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What Happens To Your Data When You Die?
dacarr writes "Your data - that is, the personal web pages and projects you have worked on to make the 'net a better place - are presumably password protected. But sooner or later the time will come when you take that last breath, and with you goes your passwords, but not your data. It's still there for your benefactors to deal with. And while many famous people who are no longer with us (e.g., Douglas Adams or Chuck Jones) have a staff for this, well, many of us don't. As such, have you planned for the hereafter, and if so, how?"
When I was in college a friend from the rugby team killed himself. I noticed days later that his student computer account was still open and emails had been received after his death. It gave a strange feeling to "finger" his account (which was how we found out about people in the old pre-web days) and have it return status information about him almost as if he was alive. I guess I can't really describe how it felt, almost like in some way some part of his life was still going on even though he was no longer around. I wrote to the system administrators and asked them to close his account down, which they did.
Not that it's relevent to the question at hand, but I never could understand what would cause someone to take their own life. Of course, logically I understand what causes it - complete and utter despair - but emotionally, I guess that I have never (thankfully) felt down enough to empathize with someone who commits suicide. It seems like such a waste. The summer before this he and I had decided to try to get into good shape for the upcoming rugby season, and we pushed each other at the gym and during runs and sprints. After he killed himself, I just had to wonder, what is the point of working so hard to get into good shape and then just ending your life?
Personal anectodes aside, I don't really see much point to this Ask Slashdot question (which is usually the case as Ask Slashdot is the lamest part of Slashdot by far). Your digital files will be treated the same way as your paper files after you die, and people have been dealing with the question of how to ensure that their personal effects are handled in the way that they would want to for thousands of years now. My advice to anyone reading this would I guess be to keep encrypted anything that you don't want anyone to see after you are gone, and for anything else, don't worry about it.
Ximian's Ettore Perazzoli died last year but his site and blog are still up:
http://perazzoli.org/blog.php
Your data should be treated like what your mom said about underwear. She always said you better have a clean set just in case you get hit by a bus and have to go to the hospital; you better have a clean pair. Just like underwear being clean, you better not have anything you don't want her to see - at least encrypt the good stuff or even use those crazy alternate data streams but don't leave it for everyone to find (especially anyone from RIA because you know they dig you up to get you into court).
I have a copy of the current server layout, (well, almost current) and ALL of the pertinent passwords WRITTEN DOWN, and kept in a safe. (Right next to the backup drives) My friend who covers for me when I'm on vacation is well known to my co-workers, and boss.
So... if I kick the bucket, there will be a way for everyone else to pick up the pieces, continute business and move on with life.
Now at home, it's a sticky wicket... I currently don't have anything up on our web site, so that's not a big deal. My wife gets to decide what to do... and I need to talk with her about this issue.
For me, the big question then is what becomes of my 80,000+ photos? I've got some good ones, that I even managed to sell. I'd hate for them to just get pitched. (Thus returning to the main question)
Odds are, if she wanted to, she could back all of my stuff onto a new spiffy $200 drive (200Gb now, and twice as much 15 months from now). I'm probably about to do something like this to save my late father-in-law's data.
Gruesome topic, but it's good to plan ahead.
--Mike--
I'm Immortal, so far
MyLastEmail offers a service somewhat similar to this.
Here's what you do. First get a cellphone, a must these days. Next, make sure your pc is always connected to the net. Next write a piece of software. This piece of software will erase absolutely all of your data completely and irreperably. Or at least anything you don't want getting out. You can also write it to send data to certain people/places. In fact, you can write it to do anything you want with your data. Just set up a thing where you contact your computer directly or via cellphone to prevent it from doing its stuff. In the event of your death your data goes to where it should. You could even have it IM/E-mail friends about your death and put up a website about your life and such.
/. on saturday!!!!
Heck, if you are really good you can write the program to simulate your daily digital life. In effect making it so people who only know you on the net think you are alive. He died on thursday? I IMed him on friday and he posted to
Oh, just so you know, I'm actually dead and this is a program I wrote that is posting to slashdot. ph33r!!!!
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I've had to do this for a friend of mine that died a few years ago. We kept in contact, and sometimes I would help him out with server issues, so luckily I had the root password to his server. After his passing, I took over the job of transfering his domains to my control, informing email contacts of his passing as emails came in, and took over maintenance of the server to keep his memory alive.
If you have family and friends that care, the data will stay alive. If you don't, then it will probably fade away and be forgotten.
Reading this thread, particularly posts about the Dead Mans Switch software and others bring back memories for me.
My housemate, Cip, passed away a few months ago suddenly due to a rare blood condition. I had to clean all "unsuitable" materials from his laptop before his family could have it, but his personal emails and other things - well, they never really occured to me.
