Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo Deletes Journalist's Pre-Paid Legacy Site After Suicide
New submitter digitalFlack writes "Apparently Martin Manley has been a popular blogger and newspaper journalist for many years. For his own reasons, no indication of illness, he decided sixty years on this planet was enough. He designed a 40-page website with sections such as: 'Why Suicide?' and 'Why Age 60?.' Martin planned his suicide meticulously, but to manage his legacy, he picked Yahoo. He even pre-paid for five years. After he left this mortal coil on his 60th birthday, Yahoo decided they don't want his traffic, so they took the site down. Sorry, Martin."
Yahoo didn't know he also prepaid lawyers. Or at least lets hope so.
Yahoo has contractual obligation to provide service, sudden death of a party is a sleazy way to weasel out of a service contract.
Methinks yahoo wants the treasure to themselves.
Does anyone have one?
If the author pre-paid for the service, Yahoo! had no business removing his blog. I'm not a betting man usually, but I would put down a grand that someone will sue Yahoo! on the deceased author's behalf.
if more people went that way before they became resource sponges then the quality of life would be better for everyone (well everyone still left alive anyway)
now if only we can somehow prevent anyone over the age of 60 from holding elected or appointed government positions we would be on the right track
and really since he was planning on dying anyway why not kill off a few people who really deserve it on your way out? i mean it isn't like you will feel guilty about it later
hopefully that isn't the only place he published his manifesto and he has other locations
He *thought* he had a website up for five years when he died. He'll never know the difference.
But because geeks always want to fix things ... it seems to me that if he had the website in someone else's name, or even in a lawyer's name, it'd still be up.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
In the meantime, there is a mirror located here.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Not only was this website paid for, it was obviously part of the deceased's last wishes. If Yahoo has no respect for the law or its customers, it should at least show some respect to a dude's last wish.
I permamarked it best I could.
http://www.permamarks.net/grabbed_urls/OQhBYg/webcache.googleusercontent.com_357.htmlz
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So where's the mirror? You'd expect someone to mirror this. Even just to investigate a death with unnatural causes, you'd expect the police to want a full copy of the web site?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
That's okay--Marissa will make the lost traffic up in Vogue hits. Also/Obligatory: Yahoo is still in business?
The site is paid for, Yahoo needs to do the right thing and leave the site up. Dead people don't have rights, so the poster who asked about Manley's lawyers is right on the money, hopefully he set up a legal trust to deal with these issues. If Manley had set this up with Japanese hoster they probably wouldn't have thought twice about hosting the site.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
http://www.zeroshare.info/
Who'll walk me down to church when I'm sixty years' of age
When the ragged dog they gave me has been 10 years in the grave
And senorita play guitar, play it just for you
My rosary has broken and my beads have all slipped through
You've hung up your grey coat and you've laid down your gun
You know the war you fought in wasn't too much fun
And the future you're giving me holds nothing for a gun
I've no wish to be living sixty years on
Yes I'll sit with you and talk, let your eyes relive again
I know my vintage prayers would be very much the same
And Magdelena plays the organ, plays it just for you
Your choral lamp that burns so low when you are passing through
And the future you're giving me holds nothing for a gun
I've no wish to be living sixty years on
And Yahoo! I am pissed
There is a novel sized amount of text here.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Yahoo going downhill since the rise of Google? Say it isn't so...
He's gonna haunt the shit out of them now
It's a shame no one had given him a copy of Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now".
Reading the "Why suicide?" section it's a classic example of a human mind at it's absolute worst creating abstract future's that will probably never happen.
e,g, "I didn’t want to die having my chin and my butt wiped by someone who might forget which cloth they used for which."
Rather than brush his "thoughts" under a carpet like Yahoo has done I'd leave them there for others to link to who can better explain what when wrong in his head.
"The power of linking" could turn this negative into a positive.
It should remain as a warning to the living that you are not your mind, your mind and your thoughts are a product of an organ that can mis-fire just like any other organ in your body.
If you are wondering what I'm talking about pick up a copy of Tolle's bestseller and find out for yourself.
Where is Yahoo gonna transfer the refund to?
There's another guy named Martin Manley who was born 2 weeks later and has the wikipedia page :D
I mean seriously, not just the same name, or year, but the same month too!
Among many other things, death entails a complete lack of power.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
the site has been going downhill anyway.
this is just the final nail in thw coffin.
1. Get customers to sign up for 5 year plans of web hosting.
2. Kill customer, make is look like a suicide.
3.?
