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?"
Everyone gather round! I'm going to open grandpa's tarball ...
They'd find my DVD backups.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
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
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?
Why yes, in fact, there is!
And imagine their surprise as my offspring open up my safe deposit box only to find a piece of paper with my Slashdot login & password and a note about trying to only post comments that are informative, insightful, interesting, or funny.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
If you can inherit it, the government will want to tax it. It's a bit worrisome that someone who inherits a website, or even an online identity, with a good reputation and lots of traffic will one day have to pay a percentage of a value the government arbitrarily assigns.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
how long until there are non-"inheritance" clauses in the TOS for porn site accounts?
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 even have my hard drive encrypted so if I should die suddenly, no one has to search through my porn. One's porn says a lot about a person, most of which should probably be left unsaid.
More music, fewer hits
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
I am quite sure that mine would be quarantined due to virus or file corruption. A true eulogy to my life experience with MS products.
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.
What next,a story linking to a /. comment?
Why does yahoo do this
...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?
I guess that's not so bad; we aging I.T. types can soon get jobs in legal offices maintaining their legacy equipment.
-Kurt
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
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'd rather not leave my account names and passwords in a safe deposit box that could be subpoenad if the feds ever had a reason to.
Considering that they can subpoena your diary, and use it against you in a court of law, the only place safe to keep your passwords is in your head. And then, what with keyloggers, it's only safe if you don't use it also.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
"Is there a slip of paper in your deposit box at the bank with websites, account names and passwords?"
:)
What about a bit of money invested with instructions specifying that that money is to be used to continue payments for web hosting/domain registration for any website(s) that you have now and want to continue on after you're gone? This is something that I've considered, but to date, haven't acted on.
If you have a blog, maybe it'd be worth considering a plan to have it export it to static HTML and just having that hosted at Geocities/GooglePages, unless you plan on posting from beyond the grave.
Dammit, the story's slashdotted! Oh, wait...
I have a public blog that I've been keeping since 2000. I don't hype it or advertise it. I do post to it regularly. It's full of good memories. Sometimes it's usefull for answering questions like "What hotel did I stay at when I was on vacation last year?"
After six years, it has a lot of content. Content that I don't want to go away just because I die and fail to sign onto my account. I plan on including the account name and password in my will, so that my decendants can maintain the account.
It makes me smile to think that people may be able to google my life's blog after I die. I'm sure that 90% of those people will roll their eyes and think "Ughh. Not another stale blog." But still...
...one child will receive the coveted "Floppy Disk of Power", unlocking all my secrets... sadly, the floppy will have been stored with my refrigerator magnet collection...
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
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.
"Son... I want you to have my porn when I'm gone."
I have a small paper with instructions for my family to say goodbye to my online friends and post about my death, just in case.
Regarding online goods, I have none, save a few anime fanfics i've written, but those are online for everyone to see.
But I doubt game accounts would matter. Games get obsolete pretty quick, and the current state of information is awful. The best I can pass to the next generations is work contributed to open source projects - it's like investing for the future generations.
If you have lots of important information (pictures, music, diaries, archives, etc) on an external site, **do not assume in any way** your loved ones will be able to get access to them when you pass on. Most all sites * do not* have a policy around this, and will probably end up flat out refusing you, or just deleting the info.
If you are the kind of person who stores los of stuff externally, the best thing you could do is keep a hard copy of everything to pass down. If this is not possible, keep a hard copy of the passwords for the sites and entrust it to your attorney or simmilar.
It would be nice if there could be some legislation put into place surrounding this - if a company is presented with a valid death certificate, the estate should have access to all that person's data. However, this is not the case now. and the government is too busy worrying about HDTV DRM to bother with trivial matters like this.
Isn't that what this is for? http://www.wheresmyestate.com/ Anyway, when I'm dead what do I care if people have trouble accessing my digtial assets? Actually I think that making it a challeng is more fun, almost like a scavenger hunt for the kids.
