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11/21/09
11/21/09
11/21/09
i could hide in Houston or LA wayy better than NY
11/21/09
11/21/09
[www.citymayors.com]
[www.demographia.com]
You really want to hide? Go to Bombay.
11/22/09
1- Density (I'm talking vertical/I look out my window and I see about 10,000 windows staring back at me)
2-Options (I could get what ever I want at just about any time of the day in multiple places)
3-Public Transportation (I can get anywhere in the city on it with little trouble and in a timely matter).
Now I know LA and Houston are nice large cities/metropolitan areas with lots of people, but I do not consider them real big cities per the criteria above.
#tips
11/22/09
11/22/09
It's also comforting to draw imaginary borders on a map and call *that* your definition of your city, and hence to rank it thus, but in the real world, all we have to go on if we are to agree with each other objectively is what constitutes cities. And when you look an urbanised areas incorporated as cities, and remove inter-observer variability and rank them according to common density metrics, then LA is simply denser than NYC, and the densest such city in the USA. Still not even close to Bombay though.
11/22/09
Also, from your list, Mexico City and São Paulo are definitely big cities (per the criteria above), Rio I'm not so sure. The areas near the beaches sure feel like it...but higher up, like Jacarepagua for example, not so much. To me Rio is a more like LA, there are some high density areas, but it's just not vertical enough.
#tips
11/21/09
The Gatz Facebook and twitter accounts, big mistakes. Just having those things wasn't necessarily the problem, the fact that he was sharing specific details was. Why would J.D. Gatz, who suffered from Male pattern baldness, need to shave his head? And why would anyone feel the need to share that information?
Should have gotten more cash at the start and stayed off the credit cards / gift cards.
Rather than relying on Tor, which is slow as molasses, he should have set up a series of high anonymity SOCKS5 proxies, preferably located in hacker-friendly locals, to redirect all data through. Doing it that way means decent speeds and not having to specifically connect each time (thus no risk of getting lazy).
He relied too much on public transport and traveling with the band. Should have bought a car and registered it to a third, trusted, party or simply bought it under the assumed name (almost assuredly illegal but not hard to do with cash in hand) thus giving him the ability to travel at will with no paper trail.
I think at the end of it, the problem was that he's just not the type who can disappear, he craves social interaction and acceptance. He wasn't really trying to escape the reality of his life, he was trying to escape the people looking for him... there's a big difference.
11/21/09
Not only will we not be able to disappear, we would be located at a click of the mouse!
It will release the "virtual stalkers" lurking in some (all) of us!!!
11/21/09
Bouncers, shells, and proxies.
11/21/09
@UnderLoK:
They're coming to get you
11/21/09
11/21/09
11/21/09
11/21/09
11/21/09
or he could go to liverpool, even if you knew he was there, you wouldnt want to go find him
11/21/09
#tips
11/21/09
Credit cards have been an obvious no no since, like what, Pelican Brief? lol
If you can pay cash and not be a total idiot with internet usage, disappearing isn't a problem.
11/21/09
it was creating a new life for yourself.
he just proved how hard it is, not only to be unknown, but whole psychological aspect of it, the paranoia, well not really cause it was true, and everything make it hard to reinvent yourself, since, like we saw, u cant totally abandon ur past life, (example, when he went to the soccer game and almost got caught at the airport)
11/21/09
11/21/09
This could be done, and he would have pulled it off if he hadn't been so attached to tracking what the team was doing.
11/21/09
11/21/09
11/21/09
11/21/09
11/21/09
He purposely left a bread crumb trail. Hell, unless Gizmodo was on it, all I do on the internet is check my email and check Gizmodo. I know Google wouldn't give out my IP and I hope Gizmodo wouldn't.
11/21/09
10/12/09
10/12/09
I would never count on any opinion or prognostication by the WSJ to have much value.
SMTP will live forever. Newsgroups were supposedly dead twenty years ago, too. The kicker for me was the sendup of sharepoint as a miraculous way for companies to decrease email traffic. Yeah, right.
I'm not sure how old Jessica is, but my guess is that she has never known a world without email. Jessica, dear, I can't wait to see you write the same article in 20 years, when email is still alive and well.
Oh, and by the way, X is still very much alive. I'm running an XServer and a bunch of XTerms right now. Love 'em.
10/12/09
10/12/09
10/12/09