4. Profit!
with the exception of some of the Alzheimer stuff he mentioned every thing he described is treatable, and even a lot of the Alzheimer stuff is. That is, if you have access to the health care. This sounds more like a failing of our society than anything else.
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I was gonna rant about refunding the estate for the residual value of his contract, and for the 5 year domain registration.. or at least transfer it to his estate.. BUT.. Yahoo's TOS specifically deals with death.
"No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted."
Allegedly, this was in effect for a while.. the page
http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/utos-173.html
says it was last updated March 16, 2012.
For a man who made a living with his words, maybe he should have read the TOS ( short by some comparison). Or, maybe like the false 'treasure hunt', he knew Yahoo would cancel his account, and through both methods he gains some post-mortem notoriety. Either way.. I hope he gets some pleasure out of all this attention to his life being generated today.
that Yahoo folks have a problem with themselves in connection with dying, suicide and related things. For sure it's not a money issue to keep the page open.
Now they have another PR issue and are exposes as jerks.
Anti-Conspiracy Capitalist Pig Investment Banker Commits Suicide for Free Hosting from "Reddit" pg 11
How is the Slashdot and Reddit crowd sympathizing with this wackadoodle?
So their latest CEO has been buying companies for ridiculous amounts of money in order to keep Yahoo in the press, and then they pull something like this?
That is truly priceless.
I agree with most comments here. And I'm proud of the ones showing compassion towards this person's last wishes.
I propose we all send a message to
@YahooInc and cc to @marissamayer
It would be most effective to use hashtag too to start a trend. Mine would be: #Fuckyahoo
But not everybody would like to use profane language.
What about #Yahoosucks ? or both?
And a link to this page to let the world know?
In a follow-up edition of Vogue magazine. Yahoo is toast, with a raspy T.
Why would suicide be illegal? Where I live it isn't. How could be someone prohibited from suicide save livelong incarceration in a padded cell?
People still use Yahoo? Why? That site has totally turned to shit the last few years.
Whatever they have in their TOS, and whatever their strange morals may be, ignoring the will of a dead person to leave something behind is considered not only petty behavior, it also above all pretty rude in almost all cultures around the world. Perhaps it's different in savage Yahoo!-Land, but we, the civilized world, are shocked by their lack of sensitivity.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
The British satirist Chris Morris authored 12 columns in the Observer, a British newspaper. He built up to a spoof suicide under the pseudonym 'Richard Geefe':
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Class_Male/Time_To_Go/
Interesting that his satire has now become a reality for one journalist.
I read it. Some of it. If he did it like he planned he was standing in the trees at one end of the parking lot of a local police station, called 911 and told them where he was, what he was about to do, and how, and then pulled the trigger and killed himself via firearm. He says he did it this way because he did not want someone who was not trained in seeing such things to find him.
Sadly, my personal belief is that someone not trained in it probably did find him, most 911 operators have not had the experience of being the final point of contact for a suicide and that he likely traumatized someone by doing it this way.
I know damned well no matter how jaded I am, if someone called me, told me very calmly where they were and that they were committing suicide and then I hear a bang and silence until the police got to him and hung up the phone, I'd need the rest of the night off to pull myself into some semblance of together. I'd wonder for months if there wasn't something I could have done to stop it, feel responsible for it even though it was totally random. The only thing that might help would be finding out who this was, that he had a website and that he was not calling me to stop him, just to be 'tidy'.
I hope that operator finds out who it was, reads the site on a mirror, and feels a little less terrible about it. Cause I know I'd want that for me.
I think there's a broader topic: the more we centralize all our communications with a few corporate services, the easier it is to take "incorrect" or "inconvenient" speech offline.
Companies like yahoo haven't taken that control, we've given that control to them. That trend would be better reversed.
I just said that his reasons were mostly health related, and that with enough money his reasons go away. I think the money should be taken out of that equation. No one should kill themselves for lack of medical care...
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it would have taken years of preventative maintenance and care. With the way things are set up today it's too expensive for anyone but the very wealthy to get that care.
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I hope that someone at Yahoo has a heart and will reconsider removing Martin Manley's website. Or is it so terrible for someone to express their feelings to others, whether they're talking face to face or they put up a webpage? You would think that techno geeks would be more encouraging of open dialogue or are they just in it for the money?
Quote from http://zeroshare.info/why_suicide
I began seeing the problems that come with aging some time ago. I was sick of leaving the garage door open overnight. I was sick of forgetting to zip up when I put on my pants. I was sick of forgetting the names of my best friends. I was sick of going downstairs and having no idea why. I was sick of watching a movie, going to my account on IMDB to type up a review and realizing I've already seen it and, worse, already written a review! I was sick of having to dig through the trash to find an envelope that was sent to me so I could remember my own address - especially since I lived in the same place for the last nine years!