The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them. - Albert Ein
I'm not likely to live to see copyright expire on the iTMS songs in my iTunes library, but my kids might. Yet no DRM system I'm aware of makes allowance for passage into public domain.
Copyright must be limited; apparently it can be a hell of a long limit, but Constitutionally it must be limited in the U.S. And everyone knows that digital files don't age--as long as you keep them on fresh media they will sound just as good (if not better) 300 years from now. Yet there are no limits placed into DRM systems, nor sunset provisions to remove the DRM when the copyright expires.
This seems to me to be a system that actually prevents compliance with a Constitutional mandate. Why hasn't this been an avenue of legal challenge to DRM yet?
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
No need. Since I subscribe to the free information philosophy just about anything of value I create passes
;)
into the public data pool as a matter of course, whether it's words I write, code I hack, music I make, or photos I take. Data is so ephemeral anyway, and the world is so fickle to it's value. As a matter of historical record
some seemingly trivial rubbish becomes very interesting, while once treasured gigabytes of data becomes worthless
within months or days. I hope the internet archive machines will keep alive some interesting ideas and bits of art and code I create or collect, if it has value, but beyond that I don't care. I hope my grandchildren will be too busy
living their own lives to care about going through mine.
Everything else I dont want to go that way, personal private data, gets to meet shred -u -f and dd if=/dev/urandom of=byebyefile. My right to NOT have that data picked through by vultures is far more significant than my need to pass things on. Inheritance is tried up with 20th century notions of 'ownership'. That's so yesterday!
Personally, I left a note in an infrequently used book at the library asking that any good samaritan time traveller rescue me.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
So, is discovering that dear ol' Uncle DG had a 3-digit UID anything like finding a box of old IBM stock or something?
/. fans?
Do famous UID's appreciate?
Will CleverNickName's progeny inherit a ton of
How manu UIDs have shuffled off this moral coil? Should there be a virtual graveyeard for the UIDs of the deceased?
Is there historical value to the early musings of UID so-and-so, who went on to become the first Supreme Hegemon of the Terran Aliance?
Will far-future biologists marvel at the distended rectums of the typical 21st century human?
Will far-future anthropologists wonder at the pantheon that included Commander Taco, CoyboyNeil, and Natalie Portman? Will they re-enact the sacred ritual of pouring hot grits into one's shorts?
The mind boggles; truly.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
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
they would probably arrest my kids, and my kids kids, and my kids kids kids for the mounds of illegal software i have :)
portfolio
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)
Sort of.
We just went through this when we updated wills. We made sure to make a list of each others web accounts and access credentials. That way if anything happens to either or both of us our survivors won't have issues around access to financial accounts, utilities, subscriptions, etc.
Now I need to figure out who to leave my Slashdot account to.
-- "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - R.A.H.
Did you ever visit the webpage of a person you know is dead? It's kinda creepy.
You know that those keystrokes left behind were written by him. His creation. And the person who wrote this is no more. No more content added. Never again.
Sure, it would be a hell lot more creepy if there WAS content added some time after he died, but still...
But somehow I wouldn't want my blog, my page, my accounts simply vanish without a trace. Or go stale and idle forever. I'd like to see them continued, if only for a last statement by a friend to tell the people who actually express interest in my inane rambling why it suddenly came to a halt. Nothing blows more than writing a comment on a page, only to find out a week or two later that the one it was intended for will never read it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Impeach Bush
trouble with your wife?
Actually, it was his illegal nanny.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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 kind of reminds me of ham radio callsigns.
At least here in the US, the "choice" vanity callsigns are the ones that are either short, or use Morse Code letters that are particularly easy to type (sort of the Morse equivalent of having a mnemonic phone number), or both. It's not uncommon for people to hang on to callsigns like that until they die, and then they go back out into the system and are available for re-use after two years. I don't know how common it is for them to get passed down from one generation to the next, but they do get reused by other Hams.
It's pretty easy, if you have a good vanity call, to figure out who's held the sign before you, and who among them are SK ("silent key" = dead). I've even heard of people getting notes from friends of previous owners of their calls.
