, take a bus or something to the trailhead and spend a nice month hiking the Appalacian Trail or something, paying cash for my food. Always wanted to do that anyway, and for $10,000 it'd be a nice vacation. Do the rules say you have to be transacting business, or in populated areas or anything?
You lose already.
Me, on the other hand...
We used to go out to Death Valley regularly. It's not a big deal if you carry enough water and food, and don't take silly risks (or do, if you carry spare parts and tools). My five year old son went out to DV with me when he was nine months old. Camped out in the old Indian summering ground at 9000ft :-)
meh
What if you had friends all around the country who would post as you. For any times you actually need to interact on the internet, work through one of their machines to hide your true location. If you have a satellite link, and camp out in a forest somewhere, it should be quite hard to find you.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
"If you are the owner or webmaster for this web site please contact your web site hosting company's support department."
It looks like the webserver for this story entered the contest.
We're already off the grid... I could probably just stay in my own house and not be found. Unfortunately we're not allowed to enter the contest.
Maybe people should read them before commenting on how easily said rules can be beaten.
Oh, that's right, this is /., where posters* comment on the story they want to comment on, not the one they're actually replying to.
(* - mea culpa, I'm feeling extra snarky today.)
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
That wouldn't even cover the expenses incurred covering your tracks, nevermind having to get by after the fact until you can find a new job.
We should get the Wired readers to track him down.
Those talking about the hike into the mountains are missing the point of the chase.
If you want to do this and have fun, you need to be an international traveler that is posting your blogs just before you get on a train or plane or boat. They have to actually catch you. Go ahead and post and tweet. Just keep moving quickly so they don't know where you are for more than a few seconds.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Wired writer Evan Ratliff wrote a story about how people erase their identities and start over.
We're getting ready to sell our house and move, only we're not buying another house right away. We're going to investigate locations to build an off-grid concrete home. In getting set up to go mobile I realized how easy it would be to make a few changes and drop off society completely. Not only can you do it, but if you have the money you can do it in style and comfort.
My wife has a medical condition that would keep us from participating in something like this, but after months of preparation I can tell you it can be done. You don't realize how much is tied to having an address until you face a situation where you won't have one. The biggest logistical hurdle we've faced is getting an address to establish residency without having a permanent physical address.
Now becoming someone else and assuming an identity is a whole different gig. That's a lot harder, but disappearing for a couple months. Piece of cake. And if someone was after us, I could have them chasing rabbit trails for weeks. There's a reason 12 million undocumented people can get by here.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It looks to me that they have basically taken the Running Man show from the book and made it real.
Unlike that bullshit movie that was made with the same title, same character names, but the story was nothing at all like the book.
I imagine they would use the Running Man title if they could get permission to.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I was a carnie for a year in my early 20's. Those guys are gone, cash everything, no real names just nicknames. Cash everything, no SS# used. It isnt that hard as many of them had warrants outstanding.
If 10 grand would cover a vacation to some remote island in the pacific?
How hard could this possibly be?
Five weeks of:
-No wireless communication
-Public terminals only, with portable browser and Tor on USB stick
-No credit or debit
-No disclosing location or plans
-Relocate daily, avoiding urban centres
Between the huge backpack, a bit of scruff, and a few sets of raggedy clothes, you could easily be (mis)taken for homeless (which is a hair's breadth from invisible). Fresh costuming could always be grabbed from a thrift store along the way.
It's unnecessary to go camping, the urban jungle provides fine cover.
ok, who the hell has an entry form in DOC FORMAT?!?!?
I'd rather hide in my office and not take the pay cut...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you make significantly less that $10k month, that would still be acceptable.
This is trivial to anyone who doesn't live in a city. There's an entire country out there to hide in. Pack some food, and hide in the badlands of ND.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I shall channel the master - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt3NfymWlss
You're young, you've got your health, what you want with a job?
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
I've been a member of the former, but not the later, for over a year.
No one knows where to find me. If I want to be seen, I find them.
They don't want me playing the game. They'll see me to check in, so that they know I exist, and then won't be able to find me again until the day I show up to collect my cash. Sorry, part of living free is not needing to have a bank account. It's too easy to track your motions through your own bank records.
