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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.
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.
...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
"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.
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)
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.
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.
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