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A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack

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Re: A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack

#71

Post by grecy »

0x1F8B wrote: post #67

> IN APRIL 2017, a man started hiking in a state park just north of New York City. He wanted to get away, maybe from something and maybe from everything. > Everyone who goes into the woods is trying to get away from something. > Everyone, at some point, has wanted to put their phone in a garbage can and head off with a fake name and a wad of cash. Since you are here I want to mention how off-putting this rhetoric is…

I agree 100%.

I've chosen a life of less work, less stuff and therefore less money. I spend a lot of my time alone on big trips around the world, and out in the wilderness. I'm immensely more happy than I was sitting at a desk watching my life go by without really being alive.

I get a lot of this attitude about how I must be "running from something" or I'm "throwing my life away".

I think it's a symptom of our modern "society" that it needs to put down anyone who chooses not to be drowning in it.

Which, of course, makes me want to distance myself from it even more.

Re: A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack

#72

Post by giarc »

mjsir911 wrote: post #49
ballenf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He posed for a number of photographs and videos. He interacted with many people. He never expressed the desire to remain anonymous that you intuit. If someone wants to slip away quietly into the void, there are much better ways to do it than this path. I'd argue it's honoring him and the honorable life he seems to have led to pursue this investigation. Not to mention there may be a number people who will get peace fr…

The article at least hints to the fact that MH was weary about digital evidence: "He asked Mostly Harmless if he could take a picture. Mostly Harmless hesitated but then agreed" Are there better ways to slip into the void than going into the wilderness without even a phone?

The "wanted poster" for lack of a better term has about 6-8 pictures of him from various people. He didn't seem overly shy.

Re: A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack

#73

Post by chaostheory »

Jtsummers wrote: post #52
jariel wrote: post #34

Young men don't die for 'no reason'. It's odd that they couldn't find some cause of death, I assumed that in 2020 we'd be able to make a rough estimate. If there's no obvious foul play then statistically the obvious one would be suicide, but that should narrow only to a few specific things. How many ways are there for one to 'just die' while lying in a tent.

Aneurisms, strokes, toxins (spider/snake bites). The first is pretty quick, but the latter two could leave someone sufficiently weak or incapacitated to move and care for themselves, but still survive long enough to become emaciated.

Florida is like the US's Australia. There are so many things that can kill you including a number of poisonous species of spiders and snakes. It's not a good place to hike alone.

Re: A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack

#74

Post by dheera »

roywiggins wrote: post #39
dheera wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm slightly less concerned about being anonymous from the government and far more concerned about being anonymous from businesses . How is it that every time I move, they still figure out where I live and continue to send me junk mail? I'm extremely concerned about the ease of arbitrary businesses finding out where some person lives. I want this to be unethical to the point that whoever leaked my address without my…

USPS sells change-of-address data. https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/08/how-the-p...

Yeah, I hate those assholes for that, that's why I don't tell the USPS anymore when I move.

Whenever I give my address to a business for shipping, DMV, voter registration, etc. I also tack on a code to my address so that if they leak it as-is, they'll have blood on their hands, and I can publicly shame them for it. But that hasn't yet seemed to successfully track down the source.

Re: A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack

#75

Post by dheera »

sologoub wrote: post #42
dheera wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm slightly less concerned about being anonymous from the government and far more concerned about being anonymous from businesses . How is it that every time I move, they still figure out where I live and continue to send me junk mail? I'm extremely concerned about the ease of arbitrary businesses finding out where some person lives. I want this to be unethical to the point that whoever leaked my address without my…

Assuming you are in US. If you fill out change of address form, then USPS tells them: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/08/how-the-p... The direct mail business has this “public records” part figured out pretty well and they gather the data from anywhere they can. Wouldn’t be surprised if utility bills factor in as well.

I don't fill that out anymore for exactly this reason.

Re: A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack

#76

Post by nitrogen »

PeterisP wrote: post #29
kick wrote: post #7

It's amazing how rude Facebook, reddit, and in this case, greedy companies, can be. If he cared enough about anyone knowing who he was, he'd have told someone. This is just blatant disregard for a man's privacy.

