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Your Data and Cyber Business After You're Gone
Reader Mountain Splash writes "The New York Times has a decent thought-inspiring article questioning what happens to our stored data and who owns the rights to it after we die. I have to admit that, while this dilemma had already crossed my mind many months ago, I've been rather slow to do something about handling it. While considering the same, though, what I did do was start a very detailed list of my many various emailboxes, IM monikers, cyber buddies, and yes, passwords (complete with encrypted hints to be stored separately). I have also already approached my roomie and my sister about following up with that list for me as a last wish if and when the inevitable should occur. Just wondering if everyone else has done the same or similar... Anyone gone so far as to have already filed their information along with their will with their family lawyer?"
I don't really care enough about what happens to my e-mail after I die to bother with all that crap. I don't really think anybody really is going to need my encrypted data after I died, or they would have had a key while I was alive.
For business related death I have prepared extensive documentation on servers, passwords, accounts, banking relationships, etc. and have filed that in my bank lock-box. I have informed my attorney whom I wish to have handle those affairs in my absence (a trusted friend/partner). The attorney has that on record in my will. The asset disposal itself is a normal course of handling the estate, but telling Amazon, PayPal, Authorize.net, and others who have my finanicals to shut off my account is no small effort. Finding the trusted friend is not trivial either.
This is something that I maintain through my company as a matter of policy. The company maintains life insurance for me and also an electronic access store to be certain that company information is always accessible in an emergency. The convenient side-effect is that my personal information is also protected in this way. And yes, I do trust this information to the company and we do have policies covering assurety of this information being purged by the lawyers when we get sacked, etc. This works in the same way that my wife gets my company provided life insurance, my 401k, and my personal information cache.
Ever visited a website for a movie that had been released 3 or 4 years ago? The sites just sit there on a server somwhere, ignored largely.
I had a friend commit suicide rather suddenly a few years ago. His site is still up at AOL. I can still read messages he posted and see pictures of him here and there on the net. He left quite a digital legacy.
It's truely intersting, the things we leave behind and we don't realize it.
I have information about all of my various electronic assets and how they should be handled in my will, which has a copy on my computer, a hard copy in my desk, and a hard copy in a safe deposit box. I don't have a whole lot to distribute, except for my life insurance payout, but I have various instructions on where some of my stuff should go, who gets certain books, etc. It's a fairly informal will, but I expect my family will respect my wishes on it, since there aren't multimillion dollar assets to fight over. The copy in my desk is written and signed in my own handwriting, as I understand this is a little more legally binding. It's not a very detailed or complex solution to what to do with the detritus of my life should I drastically change tax status (die), but at 26, I figure an informal solution is pretty good, especially since I have almost no real assets to leave behind.
-1, "1337" speak
...since the last time Slashdot covered this topic.
But in my case, I can say that I have made some inroads in both the living world (insurance mods, finance mods, Living Will conversations and the like) and the after I am gone (in this body anyways) world. The largest step that I have taken in the after I am gone world is to comprehend that as of right this moment at least, I have NOTHING that anyone would really want or need to see as far as data or anything "electronic". Really, all I have done is set up a Safety Deposit box that will eventually hold the Legal papers and insurance docs.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Personal Data Cleaners. People could leave a stipulation in their wills that they want PDC to take control of their personal data and control/clean it per the terms set forth at the time of the agreement. When you die, they're notified, show up and do their thing.
That's what we call it in our office.
"If I step off the curb tonight, and get hit by a bus, will anyone know what the hell to do with this?" If the answer is "Fuck, no!" then the aformentioned-ill-fated-coworker needs to write it down.
What does it mean to wake out of a dream
and be wearing someone else's shorts?
BNL, Born on a Pirate Ship (1998)
We have what's called the "Hit by a bus" file where I work. It's supposed to be a set of sealed envelopes to be opened in the event of an emergency.
Sadly, we had a server die while the Network Admin was on vacation, and we discovered his was blank. Seems he wants to take all our configuration, login and server data to his grave.
And it STILL hasn't been updated
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Maybe he didn't want anyone reading his personal files? That seems like the most obvious explanation to me.
Or he died unexpectedly, and had made clear at many points that the information on his computer was extremely important to him. You'd honor your brother or uncles wish, right? Same thing here. Code he's worked on, things he valued, information he wanted kept 'alive', as it were.
Someone else mentioned that I could just take the HDD out and put it in another box to recover the files. I could do that, but it's really a matter of time. I ran crack and john against it, tried a few tricks like booting into single user mode, etc etc, but that's all stuff I can do while I'm twiddling away at something else. Between school, my daughter, and 'life', I'm pretty busy and haven't had the time to do some old fashioned data recovery. I have a few days free coming up, I'll probably do it then.
Tomm / DoggI have explicitely stated in my will that all intellectual property work that I have created which has not been assigned by me to another party (ie any employers who have rights to the work) shall immediatelly be released under an open source license and the ownership of the copyright shall be transfered to the FSF for them to do as they choose.
I have told my relatives about my wishes and the location of my data. I have put passwords in escrow with a close friend.
