Common Paradox Tech Blog

Wired writer Evan Ratliff spent 27 days in constant fear of getting caught as a small army of amateur and professional investigators hunted him. He had a bounty on his head and the Internet nipping at his heels.

Vanish, a combination of a manhunt and an experiment, began at 5:38 pm on August 14, 2009 as a bold headline on Wired proclaimed “Author Evan Ratliff Is on the Lam. Locate Him and Win $5,000.” We would discover if someone could disappear in today’s world, or whether the electronic trails from ATM, email, and cell phone usage would give him away.

Of course, in Evan’s case it wasn’t just a few concerned family members or police officers looking. It was any person on the Internet whose curiosity was aroused, either by the sheer challenge or by the bounty. Any and all traceable information would be shared over the next few weeks. Soon Evan’s phone records, credit card statements, IP dumps, interviews with friends, and anything that his hunters could dig up would be posted on Twitter, Facebook, and Wired’s own site.

The end goal for the hunters was to locate Evan, photograph him after giving the codeword “fluke,” and then submitting that photo along with a codeword Evan would provide to Wired. And after 27 long days, someone did just that. Evan was caught.

You can read the entire tale here. As you do, consider whether Evan made any genuine mistakes or whether his capture was simply inevitable. Is there a way to disappear, without giving up travel and technology? How would you do it? [Wired]

There’s no easy way of going around the tedious task of tracking your expenses and reimbursements. Especially if you are a freelancer or consultant, you end up investing an inordinate amount of time separating receipts and credit card statements for clients and then creating an expense report most often a week after the expenses took place. Startup Xpenser is hoping to help professionals mitigate this problem by letting time, expenses and receipts be recorded and submitted immediately. Similar to what TripIt does for planning travel, Xpenser simplifies expense reporting.

Xpenser gives you a phone number where you can simply call and leave a message, which is transcribed into an expense submission. So if a traveler gets out of a taxi, she can call and leave a message for Xpenser saying “taxi $27 to hotel.” Xpenser parses the input, categorizes and records it, and makes it available on the Xpenser site for search, export, or for submission as an expense report. The traveler could also take a picture of a lunch receipt using her mobile phone and email it to Xpenser with the subject “Lunch $62.75 With Michael” and Xpensers will add it to its expense folder. The same conversion can be used for SMS messages as well. And you can also use instant messaging (Yahoo, MSN, AIM, or Google Talk) to converse with Xpenser. For example, if you are measuring your time on a particular project you could send “time start client X conference call” and then “time end.”