Evan Ratliff

Evan Ratliff (born c. 1976) 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.

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.

"Vanishing" experiment

Ratliff conducted an experiment by vanishing as far as knowledge of his physical whereabouts. Wired offered a $5000 reward for anyone who could find him. During the experiment, he was still "on the grid" and communicating with his followers on Twitter. 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. NewsCloud set up its Facebook application community technologyto report on the story and enhance community behind the #vanish hash tag. Ratliff used his specially created blog to taunt the "hunters", and Facebook groups emerged to team up and find himand other groups formed to help him remain at largeHe 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 messageFaLiLV/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 Ratliff could can be listened to and downloaded. The @runningratliff may have been Ratliff posting, and included the DVD of Pursuit, a 1972 Michael Crichton film featuring Martin Sheen and set in San Diego. @runningratliff also mentioned SDIA (thought to be San Diego International Airport). See Is Evan in San Diego?