In speech class we had to pick a subject for my finial grade, I pick euthanasia. I think it was mentioned
as example, as I hadn't really thought of it before.
In a shower moment, a feeling of epiphany if you will, I had my core:
The anti abortionist claimed the child has no choice in the matter of their abortion. Well that child has grown up and has made a choice to end their life,
it should be respected.
Good or bad I was pleased with it and passed the course.
Martin made the choice and shared with us moments that meant enough to him to pass on, Yahoo desecrated both his choice and his memories.
The treasure hunt was in bad taste and I feel could of been the reason his work was removed (at the insistence of the police dept).
A large X across the page, details blocked out and it being called a hoax should of sufficed; censorship yes but the alternative is this discussion.
Looks like some kind soul has put up a mirror: http://www.ussolutions.net/martin/backup/
What a narcissist! Ironic as well...
He states he was suffering from dementia.
The irony of this didn't escape me. It did absolutely nothing to hurt the Yahoo brand to leave this website up. It was even the expected behavior, by passively doing absolutely nothing they would have done more good for their brand.
Instead, they took deliberate action to cause predictable harm to themselves by undermining market confidence that they are capable of providing reliable service consistent with their contractual obligations!
Yahoo is dying on the table, bleeding out essentially, and they decide to grab a scalpel and carve on themselves? WTF is Yahoo thinking?
"No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted."
Open and shut, IMHO. Yahoo is just following its terms.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I would guess that the more reliable way of setting this up would be through a separate entity managed, and officially owned, by someone else. Would be interesting to see if this is a service that could be offered by solicitors, essentially as an extension to your will? Or, perhaps find someone you trust to own and manage payments for the site.
Fuck you.
"They'll shut down my pre-paid legacy account over my dead body!"
Is it void if the the party dies? If so, yahoo is in the legal right to do so ( tho uncool ).
Most often contracts do terminate in some fashion, when the parties terminate.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is just a phase Yahoo is going through. Yesterday they informed me, like it was a good thing, that they had gone in and edited my address book without my permission and deleted an entry belonging to a friend who passed away many years ago. I think it's pretty clear that Yahoo seems to have some kind of hate on for dead people and legacy accounts. Thanks yahoo! I'll be sure not to die while using your service.
Anonymous has mirrored his site.
To hell with Yahoo's policies.
www.martinmanley.org
martin-manley.eprci.com.
Liberty in your lifetime
Because at the end of the day, values and respect do not come from corporate entities. They come from people, they are between people. That's how it's always been, and that's how it always shall be.
In other words: If he hosted it with me, I would respect his wishes, because I'm a person, not a corporation. His web site would still be up, and his web site would not make Slashdot news.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
Martin, **** you! Yahooooooooooooooo.
Today is August 15, 2013. Today is my 60th birthday. Today is the last day of my life. Today, I committed suicide. Today, is the first day this site is active, but it will be here for years to come. Release of rights. Before I get into the nuts and bolts of this site, I first must say to those whom I have a special bond with, please don't think that I didn't consider your feelings. I'm sorry... very sorry for the hurt and pain I will have caused by my actions. In all probability, I won't be able to justify it to you - at least not today. Maybe someday you will come to understand... better. If not today, maybe someday you will be able to read what I've said and learn why. Maybe someday you will be able to forgive me. I love you! This site is divided into two major categories. The first is the suicide. The second is my life. To the left side of this page, you will see categories. Under some of them are subcategories. You can click and read anything you want. My life is an open book now that I’ve closed the book on my life. It’s important for me to have written quite a bit about my decision to commit suicide because it’s rarely been done. I assume the people I know would want to understand it better and I’m sure there are people out there who study suicide that would like to study mine – so I’ve left nothing to the imagination. It’s all here. I debated the idea of having the suicide (death) categories at the top above the life categories or at the bottom of the left side of the page. After all, chronologically, we live and then we die. But, which is more important the life or the death? I couldn’t decide that one was more important than the other at this moment in time and so I put the suicide categories on top because it's the headline, the 11:00 news lead. Besides, the suicide categories will reveal some things that nobody knows about me while the life categories have stuff in them that at least some people know. Having decided to put the suicide stuff first, it is technically something that took a very tiny amount of time to do - contrary to my life experiences which took a lifetime. So, what I hope will happen in the long run is that my life is remembered and the suicide is just