Perhaps the strangest thing is seeing old emails to/from him, forum posts by him, and the weirdest thing of all is still possessing "replays" of Strategy games we both played in - I can still see how he played.
Such an interesting topic...
I have this script which will pretend to be me if I do not pass it a secret value once per month. It will cause all sorts of trouble, including emailing old friends revealing messages from the ether.
Actually, this leads to a more practical idea of creating an AI to make sure that your wishes be carried out. Your AI would be financed by a trust and would be legally protected by your last will and testament. The will would state that the AI should be maintained as long as technically possible, perhaps employing programmers to keep it running should no longer run on current systems.
Who knows that use one would put their post-mortem AI to. Perhaps I should leave my old friends alone and program my AI to randomly send money to wacky startups!
- JML
i have a username and password for my windows server that is only in my will which is sealed until my death, it is a logon for a terminal server. after loggin into the server it prompt the user with a series of questions, which could be answered by a close friend or relative, and a few passphrases which are also in the will.
if they answer all the questions correctly it sends an e-mail to their account with a list of all my usernames and passwords.
there are accounts for all my family members. all they have to do to update the list of passes is send an e-mail to a special account with the username and password on two seperate lines and it adds it to their database.
i wrote this program after my uncle died, he was a network admin at a local public college, and no one knew his passwords for his home network, needless to say he filed his taxes online and the family was left with a slight problem becuase no one else knew any of his passwords.
Fire safes are rated to keep the tempature during a a "standard" house fire, under about 300-400 degrees F. However, CD-ROM's are no good after about 150 or so if I remember correctly.
It's a fallicy that a firesafe will save electronic media. I've seen a number of people make that mistake in the "safe my emergency documents" plans. Even worse, the CD-ROM is likely to melt and ruin the paper documents at those temperatures. I'm not sure what will happen, if you want to see, put it all in your oven, turn the temperature up to 300 degrees, let it stay in there for about 10-30 minutes after it gets up to temperature (do this with documents you don't care about, and possibly this could ruin the firerating of the safe, I'm not sure if they are designed to go thru multiple fires). That's like the status you'll get your stuff back in after the fire department lets you back into your house.
My advice, go to a local bank, get a safety deposit box. Put your stuff in there, they only cost about $25/year. In the end, your stuff will be safe, when you die, the executor shows up with the key and a death certificate and your stuff is given to them. The only thing to be cautious of, is that I've been told that vaults can act like big magnets and screw up magnetic media. However, I've never had a chance to test that, and I've never read it from a source I deem "authoratative" to actually trust it.
Kirby
But I think a "geek" would realize that a fire safe might protect paper - which burns at a relatively high temp - but might not protect CDs which can melt and warp at a much lower temp. I doubt the fire safe would do much good if the house were to burn down completely, as the fire would probably last long enough to heat the inside of the safe to a very high temp.
Most interesting. Hang around on Slashdot long enough and you're bound to run into people who share your non-technical interests. I collect beads, and I also make things out of beads.
I've relied on Peter Francis' site (and his printed works) for years, and I was very much concerned when he died--and heartened that his friends maintained his body of work on the Web. I've noted the same thing when scientists or engineers of note have passed on. Their friends or the institutions to which they belonged have kept the legacy going.
How much better it would be for people with a legacy of that nature in any discipline if pre-planning could be done. Maybe it should become an adjunct to making a will.
Regards,
Anne
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
But then I recalled last summer when my father had a heart attack and, due to a string of complications was going to have more than usual risky surgery. If all went well, then it would be considered a minor surgery, but if not... Sunday evening before the Monday morning surgery my family gathered with my alert yet sober dad and began to have "the talk." Eventually he began to tell us the financial arrangements he had made for our step mother and finally he told us his passwords and password methodology. Something about disclosing the initimate, closely held passwords made me realize he might really not make it.
After a few somber minutes my brother broke the silence and said that, strangely enough, he had developed a similar way of creating and remembering passwords as had my dad. I, wanting to try to keep things serious relunctantly gave out my methodology, too, which was coincidentally similar to both my dad and my brother's way. The laughter not only broke the tension, it strengthened our bond.
Everything turned out well; we are quite thankful.
I wonder if Dad changed his...never mind...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
You are your brain.
Your brain is information.
The degree of information retrieval from a frozen brain is dependent upon the sophistication of the information retrieval technology. Same as retrieving information from a shattered hard drive. It can be done, but you need some good equipment.
Cryonics DOES preserve information, but is it enough for revival?
Well, how much information is preserved depends not so much on the cryopreserative technology used today, but instead on how sophisticated is the information retrieval technology of the future.
But "the future" when it comes to reviving a frozen cryo, is NOT set. If the information retrieval technology at year N is not sufficient to revive, then wait K years.
