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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 ...
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.
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
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
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.
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'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.
how long until there are non-"inheritance" clauses in the TOS for porn site accounts?
Hell, there probably already are. It can actually be a real pain to leave something non-tangible to somebody after your death. A car is easily transferred, but a membership or subscription often isn't.
Example: my wife's grandmother had like 10 or 11 months left on her Dish Network subsciption. My father-in-law should theoretically have inherited it (he's the one who takes care of everything not specifically mentioned in the will). However, he was informed that Dish's policy is that they would not add that 11 months to his membership...the only way they'd pass it on is if it went to a new subscriber. In other words, they weren't willing to pass along the time remaining on a pre-paid contract unless it would gain them something (another customer)...otherwise that money (hundreds of dollars) was flushed down the toilet.
The lesson: don't assume that pre-paid memberships can be passed along in the event of your death. Also, when you're chances of dying at any given time are significant, go monthly.
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)
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).
Sounds nice, but that idea is utterly defenseless against fraud.
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
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!
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
A 2 digit slashdot UID went for $115 two years ago.
7 7887
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My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M