an asterisk, a footnote. After all, we all die. The way we died doesn’t change one little thing about the way we lived. When remembering anyone who has passed on, hopefully it is the life that is recalled and not the death. So, if you want to understand everything I have to say about my death - simply read the first 12 categories on the list to the left - especially Suicide Preface. If you want to know what I have to say about my life, read the next 34 categories and 44 subcategories. I've tried to present them in some kind of order that makes sense, but you can read anything you want in whatever order you want. I just hope you will read it. I think it is fair to say that I owe you (assuming "you" are someone that I know) an explanation. It's unfair to rob someone of something they love or even like or even know without an explanation. Having said that, you also owe me. You owe me the time it takes to understand why I did what I did without prejudging. I've done my part. The rest is up to you. If you opt to not read it, then I'm tempted to say "You can't handle the truth!"... but won't. I discovered that I was often writing in the present tense as well as the past tense, so I decided I would write in the past tense for the death categories - except for the next two categories (January 1, 2012 and June 11, 2012), but present tense for the life categories. At least that will be the norm. Lastly, at some point in reading this site you would have asked whether I was ultimately satisfied with my life, so I decided this was the best place to address it. I suspect nobody is completely satisfied and I'm no different. No, I wasn't fully satisifed with my life, but I was fully satisfied with my death! "If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character, would you slow down? Or speed up?" -- Chuck Palahniuk In case this is of any help to anyone, coping with suicide. Martin
Does his estate get a refund?
What does it say about us? Inevitably we will get old so, surely, it's in our own interests to treat old people well.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Maybe it just felt too close to home for Yahoo.
Yahoo should choose the same path, as it's clear that they've been spiraling down for many years now.
In the original site, he listed coordinates in Kansas City with the location of buried treasure. Why has no one gone there yet?
if you don't login for a year, they will delete all your email content. so don't end up in a coma or forget to check it once in a while.
For a man who made a living with his words, maybe he should have read the TOS
Perhaps he did and that was what finally pushed him over the edge?
CAPTCHA: daisies, morbidly appropriate
It seems strange that Yahoo of all companies should have a problem with suicide.
I have had yahoo for a long time, and I don't really like them anymore. I deleted google because they are getting really bad, and I don't agree with the way they run their company anymore. I just wish I had the ability to work in linux administration, and I didn't accidently kill my computers because of my declining mind and body. I want to just host my own email.
Mirrored in UK, http://martin-manley.s5h.net/. Yahoo when you die, maybe AOL will mirror your content.
Why UNIX?
and used it as a proxy to own the account. After all, the the supreme court upheld corporations as having the same rights as people....right?
Has the death been (actually) confirmed? Has the family made any statment about it? Publicy?
The man sounded exceptionally resourceful. Any chance he 'faked' this suicide, in an effort to start a new (last phase of) life? (I think of the Andy Dufresne character from Shawshank Redemption). Maybe he set himself up a whole new life in a New Zealand backwater or some such. Dunno, just a thought.
Aside from Suicide, I think this idea of simply 'ending' your current life (figuratively) and restarting anew is something many people secretly desire, although you'd never get them to admit it out loud in normal conversation. Rebirth, rejuvenation, reboot, Phoenix-metaphors lie deep at the heart of (at least) the American Experience (well, or used to in a certain era).
If a person prepays for something, and dies during the contract, then it must be honored because payment was made. How does prepaying for your own funeral services work? Should they also be allowed to cancel the contract because you are no longer living?
Yahoo is a toilet. Why is anyone surprised?
"The content does, but the publishing contract ends. A dead person can not be part in a contract. "
I wish someone would explain this to the Walt Disney Company.
Who decided to do the same thing, but because of Parkinson's. Unfortunately, his wife Cynthia did the same thing, because she simply couldn't imagine going on without him...
And that he left this record for the world.
Of particular interest to me is the "Living Donor" section of the mirrored site. I hope people will read it and start asking some hard questions of the people responsible for our organ donation system. It's broken and needs to be fixed.
There's a lot on the site. This was a person that was trying to do some good at the end of his life - I respect that. I respect him.
... or did I miss it somewhere here?
If the guy prepaid, the least Yahoo can do is refund the estate. I agree though that continuing to host the data opens them up to all sorts of imaginative litigation.
Problem is, they have done it without his death certificate.
he paid yahoo. people do that?
marissa meyer for that, this is an outrage against freedom of expression, i really thought you were the shit, girl
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?