I always thought it was neat. If they keep this up for a while, it won't be long before all the short callsigns have several generations of history attached to them.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I wonder what policies they have... Many people are earning a good amount of $$ with AdSense and they would definitely want to pass it on if they can.
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
I was once asked for help in acquiring passwords from somebody who recently died. The person ran a website and message board for victims of parental abuse and they tried to help others come to terms and move on. The deceased had two sets of parents and was on poor terms with all of them. Nobody knew much about the parents and given the site, that was kind of understood that you don't want to bring that out. The friend wanted to maintain the site after the death but didn't get any of the access information. The host refused to hand it over.
This site had email hosting as well, and the deceased admin referred to it as a backup on the hotmail account. So I suggested they try to reset the password. If they knew enough about the admin, they should be able to handle the secret question.
It asked for the father's middle name.
No I'm not trolling.
Really, it isn't very likely that our generation will show up as big black hole i human history. Even though we percentually use computers and volatile media alot more than previusly. In actual numbers we create a lot of more media than before. It's more likely that historians some generations forward will have big problems going trough all the data than having problems finding any.
Somehow I suspect that even hundreds and thousands of years from now much of our data will be avaible in some form.
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.
to store all my secrets in a 1 pixel gif on my website.
Susan: That er, that Steve guy; how well do you know him? Are you close?
Jeff: Close? We're porn buddies!
Susan: Porn buddies?
Jeff: Oh, yeah.
Susan: Is this code? Were you in prison together or something?
Jeff: No, no, no it's simple; it's a safety precaution, like a scuba driver swims with a buddy in case he runs out of air.
Susan: Okay, okay. Are you telling me that a porn buddy stands by with oxygen?
Jeff: No. Many years ago, me and Steve exchanged house keys--
Susan: Are you sure this isn't code?
Jeff: It isn't code.
Susan: Alright.
Jeff: In the event of Steve's death the first thing I would do --upset though I will be-- is go straight to his house and remove all the pornography before his parents can find it.
Susan: You're kidding!
Jeff: And he's pledged to do the same for me. That's how close we are!
Susan: You two have seriously made plans to destroy each other's dirty mags?
Jeff: Who said, "destroy?" Remove.
Susan: you wouldn't keep them?
Jeff: It's a perk.
Susan: Oh, Jeff.
Jeff: That's the beauty of it, you see. Your best friend's dead, but there's a bright side!
Carthago delenda est!
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.
2. Your personal example of doing good and fighting evil
What about us evil folk you insensitive clod?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If they try to tax my allergy to kiwi fruit, I'll sue for health endangerment.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Imagine a future archaeologist needing to break a 1024 bit public key system...
Staggering, but only in today's context. Who knows what the future will bring? Just like the ENIGMA messages were cracked in a few days despite complete failure back in the '40's. Perhaps tomorrow's technology will make it trivial to circumvent our current encryption methods.
Then again maybe not - I basically agree with your argument. Constant copying is the only way to ensure the survival of information - hey it worked for DNA for billions of years...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Before I left Canada to come and work here in Africa for a few years I backed up all my stuff (writing, digital photos ect...) put them on a couple cdrs, and got a safety deposit box. The surprising thing was that the boxes in the bank vault barely fit the cds. I guess they don't have many people putting cds in safety deposit boxes. This was a few years ago now, so maybe they have changed that. Ofcourse the real cool part is getting that funky looking safety deposit key. You can pretend you're a mobster and have a few million stashed away for a rainy day...err not really, just some useless files from uni. But a man can dream can't he???...
Hi, I've thought long and hard about this. (I'm actually in the middle of having a will made to take this into account). Let me say that there's not a lot of good options and almost no archiving services exist for handling personal digital content. You really need to document your intentions clearly (preferably on the webpage you produced it on--Creative Commons Attribution license, for example), because it is hard to depend on people following these intentions after you die.
