Slashdot Mirror
Dead? Hope You Left Someone Your Passwords
A reader writes "Looks like if you die, Yahoo won't grant access to family members. I know I've enjoyed reading my grandfather's letters from WWII, this could be a huge loss of history if other ISP's have the same policy." MJK points out that Slashdot has explored the notion of what happens to your data after you die.
Plus think of the flaming possibilities. You could instruct your surviving loved ones to flame as much as you want, knowing full well no one can touch you in return (unless you believe you are experiencing literal flaming after death, but that's just the risk flamers take).
Seriously, put it in your will if it's important enough.
Leave the accounts and passwords in your will. Seal them in a saftey deposit box.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Yeah, I don't think Yahoo wants to get involved in ensuring that a supposedly dead person matches up to a particular account. Imagine if Yahoo announced that they would allow this -- it would probably be abused to get access to other people's accounts, and would probably expose them to lawsuits too. They're too big to do something like that.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
how do you tell it that you're dead when you're, well, dead?
I wrote a little program called dead man switch years ago, for just this purpose (and to teach myself Java). I imagine this is someone else's though since I only gave mine to a few friends. Mine just required that you log in to the server once every [variable] days. If you failed to log in it would optionally send a warning e-mail and then it would mail out a predefined message to a predefined address. I planned to expand it to include setting up accounts and storing files encrypted, but never got to it. I figured all those movies where people say, "If I die my computer will automatically send the files to the police" would be more true to life if there was such an app lying around to make it easy. (cron, yes, I know)
My guess is that like my program, and like a real dead man switch, it takes a conscious effort to keep the switch from being tripped.
When my best friend died in a tragic hiking accident, I spent about 30 hours trying to hack his hotmail account for his family- after they found out that Hotmail was not going to give it up for us. I never did get in.
I've been heavily into the MMORPG scene over the last few years, and some of my closest friends are folks that I don't have any other contact with. If one of them was to get hit by a bus, I'd never know what happened. That would be odd. I suppose that from my side of the monitor it would be exactly the same as if they had suddenly quit playing the game and never contacted me again. That's an odd concept.
I keep forgetting my place. Jesus is for losers. Why do I still play to the crowd?
Passwords are too insecure, or if you choose a secure one, too hard to remember. I choose entire passphrases from movies, music, whatever, complete with punctuation.
My home root passphrase: "Open the pod bay doors, HAL."
My home user passphrase: "Think bule count one two"
Workstation passphrase at work: "Soylent Green is people."
CC Website passphrase: "Another day older and deeper in debt"
Bank account passphrase: "Blew it all on the suit."
Home Windows computer passphrase: "MAIN SCREEN TURN ON"
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
When my significant other died, it would have meant all the world for her (much) younger sister to have access to her yahoo account, for two reasons:
1. things happened suddenly, and suddenly everything left behind by that person was now precious. everything. imagine you're slipping over a cliff, and desperately grabbing at any sort of purchase you can find. it's sort of like that.
2. she associated that SN with her sister, which they would talk on and email often because her family was in australia. the idea of somehow seeing it in use by someone else was... not sure how to explain this, except it wouldn't be something one would want to experience. yes you can take the person off your messenger, and you can block the list... but it's just the idea.
I have to admit that I spent hours and hours late at night trying to guess her password, and some other things after yahoo said no, but will also admit i was one of many things I was doing to try to keep my mind busy and off of everything else.
I do recognize that there is a right to privacy, and that aspects of things might not be healthy... but it doesn't work that way when you're going through it. Your world is upside down, and what is rational and what isn't doesn't really matter. Yes, not having it isn't the end of the world... but seeing one more piece of that person just slip away into the ether, while possibly romantic to a 16 year old, is just a horrid thing to contemplate.
When you're living your life in your mid-20s, you don't think about throwing your yahoo password in your will for your significant other... or often a will at all. This isn't something I expect a typical slashdotter to understand, it's just how it is... I'll leave it at that, as I'm finding myself way outside of my comfort zone at the moment.