Too bad their site is down. I'd already have signed up. Maybe I'll have to just show up to their office some night, and leave a note saying "I'm in."
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Rutger Hauer or Gary Busey.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It is a movie promotion. Nothing more.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Give me ample junk food, weed and XBOX live account, and you will not see me for 2 months.
They're giving away a measly $10,000 each, for a total of $40,000 - IF ALL FOUR contestants make it full-term. The vague rules they have posted in the application say that you must agree to sign other "agreements", which (conveniently) are not available right now. Yeah right, like I'm gonna sign something *now* that obligates me to sign something later, whether I agree to the subsequent agreements or not. This leads me to believe that like others have suggested, they'll set forth such stringent and restrictive rules that almost ensure the contestants will NOT make it to the $10,000 mark, so they'll end up with the $2,500 given to you up front. Several of us are quite capable of going *completely* off the grid, but updating Twitter/Facebook/Myspace is not my idea of completely disconnecting. This means that their investment here (not counting the marketing costs that would normally be associated with an upcoming film) are somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 to $20,000 if someone does make it. At the end of the day, it's to generate hype for the movie using a different approach. Ultimately, isn't everything about generating revenue?
Most everyone assumes that Jack Bauer/CTU, the NSA and the military are actively *chasing* you. That's ridiculous. Unless the rules require you to start in a specific location at a specific time, this should be trivial and not even require leaving the city you live in (although it might help to avoid places you would normally frequent).
Just get an extended-stay room at some anonymous hotel or furnished apartment in someone else's name, paying cash, including leaving a huge cash deposit for consumables like pay per view and internet. It'd probably be easiest to do this through a proxy like an attorney. Stay in the kind of place that has a kitchen, so you're not forced out for every meal. If you were enterprising you could probably bring in an entire month's worth of food at once as long as you didn't need a lot of refrigeration.
It would get boring, but an archive of DVDs, on-demand tv and cooking could keep you occupied with seldom needing to leave your hotel. Cell phone through pre-paid throw-away phones and service. Internet through the hotel to a secure outside proxy or chain of proxies (rent a couple of VMs at a couple of hosting places) or free wifi, or, I wonder if you can rig up occasional 3G tethering on prepaid SIM cards put in tether-capable phones?
If you did it in a busy but anonymous suburb of some major city you didn't live in usually (Chicago, NY/NJ, LA/Orange County) you could probably go out and as long as you pay cash for things, do so with impunity, since the odds of someone actually running into you would be about zero. As long as you live in a 200k+ sized city and stayed away from friends/family/familiar places you could probably get away with without leaving home.
10 year old 1: Want to play hide and seek?
10 year old 2: Yeah!
1: You know the rules right?
2: Yep, you're never gonna find me!
1: Yes I will, you can only hide in the kitchen and you have to talk to me while I look, it's part of the rules.
2: That's not a very fun game...
This is stupid. Anyone able to camp for a month could just go live in the bush. Or draw as much cash as you'd need and go hire a camper van for a month if you're a sissy for the outdoors. Double points if you find a way to park your camper van 100 yards from the offices of the guys holding this competition. Triple points if you wear a disguise and use their lobby toilets every day.
I hate printers.
So you get $2500 for the month and then $7500 if you complete it without being found. You're not making much more than if you just went to work for those 30 days. The risk vs. reward ratio just isn't there.
or else!
Good to hear they are finally making a sequel to the greatest movie of all time, Repo Man.
"It happens sometimes. People just explode."
This seems pretty dang simple. If I didn't have a family, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Double the amount and I'm in. That's just not enough you tight fisted a holes!!!
That's only $2500 a month. I make that in a week and a half.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Yeah, because private investigators have never found someone camping in the bush or in a campervan, especially when they visit their clients headquarters daily in ridiculous outfits.
Hiding out in the bush is boring. Well, nice to experience nature, but not the best place to hide, especially if law enforcement is after you. If you're in a county, state, or federal park, you'll likely encounter a fish & wildlife officer or park ranger. If you're on private property, you'll likely get a visit from the local Sheriff's department, when the landowner or a neighbor calls. No matter how isolated you think you are, someone will notice you, and complain.