Lawyers who prepare wills are loathe to touch copyright issues in your will (especially when the financial value is hypothetical). That requires getting a copyright attorney. The best thing to do is appoint a dependable/knowledgable executor or trustee (see below).
My suggestions:
1)sign a durable power of attorney to a close friend or family member. That gives them access to bank acccounts and web acccounts. (I don't think executors can do this without a court order). Usually you can download a form from the net for free.
2)Emphasize to executors and family members about the first thing they need to do when you die: FIND OUT WHO ARE THE WEBHOSTS AND ENSURE THOSE THINGS CONTINUE TO BE PAID. Nongeeky people are clueless about this. (also, it might be good checking into webhost policies for handling nonpayment of webhosting).
3)A yearly zip file consisting of contact information of friends, account info, and passwords would be a good idea. I'll leave it to slashdotters to figure out how to safeguard this.
4)I'm a writer/content producer and I created a testamentary trust for someone living after me to archive my creative content. That said, unless you pay lots of legal fees to draw up something more elaborate, it's hard to depend on your executor or trustee to handle the archiving duties well. The best way to ensure that "sensitive information" doesn't get tossed aside or shared inappropriately is to bequeath your computer equipment to someone with the discretion and technical proficiency to know what needs to be done.
5)I should reiterate the necessity of making a good list of people to contact after your death. My siblings and parents have absolutely no idea who needs to be contacted. Some of these contacts would be in a better position to know what to do and what kinds of online content you have.
6)obviously media backups are a good idea.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Perhaps we should get into the habit of backing up all our data on the latest technology every few years. Floppy > cd > dvd > ??? Usb? just kidding...
Result: somewhere between difficult and impossible. The current systems literally have no provision for ownership of a file to pass from one account to another.
See e.g. impractical.
I don't want to give people access to my accounts after I pass away, I want to pass on the legally purchased files that I accumulated. Isn't it a major problem that this currently isn't supported by DRM systems?
My mother died a few years ago and my father died last year. Fortunately death wasn't a taboo subject in our family and also my parents believed in preparation. My father left us a document detailing all of his accounts, the web sites associated with them, the logins and passwords, etc. There were a couple of gaps but it was mostly complete. He had also detailed the relevant stock prices as of my mother's death which saved a lot of time in tax preparation and allowed us to quickly identify which assets should be sold to limit tax liability.
My parents had established trusts which vastly simplified handling of the estate. I had transfered his memorial society membership and pre-selected a cremation facility so when he died, we just had to make one phone call and transport, cremation, death-certificates, etc. were all handled.
Still, the whole death thing has been a learning experience.
When things have been done correctly, handling things is a breeze. The house and larger accounts were in the trust and we were properly named as successor trustees on the accounts. Disbursing them was simply a matter of providing a death-certificate, disbursal instructions and a couple signatures.
When the Ts aren't crossed and Is not dotted, things are more of a problem. My father had a small checking account on which he forgot to list beneficiaries. Although it amounts to less than 0.1% of the estate it was more work to deal with than the large accounts.
Email and electronic access presents an interesting problem. Just try to close a paypal account when you don't have access to the email of the deceased. Fortunately, I had my dad's laptop (and he was using my email server to handle his mail) so I was able to "forget" the password and ultimately to cancel the account. It also allowed me to unsubscribe from his mailing lists and made it easier to transfer control of various web accounts.
Check caching is a pain, too. Turn in your FastTrak transponder, cancel the landline, insurance, cell service, internet service, etc., and submit final insurance claims. Suddenly you will get a bunch of checks made out to the dead person. When you notify financial institutions that a person has died they freeze the accounts and cashing checks made out to the deceased is an exercise in paperwork. You also have to track down things that are on autopay. Then when you cancel them you may ultimately find money appearing in accounts that you thought you had closed. While not "legal", I was told by an attorney that things are a lot easier if at least one financial institution doesn't know the person is dead. Tell them only after you have deposited all the checks.
My advice....
