This is a pretty interesting read.
Back in August there was an article in Wired about people who decide to disappear without leaving any trace at all. As a sort of follow-up the writer decided to “disappear” himself and try to pick up a new identity for a month, with a bounty of $5000 for anyone who could track him down.
The premise is simple: I will try to vanish for a month and start over under a new identity. Wired readers, or whoever else happens upon the chase, will try to find me.
The idea for the contest started with a series of questions, foremost among them: How hard is it to vanish in the digital age? Long fascinated by stories of faked deaths, sudden disappearances, and cat-and-mouse games between investigators and fugitives, I signed on to write a story for Wired about people who’ve tried to end one life and start another. People fret about privacy, but what are the consequences of giving it all up, I wondered. What can investigators glean from all the digital fingerprints we leave behind? You can be anybody you want online, sure, but can you reinvent yourself in real life?
It’s one thing to report on the phenomenon of people disappearing. But to really understand it, I figured that I had to try it myself. So I decided to vanish. I would leave behind my loved ones, my home, and my name. I wasn’t going off the grid, dropping out to live in a cabin. Rather, I would actually try to drop my life and pick up another.
Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here’s What Happened
Scotland’s Autumn Tests started this weekend against Fiji. Getting tickets was easy but I had to solve a little logic puzzle to actually get into Murrayfield.
Someone at the SRU hadn’t thought their cunning plan all the way through.
Pretty good game. I’m off to the Scotland / Australia game next week.
On the off chance that you want to read a genuinely interesting piece of science writing, here’s a New Scientist article about the Large Hadron Collider.
And for those who worry about the repercussions of digging a tunnel under the Franco-Swiss border and smashing some very small things into other very small things at very high speeds, here’s a handy RSS feed.
Throughout our forensic informatics lectures we have been somberly informed that a career in digital forensics and avoiding child pornography are, to all intents and purposes, mutually exclusive. It isn’t very nice but sooner or later anyone involved in digital investigations is going to have to deal with it at some level.
I recently had a conversation with some friends where we discussed various scenarios where “evidence” could be planted on a computer without the owner’s knowledge. We came up with a few hypothetical situations in which it would be trivial for a motivated party with a bit of technical knowledge to cause a lot of trouble for an unsuspecting victim. Especially as child pornography is nasty enough that possession alone is all that’s needed to cause some serious legal difficulties.
I was reminded of that conversation by a post on Slashdot over the weekend concerning malware which, for one reason or another, seems to do just that. One case referred to in the AP article mentions software that hit 40 sites per minute while the defendant was out of the house. That case was eventually dropped but it took 11 months and cost the defendant $250,000 in legal fees, not to mention the damage to his reputation.
I’d like to think that it would be pretty simple to determine if malware is responsible for the presence of an image or video, but that doesn’t always seem to be the case. Another thing is that these seem to be “random infections”. I find it a little depressing to think of the damage that could be done by a properly targeted attack.