So, I hope you see that the odds are quite possibly good that there will exist some year N + m*K years from today in which the information retrieval technology is sufficiently sophisticated.
So, in retrospect, destroying information LONGTERM is actually difficult.
For more information on Information Theoretic Death, see Ralph Merkle here and here and here.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
No, seriously, this is an interesting problem to me. It can be generalized to "When I become incapacitated, how do I set certain pre-planned events in motion?" Maybe I die and I want my porn buddy to clean up. Maybe I get really sick (coma) and I want bills to be paid. Maybe I get amnesia while on a secret mission and I want my ex-CIA buddy to find me (and bring me a suitcase full of spy-toys, natch). Maybe I die and want my enemies smited from beyond the grave.
The traditional method for this situation is a will (including living wills). But they do not cover enough situations, take too long to activate, require certain legal events to have occurred (death certificate, etc.) and are "public" ("...and to my brother I leave my DVDs. Now, a message for my ex-CIA buddy: SMITE!"). The mylastemail.com service mentioned elsewhere suffers from these faults. I want a system that I can secretly maintain that has flexible targets. Maybe it will give access to a safety deposit box to a trusted friend (I have a safety deposit box fetish, just ask my friends). Maybe it will forward info on an enemy's shady business deals to the government. It has to be fast, too. Ideally it will detect my demise and set things in motion well before my death/illness becomes public knowledge.
I could ramble on for a while (I have spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about this). But I'll stop (for now). Any thoughts? Implementations? Cool things that you would like to see done after you die?
Serve Gonk.
Ideally, I'd like to have a method for cleaning up certain things. There are probably files I wouldn't want others to see, in addition to files I *do* want them to see, but only after my death. Might be interesting to write a script that they would be told to execute, that would clean stuff up and print out my will. Of course, I'd have to put in protections to keep it from being run before my death....
I did some work on this a while back, dealing with splitting up passwords among N people such that any M people could recover the password (MN, of course). That way they all have to agree I'm dead, which prevents cheating.
... for this to be relevant.
Here's a hypothetical situation -- you keep all your finances (check register, bank balances, etc) in Quicken/M$FT Money/et al, as well as policy numbers, loan payment schedules, yada yada yada.
Your home directory is encrypted (via something like Mac OS X's FileVault) when stored, and decrypted only upon a successful login.
You're in a car wreck and are comatose for 6 months.
During that time, your car is repo'ed, your home is put up for sale due to lack of property tax payments (I think there are probably things to protect one from the mortgagor, but not from your friendly local gummint) -- you get the idea.
It's a good idea to have someone you trust (Fox Mulder notwithstanding) know how to get in and manage things in your absence.
If you're fortunate enough to have TWO people you trust (or almost trust), you might devise some sort of digital equivalent (this IS Slashdot, right?) of the old "2 halves of a dollar bill" key used in the movies. It would seem like a variant of the RSA scheme would work nicely. Maybe a large number that is the product of two (or as many trusted folk as you have) large primes could be the key to your digital castle...
Otherwise, recovering from a coma could be one of the most unpleasant surprises you'll ever have.
I had a friend who worked for a gov't agency. We went on vacation for about 2 weeks once and every morning at 9am he would send an e-mail from his cell phone, wait a few minutes for a confirmation and then continue his day. After a few days of this I asked him what the hell was going on. He informed me that if he didn't log-in to his computer daily by noon, it would auto-wipe a few gigs of encrypted data and inform his supervisors that he was either dead or captured. Now I'm not sure if it was his paranoia or if he really was doing something -that- important (he would never say anything about it), but I've taken up the same idea, although to a lesser extent. If I don't check my e-mail at least once every two weeks, I have some scripts set up that will e-mail someone my passwords, delete some info off my computer and encrypt a lot of data with a 512bit key so that I -can- get the data back if I happen to not be dead :-)
One of the key things my psychologist pointed out to me when I was beating depression was the idea of altering your brain chemistry. If you think a certain way, you can change the nature of your thoughts patterns. With depression you are constantly thinking negative thoughts. The negativity breeds more negativity and, as the parent said, you don't "just snap out of it".
g nitive.htm
What helped me a lot was to recongize certain negative thought patterns as "cognitive distortions". Once you recognize it, you can work at changing it - retraining your brain. Or, translated into Geek: "You must unlearn what you have learned."
This link describes the concept of cognitive distortions: http://depression.about.com/cs/psychotherapy/a/co
Magnatune: Quality (DRM-free) MP3/FLAC/
A very good friend of mine had an account on my system when he was killed (hit by a bus while bike riding). That was almost 9 years ago, and it wasn't that long ago that I finally removed the account. Though it was only the first couple of years that I really couldn't bring myself to do it, after that, I pretty much forgot about it until I was doing some housekeeping. But I still had to tell myself "get over it already".