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.
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
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
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?
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".'
There is a novel sized amount of text here.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
http://www.zeroshare.info/
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Luckily a redditor mirrored the site almost as soon as they became aware of it. Fuck Yahoo.
mirror
He's gonna haunt the shit out of them now
If he has an heir who wants to go the effort of trying to get a refund from yahoo, I'm sure yahoo will refund it as soon as the lawyers send the appropriate letter. It won't get it back online, though. They could use the money to put the site up somewhere else, if they wanted.
So my guess (gambling is for fools, that's why I only make guesses) is that yahoo would not ever be sued. To be sued they would have to first be asked for the refund, and then refuse; and then refuse again when threatened with legal action. At that point it would be punted to the lawyers, who would look at the amount of money for 5 years of hosting, and recommend refund very quickly.
This little quote from the guy's site:
The thought of being in a nursing home, physically or mentally disabled, was the single scariest thing I had ever thought about
This is exactly what I've been thinking for years now; I've always thought that I will commit a suicide and end my life one day when I feel I'm getting too old, when I feel I'm losing control over my own thoughts and body. Honestly, the most horrible thing that I could imagine is being locked up in a bed 24/7 at the mercy of others without being able to do anything by myself -- I do not want to end there. I will commit a suicide if it looks like it's coming to that, I want to be in charge of my own life. As such I fully understand the guy's reasoning and I agree: good for him.
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"?
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
While I agree with the general thought there, I don't think I would choose his method of ending my life 'when the time comes'. Shooting yourself in front of a police station just sounds cliche, and way too urban.
I would rather go out on a camping trip and never come back. Whether that's in the hot desert or cold mountains, or out in the plains of Africa with my final sight being a hungry lion. If I'm ending it all, I want it to be something more personal than a bullet in the head while standing in a city street.
Posting AC to keep future searchers from discovering anythiing.
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.
Shooting yourself in front of a police station just sounds cliche, and way too urban.
I just find it somewhat distasteful. I haven't yet decided how I'd wanna go, but I'd try to do it in such a way that it doesn't involve bystanders or possibly cause anyone to actually see me dying. So, I'd probably opt for going somewhere far out-of-sight and just overdosing on something that's certain to kill me -- no messy blood, no bystanders being sprayed with brains, no collateral damage, just a clean death.
Putting a bullet to your head in front of witnesses and the police means there's little to no investigation - or, cost to society. They clean up the street, but it's obvious why, how, and when you died.
Disappearing into the woods could prompt a million-dollar manhunt trying to 'rescue' you, until or unless they find you first. And once they do find you, they'll have to do an autopsy to investigate cause of death - possibly quite an expensive one, as your remains will have degraded. You'll cause a lot of extra cost and grief to society that you could have avoided.
Maybe that was important to him.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I intend to be living a fantastic life and raising hell for another decade or three yet. Deal with it.
So... your magic number isn't 60, but possibly 85 or 90. Ok, that's fine. I am more than happy to let you define how long you think your quality of life is good. So what happens after that?
I've one great-great-uncle who lived to be 106. (They found him one evening leaned up against a fencepost, where he'd evidently stopped to take a little break whilst making his daily walk around his farm. Nothing wrong with him, the doctor said, except that he finally just wore out.)
Yeah, and I've got an 80+ year old great uncle in-law or something who's been bedridden for years now. Adult-onset type 2 diabetes. The diabetes so far has caused blindness, and has led to the amputation of both legs. It could happen to anyone, even you. 51 is a long way from 70.
My own grandfather developed Alzheimer's, and although he remained perfectly healthy in body until the end, that was probably the most horrifying and heart wrenching thing to undergo. He was terrified at least for as long as knew what was happening, and it wasn't much better for those around him.
We all wish to age gracefully, die in our sleep peacefully, and while I agree arbitrarily committing suicide on your 60th birthday is nuts... committing suicide when the circumstances of your final days are rapidly becoming apparent is pretty rational in my books.
http://www.zeroshare.info/
http://web.archive.org/web/20130815235729/http://martinmanleylifeanddeath.com as well, which is guaranteed to reflect the original.
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?
You would lose the bet.
Yahoo would have taken the site down if he was dead or not. It doesn't matter how much he has paid in advance. It violates the terms of service.
It's not like they get a notice every time a customer dies. Somebody would have complained to Yahoo they are hosting a site both advocating suicide and describing many methods of doing so. Not very legal in California.
People still use Yahoo? Why? That site has totally turned to shit the last few years.
A former girlfriend was a SAR volunteer. I'd guess the majority of calls she got were people who were known to be suicidal and had gone missing (usually into woods/lake area).
Even with a suicide note, they're still going to come looking for you. Not only that, but your family is probably going to be freaking the fuck out.
Seems like a pretty shitty way to go for everyone else.