If you care for your loved ones, take a moment in the next couple days to make a list of all of your accounts. Then verify the beneficiary information on all of them.
Make funeral arrangements. In our family this was easy since none of us are into forking over cash to the "death mafia" and so have opted for the least expensive cremation available through the local memorial society. When my neighbor died (expectedly at 90+), her son suddenly realized that he didn't know what to do next so he called the fire department. It's nice to have things pre-arranged so you aren't stuck thinking, "now what am I supposed to do" at an already difficult time. It also makes you less vulnerable to fast-talking funeral arrangers.
If you have assets in excess of $100,000 (in California, anyway), establish a trust. And assets != net worth. You may owe $599,000 on your $600,000 house but the asset still exceeds $100,000 and your loved ones will have to slog through probate which is a royal pain involving $$$, lawyers, courts and time. It's also all open to the public. With a properly drawn trust your successors may not need a lawyer at all and your business will stay private. (We have an attorney for the occasional question but have handled nearly all the estate ourselves.)
Given the overwhelming amount of time required just to deal with a house and two lifetimes of collected stuff, I'm extremely thankful that we aren't dealing with probate, too.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
"One by One and Two by Two, He Tossed Them, Human Hearts to Chew!"
I know why I chose it... it's because Tim Curry, playing the voice of Captain Hook said it in that old Peter Pan cartoon show they had on Fox.... but even I do not know the correct answer to this question. (It isn't Peter Pan, Captain Hook, Alucard(1), Alexander Anderson(2), Percy Bysse Shelley, Tim Curry or 'V' for Vendetta(3) in case you were wondering.)
(1) and (2) Hellsing Codenames are Peter Pan and Captain Hook, respectively.
(3) The Poem name is "The Masque of Anarchy," which would fit, "I do not have a name, but you can call me 'V'" to a T (in the comic, anyway).
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
It's interesting actually, as I'm sure many small businesses are run this way. If the sole staff member of a one-man shop disappears, will anyone be able to get into those servers and recover the data and get value for it? Or will someone just pull the plug on your equipment not knowing what to do. Can someone get into your customer list? Where is your customer list? What is its format? What is the intranet address? Username/password? Root password? What amounts are owing on each account?
People who start their own business maintain a lot of information in their head, and very little on paper. As you expand to many, you start to see the need to document and share information. Document what you're doing, have password lists, and have more information.
What happens if you get injured. Who will make sure your clients don't all leave for a few weeks that you're unable to manage a computer?
This information needs to be documented even as a one-man shop in order to get value from it for your loved ones or even your own benefit due to permenant or temporary absences.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
A friend of mine passed away after a battle with cancer, and her website was the last thing left of her to the public. Her site was something of a central repository for not only her personal things, but also some reference material that was quite useful to her church. I offered to archive and host her site indefinitely, but before I could do anything about it her domain name / hosting account happened to run out, and nobody who wasn't her could do anything to renew it. I believe the domain is still owned by a goddamn domain squatter these days, and the content vanished with her own computer, which had been reformatted and passed to someone else. Ever since then I have my account info, passwords, and backups of major stuff written down and stashed away somewhere safe. I also warn people against letting domain name providers host the sites they're connected to, since having access to either the host or the name would have let us keep something rather than losing it all in one fell swoop.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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 started a website just recently to discuss all of the potential issues and problems related with inheritance of digital property called http://www.BeforeYouAreGone.com. I had considered these issues too and feel that this was the best way to start discussing them.
I plan to leave my kids copies of my film collection in digital format, mostly some old/rare stuff that's not available except via private collector trade. I've got most of it burnt to my hard drive and I back them up once a year to DVD-Rs (until something better comes along). If I keep it up and maintain the rigor, they'll be able to pass the stuff on to their kids...
Something Witty Goes Here
You raise an interesting point.
I'll add one thing to your mind though, hopefully.
The Dark Ages are called that partially because a lot of knowledge was lost. We simply do not know and may never know what happened at certain points in history.
The key I think to information safety is to have curators who keep it alive.