The best place to hide anything, including yourself, is in plain sight. In a rural area, you may be the only person for miles. In Manhattan, your face is mingled with hundreds of thousands of others, who wouldn't remember seeing you walking down the street. You're no different than anyone else they see.
But, the best way to hide is to not be obvious. Book a hotel room under another name, preferably with all the required credentials. You can be out of sight, and out of mind, without being out of the area.
The 100 yards from the organizers facility isn't a bad idea, but it has to be done right. Sleeping in your car or a camper in their parking lot will raise suspicions. A nearby hotel with a view of the front door of their building is much more advantageous. It's also more entertaining to provide pictures of the staffers entering and exiting, *AFTER* the contest is done. You'll get the urge to brag, and when you send the first picture, it's a matter of elimination to figure out where it was shot from.
As always, know your environment. In the hotel, there may be a main elevator to the lobby, and that would be watched. What about stairways? I spent some time in a hotel for work. The elevators opened in the lobby, in plain sight. From the 2nd floor, you could take the stairs closest to the room to the 3rd floor. From there, you could cross the floor and take the other stairwell to an outside exit, without tripping a fire alarm. I wasn't scouting it because I was worried I was being followed. I was bored and exploring. It turned out that if I took the stairs to the 3rd floor, walked the length of the floor, and took the other stairwell down, it was quicker to get to always empty parking. That was faster than going the lobby route.
Pay attention to available spaces. Can you go in the laundry room, and lock the door from the inside? How about a janitorial closet that's usually unlocked.
At some point, you'll need food. In a high density environment, you won't be noticed.
Sometimes it's easy to leave all traces of yourself in one state, while being in another. Give someone your credit card and cell phone. Have them use the cards, and phone on a regular basis, to give the illusion that you are still there. Loan him your car for the duration. Folks believe I am in one state, and I'm actually in a distant state. My friend with the phone knows my new disposable cell phone number. I wander around, turn the phone on, check my voicemails that the friend leaves, and then return to my "home base".
Where am I today? I could be at a friends house. I could be in a hotel. I may be sleeping in my car in between locations. My IP? VPN'd to the state where I want to appear to be, on a private VPN. If I even begin to believe my location is burnt, I move on. Don't settle in one place too long. Have your bags ready to move within 5 minutes.
Traveling on cash for gas, and sleeping in the car leaves little evidence of my travels. I be anywhere in the US within a few days, and I still look like I'm home. Use your car like the burn phones. Buy one on Craigslist, slap the old plate on, and keep moving. If you're caught driving with the wrong plate, you can produce the bill of sale showing that you just bought it, and say you are going to properly register once you get back to your home state. With the title in hand, it's easy to swap ca
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I'm in the last hectic months of writing before finishing my PhD. Months where I need absolute peace and quiet and a full withdrawl from the world.
Easiest. Challenge. Ever.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
I presume it's US-only, or else I could simply pack a camper full of food, solar arrays, and a satellite net connection, and head out into the Australian desert for four weeks. There are places within a day's drive that haven't had a human pass there in fifty years.
It wouldn't even matter if my net connection was unproxied. Tracking my IP might tell you which ISP I was with, and analysing the ping might help to determine that I was on a satellite connection, but then what? Even if you knew precisely where in orbit the satellite was, "over Australia" still doesn't help much. I could keep up with a pile of forums all day long and no-one would have a chance in hell of physically locating me.
As for interesting things I could do, I could shoot a nature documentary, a survivalist documentary, a documentary on car repair in the desert, make a vlog, all kinds of things.
Bonus points if I had a tiny area in the camper set up with a variable background (colors, paintings, wall kibble, lighting etc) and took along collapsible backgrounds which resembled well-known locations/walls in a major city. And wore different kinds of hats, sunglasses, hair styles and colors etc, to make it look like I was skulking around town. And uploaded a ten-minute video every day with the fake backgrounds and disguises.
Double bonus points if I'd shot the videos the previous month, uploaded them to a colo server, and simply had a cron job move a new one to the public folder (and update links) every 24 hours.
"Hi. I'm in... Delaware."