I myself have 2030+ posts here, and boiled down, it shows that I was funny, a musician, and angry at how those in power treat those who aren't.
I guess that is about what people will say about me when I'm gone (plus the unavoidable references to my incredible sexual prowess, my stunning good looks, and my amazing plan to save the world with cold fusion).
So, then. Dead people's /. posts?
I made a password list for a customer, that, over time, has grown to 3,849 words. (There is a lot of explanation about how accounts are configured.)
I encrypted that list with an unguessable password that includes punctuation and numbers, using the excellent GnuPG.
I sent the encrypted file by email to every responsible person who works for the customer, including the CEO. I demanded that everyone learn the master password, because otherwise, if something happened to me, they would have problems with their accounts and web site. I also copied the file to their hard drives.
Although I have made several demands in strong language, no one, NO ONE, has bothered to get the master password from me, even though I have suggested it in person to several people several times. So, they have the file, but have no access to it.
The fact is, the new world of computing (okay, not new to me or you) requires a huge cultural change, and the average person has mostly not gone very far in making that change.
The parent was stolen from a previous "Ask Slashdot" on the same topic. This is also made obvious by the fact that the same text is pasted twice.
Not that duping the story says much about the Slashdot editors...
Also, it is most offensive to have to send death certificates to total strangers, in order to document that the person you say is dead, really is dead, thereby enabling the company to cancel your whatever-it-is. Believe me, I went through this with dialups and credit card companies. It took months to finally get every branch of every company involved to accept that they were not getting any more money. I have never seen a dead person rack up so many late charges on a credit card. After the company was notified of the death. Go figure!
It is so much better to be over-prepared than under-prepared. Somebody has to clean up the wreckage after you die, and it is much easier to gove that person the tools they need to do the job.
This sort of thing is vital for decrypting your files after your death, or if you are injured and suffer amnesia, or other morbid scenarios in which your data outlives you.
I have the same arrangement with an old roommate of mine - we both keep our pr0n in a specific directory of the same name and location. In the unfortunate event that one of us passes away, the other is to delete that directory before family members get ahold of the computer (or, more likely, make a backup copy for themselves, then delete :) ) ...
Me? Debunk an American myth? And take my life in my hands?
I'm told this is customary in the military. If someone is killed, his army buddy or CO will clear out the pics with thai prostitutes and other offending items from their personal effects so their memory won't be tarnished.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Some people may remember the Macintosh game StuntCopter. When the developer died, his parents released the software into the public domain:
These arcade games were programmed by Duane Blehm. They have all been previously released and are currently offered by most sources of Public Domain software. Duane unexpectedly died a year ago. Cairo ShootOut and Puzz'l required users to send $3.00 to Duane to receive a "Key Code" to unlock all of the features of the program. All of Duane's games contained offers to sell the source code of the programs to programmers who wanted to see how Duane wrote them. Duane's parents have been swamped with Key Code and source code requests that they are unable to supply. These new versions have been altered at the request of Duane's parents. These versions have been unlocked and will allow full access to all of the features. The offers for source code have also been removed. Duane's parents have requested that if you have any of the old versions of Duane's games that you destroy them and replace them with the new versions. Please do not distribute any of the prior versions. Distribution of these new versions is encouraged and requested. Thank You and Have Fun!
May we never see th
I saw a program for just this purpose posted on slashdot a while back. It was called Dead Man's Switch if I recall. If you use it or some similar piece of software you'd be pretty protected.
Basically, it will encrypt (and I think delete if you want) any files on your computer that you don't want to exist after your death. It's a timer you re-set every week or so. Seems like a good idea - not just for people who don't want porn to stay on their computer, but also if you had anything sensitive on your computer. I've tried it and it seems to work pretty well.
Good point. By saying information used to be more "ephemeral", I meant to refer to the total quantity of information that a person might encounter during their life. In the past, a much smaller fraction of that data would have been recorded and preserved, because the costs were greater.
What I should have said was that data is much easier and cheaper to create in the modern era. Paper publishing takes more time and resources, and so there tends to be some minimum threshold for what's important enough to store that way, and whatever doesn't make the cut is essentially "lost". Electronic data storage has recently gotten affordable enough to offer essentially unlimited capacity.
So it's much easier for someone living now to accumulate and store gigabytes of personal miscellany than it was 100 or even 10 years ago. The costs of the medium itself no longer requires us to distinguish between "important" data and all the other stuff, and we are still stuck in the mindset that all data is valuable and should be preserved. This is why I think that even though we are (temporarily) released from the economic pressure to let data be "forgotten", we need to free ourselves from the compulsion to save anything and everything.
#dd if=/dev/hda |gzip -f >/mnt/really_big_drive/client03062004.dd.gz
Should help on your Knoppix or other Unix-based box. Do this before you begin, and you have an effective CYA in case you screw something up.
Also, take a look at Microsoft's EFS documents. There's a Recovery certificate you can create. I could imagine storing one in a safe deposit box so that your executor can decrypt your documents after you die