The laws and principles of privacy protection are generally built from the perspective that people have privacy interests that need protection, but dead bodies aren't people anymore and have no privacy rights. We do have certain restrictions about the deceased, but those are designed to protect the interests and privacy of their surviving family, relatives and friends, not the deceased themselves. For example, we can…

we can read and even publish the private diaries and intimate correspondence of dead people

Subject to copyright, of course.

Re: A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack

#78

Post by dreamcompiler »

Jtsummers wrote: post #52
jariel wrote: post #34

Young men don't die for 'no reason'. It's odd that they couldn't find some cause of death, I assumed that in 2020 we'd be able to make a rough estimate. If there's no obvious foul play then statistically the obvious one would be suicide, but that should narrow only to a few specific things. How many ways are there for one to 'just die' while lying in a tent.

Aneurisms, strokes, toxins (spider/snake bites). The first is pretty quick, but the latter two could leave someone sufficiently weak or incapacitated to move and care for themselves, but still survive long enough to become emaciated.

All of this would show up in an autopsy. Snake bites would leave visible puncture wounds. There are for all practical purposes no deadly spiders native to the US. Tissue necrosis from a brown recluse would be visible, and a black widow would leave neurotoxic signs that a decent autopsy would have found, as well as possibly the toxin itself. (Hardly anybody dies from those two spider bites, and those two are the only medically significant spiders in the US.)

Re: A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack

#79

Post by Jtsummers »

asphyxiac wrote: post #62
Jtsummers wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aneurisms, strokes, toxins (spider/snake bites). The first is pretty quick, but the latter two could leave someone sufficiently weak or incapacitated to move and care for themselves, but still survive long enough to become emaciated.

Aneurism would show up in the autopsy, right? And snake bite in the toxo report? Not sure about stroke.

Well, I'm not a doctor or medical professional of any sort so I honestly don't know. I was just presenting things that could lead to an apparently healthy young-ish man suddenly dropping dead for no apparent reason.

I didn't pick them totally randomly, though. I had a rationale: He seemed emaciated, which suggests something left him immobile for an extended period since he had food at hand. This made me think of strokes and snake/spider bites. The former could leave you permanently immobile, but alive. Without assistance he'd have died within a few days. The latter, depending on the sort, could leave you immobile and in great pain for a day or so, with a chance to recover and survive. But if he'd already become sufficiently dehydrated he may not have had the energy or wherewithal to care for himself.

There are other conditions which could lead to a similar outcome. Heat exhaustion, for instance, may not kill outright. But could leave you in a state where you need assistance and can't recover on your own.

Whether they'd show up on an autopsy, I don't know. But also per the article it was a while before he was found. So given a sufficient level of decay, it's possible these conditions wouldn't show up or would be sufficiently hard to detect (remember, the sheriff's didn't even want to pay $5k for the DNA testing, he wasn't a crime victim so their budget wasn't paying for a lot of analysis).

Re: A nameless hiker and the case the internet can’t crack

#80

Post by momothereal »

ColanR wrote: post #25
thomasqbrady wrote: post #5

The Screeps detail seems like something that could be fairly easily pursued... there can't have been that many players of that game to begin with, let alone those that would care so much about it that they would journal their thoughts about it. A quick check of the GitHub repo doesn't show he contributed code, but might he have opened an issue, contributed to docs? Might there be someone who was active in the communi…

If someone wants to check, I'd bet he at least forked or starred the github repo. A script to pull the list of those people, minus anyone whos been active since april 2017, would probably show his account.

I wrote a quick script through Github's API, and found 10 users[1] matching the criteria:

* starred any screeps repo before May 2017, and no other screeps repo since then

* no public contributions or events since April 2017

If someone has some time to do further filtering, ensure the users have not starred any GitHub repo since May 2017

I didn't go through forks but that would also be an avenue.

[1] https://gist.github.com/aramperes/2363dc3434de6b494b28b5a658...

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