A good example might be wikipedia, where people are actively collecting and preserving information.
A bad example might be a time capsule, because it goes dormant for a while and then when it is finally opened there is a large chance that parts of it will be damaged or that perception of the information contained will have changed. This includes digital works that are no longer decipherable (like punch cards would be to most folks, or printouts of programs in "dead" languages (insert your own examples here))
So for information to survive we must have active libraries of information. If it goes dormant it risks being lost for all time.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Been there, actually. I ran an ISP with 30K+ customers, and the inevitable happened several times. One time a subscriber wound up murdered after wanting to become a police informer for drug deals. The cops called wanting access to the email account for leads. Another time a subscriber died I don't know how and the family wanted access to the email account so they could "inform his email correspondents." I got the impression it might have been a case of suicide. It wasn't any of my business to ask. They had no power of attorney in the second case, and no subpoena in the first case. And this was well before probate when you could make the case someone "inherited" the account. (So do who pays for the account for the year of probate? Am I required to keep it open just because they can't settle the estate? Yet our privacy policy CLEARLY stated e-mail was a privacy issue and nobody but the subscriber could gain access to the account.
So here people are yelling "PRIVACY is my RIGHT!!" out of one side of their mouth, then this happens and they say, "Well, no, we REALLY didn't mean it this time." out of the other side.
So, hypothetically, what if your dead person had a bunch of incriminating stuff stashed in email? How bout 'child porn,' for example, or details of a sordid affair. Do your rights stop because you're dead? (Well, they can't prosecute you at least, but maybe your estate.)
This issue is a little trickier that it may seem at first glance. Rock and a hard place if you ask me. It was probably the worst kind of policy issue I had to deal with. Thank goodness that ISP is gone now and I don't have to deal with it.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
"Do your rights stop because you're dead?"
yes.
"Yet our privacy policy CLEARLY stated e-mail was a privacy issue and nobody but the subscriber could gain access to the account."
thats great, if the people wanting that information had that agreement with you. And if the dead guy complains, well, we got bigger problems on our hands!
However, needing a sunbenea, or power of attorney is a good policy. OTOH, I used to pick up my grandfathers mail after he passed on, and All I needed was a death cert.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...that's highly inaccurate, but at the time(s) the income tax was nearly that limited, we didn't even have interstate highways. We were also paying for wars as a relatively new experience--and we've for all intents basically been engaging in new wars, with new veterans needing to be supported and pensioned off, well, ever since the Revolutionary War so this "golly, but that was raised to pay for 'the' war" line is pretty silly. Aren't we fighting one right now? How about five years ago (Afghanistan)? 15 (Gulf I)? 30 (Vietnam)? 60 (WWI)? 90 (WWI)? 105 (Spanish-American, Philippines)? 120 (Indian)? 140(ish) (Civil War)? 150 (Mexican-American)? 190 (War of 1812)? See a pattern? There were many more in there, but the big ones happen like clockwork and the money to fight them has gotta come from somewhere.
So, through the late 1800's to the end of WWII a huge amount of the federal government's revenue to pay for these things was gleaned from customs receiverships, which have long since been disbanded as a part of decolonization under the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations. Tariffs continuted, but under GATT and later the WTO, those have been dropping off into oblivion. If you think that the IRS is abusive (disregarding the fact that every developed nation has something nearly identical), what we used to have was outright criminal. It isn't surprising that the income tax would grow in the context of getting rid of the long-standing practice of international extortion.
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 so love screwing with people 50 years from now.
That's why I'm going to keep my porn collection intact.
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All this inheritance stuff keeps reminding me of peoples greed.
On too many occasions the offspring sue the deceased estate to overturn the will and get "what's rightfully theirs". In many cases the elderly have to fight for the right to control their own property against their overzealous offspring.
Digital inheritance will start a whole new fight over the IP of the deceased.
