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Your Digital Inheritance?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the actually-kind-of-important dept.

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?"

7 of 370 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds like a movie plot. by AltGrendel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  2. Generation without a past by jigjigga · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Kind of.... by Itninja · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Kind of.... by TheRealBurKaZoiD · · Score: 5, Interesting

      My best friend passed away almost seven years ago. A couple of months after the funeral I was surfing the web when suddenly his screen name on my AIM list lit up as if he had just signed on! Totally freaked me out, until I found out it was his wife checking his email. It would happen every so often until finally I had to remove the entry from my buddy list, and I even went so far as to block the screen name. I know she took his death really hard, but I found it to be exceptionally creepy. I think she paid his account for a few years after that, just to keep the screen name.

      IMHO, it's better to walk away from death than to wallow in it.

  4. In case of my death... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. porn! by F�an�ro · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)

  6. Re:Go ahead, punch me by fishbowl · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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