Slashdot Mirror
Your Digital Inheritance?
eldavojohn writes "I wrote a journal entry musing on the idea of passing on accounts and digitally stored information from generation to generation. Has anyone done this or inherited anything? Does anyone else plan to do this? Is there a slip of paper in your deposit box at the bank with websites, account names and passwords?"
You know, as the elder hacker ages, he hands off his identity to the young hacker who has learned his 733t ski77z!
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
havent had it happen, but I have an archive of "my stuff"- being basically I have created on a computer since in middle scool (when computers replaced pen and paper for me). One day I'll be able to find all of that stuff and rummage through it. Could be cool. I feel sorry for the people, among my generation, who dont backup anything they make on a computer... because I know they dont produce anything on paper... A generation with no past is bad news.
I had a good friend pass away a few years ago. I knew all his passwords and stuff, and have poked through his Hotmail account from time to time, just for the sentimental value.
Interestingly, he still about 50-100 spam emails per day.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I imagine I would give all my music to my sister- but when I lent her a laptop a year or so ago, she guessed my password on the first try (It is actually a fairly strong 14 character password that would stand up to a dictionary attack), so I guess she could get whatever she wanted if I die :)
My music is the only non software thing that I have paid for, file wise, on my computer.
But truth is, I sincerily hope all my software is obsolete by the time I die!
Anyone remember the case of the guy who died in Iraq, and his parents wanted his Yahoo password to see what was in there for sentimentality? I believe Yahoo ended up having to give the password to his parents...
When I was deployed however, my wife and I sent some emails that I definately wouldn't want my parents seeing, so I think this guys p-word should have stayed private....
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
In the case of my death, I have a document labeled as such in my data collection. There are some instructions and passwords. This file is encrypted with the key held by my lawyer.
I also have plans of sending out a "dead man's switch" email.
The worst things I have seen are the web pages of the recently departed. There are static pages out there that only the owners can change due to privacy and passwords.
...which is very unfortunate. In previous times, it was accepted that any papers one did not burn or destroy, one's children would inherit, thus receiving valuable information about their antecedents. These days, on the other hand, more and more of people's lives are being lived on the net: with very little to show for it.
A while back this very issue surfaced where a US soldier was killed in Iraq. Yahoo refused his family access to his account and the clock started ticking for account deletion. I don't know what became of the problem, but it does highlight the difference between a locked safety deposit box which one receives when one's grandfather snuffs it and the current digital equivalent. I very much doubt the soldier would have minded his family reading over his final few letters if he was no longer around.
I think there should be an "opt out" scheme whereby if one dies, by default, one's relatives can send in proof of the death and be granted access to accounts (email and otherwise). If one specifically decides otherwise the account could be deleted as per normal.
Most users of the net are young and therefore haven't gotten around to this type of thinking.
How long do CDs last (industrial pressed/CDR/CDRW) before photovoltalic decay?
In either 2004 or 2005, The New York Times had a story on this topic. It focused on people who had inherited password-protected computers (but not the passwords) and their frustration at the fact thay may never know what treasure (or trash) lay within.
That story prompted my wife and I to write down all of our user names and passwords and store them in our safe.
I am interested in good answers to this as well. Before yahoo, gmail, etc. I was moving jobs and decided on getting a family domain name so I could keep the same email address. Now that domain hosts email for most of my family. I'd like to put the domain name in my will along with instructions to transfer it since I'm the point of contact.
At the moment my wife knows that for any given site I have an account on there's a list of probably account names and a list of probable passwords. A few she remembers the combinations for. These are mostly financial in the case something unforeseen should happen to me (Like the other Illuminati realizing I talk about them on websites).
More and more I see the reality that family websites, and other hosting/presences become heirlooms after time. My in-laws already like that my wife and I put some photos up on a website for them to be able to get to, I can see that expanding. Eventually the family website might be the magical thing that is passed down from matriarch to matriarch within a family the way the photo albums are now. Someday my son or daughter may be maintaining the old site and see blogs I posted and get all misty eyed like I do about the stopwatch my grandfather left to me.
Now my porn? Well that I will be encrypting.. for all the reasons mentioned above.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
During the funeral:
"And now, as expressed in his will, all the porn on Dale's computer will be shown to the mourners."
Now that's a way to go!
If I ever work up the guts I might put something like this in the will.
got the idea from this comic
(which I hereby shamelessly plug, because they deserve to be slashdotted)
Imagine a /. account being in continuous use for 150 years. (Imagine /. being around that long.) Digital accounts obviously can have a life independent of their owners. I wonder how many low number /. accounts have actually been sold on Ebay.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
If I were to leave any of my 'online property' to anybody, it would most likely be one of my friends. Mum & Dad wouldn't know what to do with my stuff. My friends might like to poke through my various php, and other, projects I've done over the years.
I own a couple of domains, one is celardore based, and the other is my IRL name. It would be cool to leave some money behind - say enough for domain registration of my IRL name for 100 years, and then have the URL on my tombstone. After it runs out? I won't care.
This actually happened with one moderator at one of the forums I frequent, She passed away suddenly and someone in her family notified the admins on the site. We got a huge collection together and sent a whole bunch of money to her family.
You can now register domain names for 100 years. Is it possible to inherit a domain name?