This question deserves to be taken seriously. I know of a case where a gentleman died and left no record of his passwords. This affects both your local computer and network accounts. It can take a lot of time and energy for relatives to get into important data on a computer, if it's possible at all.
Furthermore, if you have your own servers, a supoena isn't going to get anyone access to them without the password. In my case that would mean that my Web sites would go on without change until someone pulled the plug - and that's assuming they could figure out where the server is physically - it's not in my house.
I have a master list of accounts and passwords in a safe location and my kids know where it is.
What you need is the digital equivalent of a dead man's switch. Something that only triggers once you are dead and then sends all your passwords etc to one or two family members. You could do this with some kind of timed email. There are sites that let you send emails into the future. You just type a message and specify a date on which it will be sent. You could set it to email every month and then make sure you cancel the message every month. Once you die you wont be able to cancel the message and voila!, it will be sent. There is probably some business potential in this. You need a service that makes the dead-man's switch concept simple.
i've gotten my girlfriend to promise to wipe my computers out before my family sees them should i die unexpectedly.
I could think about my dad one day inheriting some items of my digital past ...
In my case, I presume all my data is 'somewhere' (my servers, 3rd party websites, etc). I don't go to lengths to archive/encrypt it. But my survivors will need access to it. So this gets back to the simple question of secure username/password storage.
I use Passowrd Gorilla. One master pass, to encrypt the rest, and most of the entries have 'notes' like the URL of the applicable site or server. Of course I leave the master password with my S.O. and/or anyone who I trust not to use it till neccessary.
Lots of other projects out there for the same purpose, but I like P.G. since it does TK & Windows, isn't Net dependent, and other features like autosave.
A 2 digit slashdot UID went for $115 two years ago.
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My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
Tempest program
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
....my digital allowance.
Its been awhile but this is essentially the same discussion as we had before .
What Happens To Your Data When You Die?
It even incudes the same jokes about finding grandfather's porn collection.
I have a friend that inherits his customer's pr0n collections all the time ...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Recently I started a blog. The primary purpose of which is to leave some kind of public record of my thoughts, attitudes and view of the world (no matter how ridiculous) to future generations. My motivation for doing this. I now have a nephew that just turned 2. Allthough I anticipate being around for a long time yet, life is always unsure. I lost my maternal grandfather when I was 8 and maternal uncle when I was in Jr. High. My grandfather was a WWII veteran that fought in both the European and Pacific theatre, as well as an all around good guy. There are so many stories of his that I'll never hear. I hope that, even if I only make it 6 more years, until my nephew is 8, I can leave something of myself behind for him and other nieces, nephews, children and grandchildren that are to come.
Now, as another precaution, I recently acquired a bank box and intend to put an archive of all my development work, passwords, etc.. in there. Probably more in case of a disaster than for an inheritance. One question I do have for anyone reading this, can I write to min cds or mini dvds with my CD/DVD writers? Where do I find media? The bank box that comes free with my account is only 4" across and a 6" CD/DVD isn't going to fit well.
Find coupons in Greeley
One advantage of being an atheist is that I realize I will be looking neither up or down after I'm dead, and that in fact there will be no "I" to care about anything once I'm dead. I may worry about things while I'm still alive, but not after I'm dead.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
What a bizarre concept! Stable url's? It may be true that information resides somewhere on the internet forever, but if it's useful, chances are it's not going to be revealed (to you) by Google. At a guess, I'd say 99% of the curious url's I collected over the last five years are kaput.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Automatically paid for via bank transfers, automatically collect money for shareware, music or other services, even automatically adapt itself to environmental changes (OS upgrades, etc.). I plan for my website to LIVE ON long after I'm gone, and make a fortune for itself in the process.
How about you don't have the porn in the first place!? IMHO it does more harm that it does good. Besides, I'm perfectly happy getting all of my sexual release with my spouce. I honestly don't need the porn and have none. I could die tomorrow and everyone could look through all of my stuff (including my browser cache) and I would have no worries about what they may find.