I can picture it now:
"Being of sound mind and body, I do herby bequeath MutantGoat.com to my heirs....."
-ted
Yahoo has denied the family of a dead soldier access to his yahoo email account. I'm not taking sides on this, but it is a real issue. http://news.com.com/Yahoo+denies+family+access+to+ dead+marines+e-mail/2100-1038_3-5500057.html
Check out the My Life Bits project.
From the description: "MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort."
Too bad it doesn't seem to be publicly available at all, let alone for Mac OS X or Linux.
Thus why all my pr0n is on encrypted DVDs!!!
Mine is in a 32meg USB thumb drive sealed in a 35mm film can that is in a sealed ziplock baggie buried in a geocache. My children get to go on a really fun wild hunt for that info.
The fun is that there are 3 more caches with only Lattitude and longitude for the next cache....
I so love screwing with people 50 years from now.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm responding to a joke by an AC, but there's a good point here.
I compose and record music. I struggle with certain kinds of DRM and copy protection, because I would seriously like to be able to put my tools and my work in a time capsule and have it be usable to future generations.
I understand that digital media can be volatile. Plastics evaporate. Magnetic bits realign. Etc. I can handle that, because that makes *me* responsible for the media.
What I *cannot* handle, is any form of crypto that "protects" my work, or "protects" the software needed to reproduce my work. If it's tied to a certain piece of hardware, if it needs to call home, or if it prevents me from making a copy, it is completely unacceptable to me. I take it as far as considering it to be an abridgement of my own rights if the tools and media are not open to me, particularly if they are closed through hard crypto.
I started a Masters Thesis on the work of Bach (I'm a Music Theory major). One thing that fascinated me was the amount of detailed understanding that we can derive from Bach's manuscripts, both the ones he created himself and those that were copywritten. For example we're able to deduce whether Bach had a particular composition complete in his head before he sat down to compose, or whether he sketched out a framework and filled it in over a period of time. We have a pretty good sample, and he had different processes for different kinds of musical ideas. It's even possible to make deductions based on the way he started drawing the staves. Open to debate, to say the least, but regardless of where you stand on the controversy, it is very fascinating to have some visualization into the thought processes of a composer, particularly, Bach.
It's unlikely and ironic that anyone 500 years from now will be able to look with the same level of detail at the writing processes of our contemporaries. It's not even clear that our media will *last* that long, even most contemporary paper and ink self-destructs. When you add DRM to the equation, you introduce yet another risk: That mathematics will not happen to have advanced to a point where current cryptosystems are rendered ineffective. Imagine a future archaeologist needing to break a 1024 bit public key system... I'm not the sort of optimist that believes future generations will know how to do such things in their head by third grade...
rant off.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The user I remember doing that was Fascdot Killed My Pr, who signed up not long before I did (his UID is 5 digits, not 3). There's a blurb about the auction here, but Fascdot hasn't posted in years, so whoever bought the account (if anyone) never did anything with it.
For more information, click here.
That implies that there's anything of value to pass on. When was the last time you had to access something +10 years old that only existed online?
If it's information, hard copy it and put it with the will.
If it's the family photo JPG archive, burn a DVD (or get prints) and put it with the will. (or in a box for Christmas!)
If it's my bank account, forget on-line access. The trustee's gonna be doing a lot of paperwork anyway...
I just don't see anything online that I'd pass on to my son that can't be stored in a long-term physical format.
I suspect that the Government just outsources it to these guys, or somebody like them. The company I was referring to (eMag) was also the very last manufacturer of 9-track, open reel data tape systems. So they've got the gear there if you ever want to recover data from your old 3420 tapes, they're probably the go-to people.
I do think it would be a neat idea, though, if we had something like the Library of Congress for computing. Or at least data storage. Manufacturers, send in two units of your storage device, and one set of associated signal-processing equipment which produces a standard output. Keep them in some big warehouse somewhere. Maintainance would be a bit of a problem, I suppose (I'm thinking of some old open-reel decks I've seen where the rubber parts have slowly "melted" into puddles in the bottom of the cases). Oh, well -- you have to admit that would be a cool facility to visit, though.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This just happened to me. My mother passed away last month. She was extremely active in genealogy research and was therefore very active on-line. Fortunately, before she passed away I knew her passwords for her computer (... well I built it and she never changed that one). I also knew most of her on-line passwords ... or was able to guess it.
... and no, I have no pr0n to pass on to my children.
The only password that gave me fits was her churches financials which she kept on her computer. Of course the congregation wanted their giveing reports for last year. That one was fun.
I used her address book to notify some of her most frequest E-Mailing buddies of her passing and I still check her E-Mail on a regular basis to see if there and any more genealogical contacts that come through.
Even though my mother was far less computer literate than the typical slashdotter...it was amazing how much she had in the on-line world. Had I not known her passwords, much would have been lost or unknown.
Learning from this, I am planning on making sure that I can pass on my locked information to the appropriate people.
I just started a website a few weeks ago, BeforeYouAreGone.com and would love to get stories of people who have gone through this. It helps to let people know of some of the headaches their loved ones will face if they don't prepare ahead of time. The website will be used to get the word out that, just like our real life, we have to prepare our online life for our passing. Would love to hear from you (just email me if you're interested in contributing).
A 2 digit slashdot UID went for $115 two years ago.
7 7887
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118075&cid=99
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M