I know, I posted something against porn on slashdot... let the flaming begin.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
Just wait until someone finds a way to predict prime numbers, then pretty much all encryption could be cracked without effort...
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
What greed? If you have lived free, everyone will have what's worth having already. Digital records allow sharing that physical objects never enjoyed.
I don't have any non free software or other silly junk written in dissapearing ink. I used MSDos, Windoze 3.1, 95 and 98 before I learned my lesson. They sit in a closet, to be looked on in 50 years as curiosities. I doubt anything will run them and free software works better than newer of the same. My wife and 4 year old girl use that better software.
Because of that they can help me build the digital record we can all look back on and share. I've got about 20 GB of pictures in a simple digital photo album. Some of those pictures are scans of parent and grandparent photo albums. Anyone in my family can have it now, so digitization has increased the worth of the collection for everyone. These albums and the stories they told me are worth much more than the physical things they left, which will rot away. I imagine my email will be more interesting that reams of old letters, because email is easier to store and search through.
It's inconceivable that that kind of information would be hoarded but people have strange ideas.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yes! It indicates something along the lines of destroy my computer and all of the data on it, format the disk, many many times, install crap over it (windows would work), format it again, then burn the damn thing before running it over with your car.
So, in short, my (insert the word data, but scratched out) pr0n is mine, not to be had by anyone else. Save your selfs and do what I said :-p
All joking aside? I don't have anything worth passing down. My email is a bunch of spam, and my more important files are pass codes to download things at tufat.com or similar things. Plus, the various programs I've downloaded and their keygens will probably be out dated. (Mr. FBI dude: This is just an example, I don't -really- have any of those horible thing...)
Scott Swezey
Presumably you're talking about van Eck phreaking, which was featured quite prominently in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.
Yes, although the name I had on the tip of my tongue but couldn't remember was TEMPEST, which NetworkBoy pointed out.
The surge of interest in it a few years back may well have been due to its mention in Cryptonomicon, I'm not sure. I just remember reading a lot about it, and seeing several programs that had options for "TEMPEST resistant fonts" or stuff of that nature. (The program I'm thinking of in particular was a Mac password-management database program, so by design it had to display passwords onscreen.) Seems as though interest has died down of late.
It would seem that the term "TEMPEST resistant" is actually a misnomer, since (according to Wikipedia, anyway) TEMPEST actually refers to the USG/NSA standards for hardening equipment against such monitoring, not the snooping system itself.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Tax reform in general is not limited to that particular tax reform idea in particular.
Opposition to that particular tax reform idea does not equal a lack of understanding of either.
Boredom with the endless drone from people who see no other alternative but that particular "solution" is an indication of neither. It's just after the billionth reading of the talking points, one simply doesn't need to hear it again...and again...and again.
Take it as a given that "most" people ARE for tax reform, ARE interested in it and ARE open to the discussion. But, don't expect them to sign on to ONE idea just because it has a nifty name and a website,
It's the FT folks that are being stubborn. They have THE solution and aren't interested in hearing anyone else's ideas or criticisms. Politics is about compromise and that platform is uncompromising, ergo, it will fail.
Here is one for ya...
My great uncle died when I was 10. He had everything written up, set up perfectly etc. He owned a house, a few cars, and operated an antique shop out of his house in rural Mississippi.
Well, he died on the morning of January 1st at a hospital in Memphis. However his car was stolen the morning of his death (Memphis has a LOT of crime). Unfortunately my parents pulled a lot of important documents from the house (small town - every one knew he was in the hospital) in order to protect them and they were in the trunk of the car when it was jacked.
AND, they had all of his blank checks in there too.
These theifs had hit the jackpot. For two years after his death they wrote hundreds of thousands of dollars in bad checks. They also got legit IDs in his name and reordered checks and then got credit cards in his name etc etc.
Talk about a CLUSTER!
Anyway, 10+ years later my family (my dad was executor) is STILL getting calls from creditors looking to collect, and the direct marketing lists keep sending us dozens of mailings with his name on it.
UGH!
Libertas in infinitum