The wouldn't need to start a manhunt if you just set up an e-mail to be sent at a certain time to the appropriate government agencies, describing that you committed suicide and provide GPS coordinates to your body. You could even draw a nice map for them.
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.
Whether David sues Goliath is pretty much irrelevant. It's whether Yahoo! suffers a (IMHO well deserved) PR disaster that counts. It's news like these that people keep in mind when they think of companies. Next time I think about using Yahoo, I'll remember: "Oh, that was that bunch of jerks that kicked a dead customer out who pre-paid for 5 years? Okay, better look elsewhere."
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
We all wish to age gracefully, die in our sleep peacefully, and while I agree arbitrarily committing suicide on your 60th birthday is nuts... committing suicide when the circumstances of your final days are rapidly becoming apparent is pretty rational in my books.
No we don't, that's a compromise wish. Many of us wish to age just enough to reach our prime, and die never, with no health problems, along with everyone we ever love or meet.
Others have decided that since that's pretty unlikely to be attainable, they'll pretend there's virtue in "aging gracefully" or "dying with dignity" or some other malarkey about some number of years being enough for anybody. That just because you can't have something, it's somehow virtuous not to want it.
I think far fewer in the age gracefully column than claim it. Just look at the extraordinary measures people will go through just for a chance for a few more minutes, even after a lifetime of declaring against the idea.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
They'd still need to send somebody in, drag your body out, prove there wasn't any foul play, etc.
As I said: it depends on what was important to him. There are logical reasons to choose the street in front of the police station. There are reasons to choose walking into the woods to disappear - but they are different reasons. Apparently this was the statement he wanted to make, for whatever reasons. (Maybe for the reasons I gave, maybe for others.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Actually, Yahoo is trying to commit suicide. I suggest we encourage that.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I'll take it and host his pages.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I know somebody who died in the woods on a hike.
It was a while ago, probably in the 1960s. His name was Eric, he was probably in his 50s or 60s, and he was a doctor (a radiologist). He used to lead day hikes in the New York City area for the American Youth Hostels, and his hikes were very popular.
One day, he was hiking with his wife (I think in Bear Mountain park). He was coming down a mountain, and told his wife, "You go down that way, and I'll go down this way." His wife got to the bottom and he didn't show up.
Volunteers launched a massive effort to find the body. They combed the mountain slope shoulder-to-shoulder, but never found anything. (This was fairly dense woods.)
I remember seeing the "Missing" poster.
Given how he felt about the outdoors, it was as good a way to die as any. But his wife, family, and friends had a lot of discomfort at not knowing for certain that he was dead. It's sort of like being "missing" in the Latin American dictatorships.
Years later, somebody found the body.
If I can be free to speculate, it was most likely that he died of a heart attack. Perhaps he felt it coming on and didn't want his wife to watch him die. But that doesn't make sense. Most heart attacks aren't fatal, and they could have gotten him to the hospital. He was also diagnosed as being clinically depressed (like lots of people his age). Maybe he just decided to give up. We'll never know.
The moral of this story is that dying in a favorite place is a good way to face the inevitable. But just disappearing is painful for your survivors.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Links from there are broken because they point to Yahoo.
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?
What I could understand from the website, that would be something that mattered to him. Except he didn't do it in front of witness because he didn't want anybody having to face that, yet he did call 911 before doing so. In theory (that is, what he says he was planning at his website), he would be found rather quickly, by prepared people.
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.
Anybody who hasn't heard about any of the other sucky things yahoo has done over the years probably won't hear about this one either. Or if they do, remember it. If he'd been from slashdot he would have used prgmr.com or something
What a narcissist! Ironic as well...
This is sad. With the state of medicine these days, I doubt there'll be the amount of physical suffering you imagine you'll suffer, and as for the mental angle...
I'm going to use a tank of Nitrogen and put on some good music.
I'll end up feeling happy and die in a matter of minutes.
(Not now, when I'm older, and don't have pets and don't want to go to a home)
"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
By the time you know you've got Alzheimers, it's too late to consider suicide.
No. Highly recommended to get perspective on things.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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...
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
Use http://web.archive.org/web/20130816143409/http://www.martinmanleylifeanddeath.com/why_not even before it was down there were some bad links when omitting the hostname.
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.
This little quote from the guy's site:
The thought of being in a nursing home, physically or mentally disabled, was the single scariest thing I had ever thought about
This is exactly what I've been thinking for years now...
I worked as a nurses' aide in a nursing home one college during summer. (Nurses' Aide = butt-wiper.) It was a depressing, terrifying job. Most "residents" had bed-pads because they couldn't get up to go poo. We had:
* A woman who had long lost her mind, was cemented in a fetal position, and regularly coded. Staff had to restart her heart each time, because she had no living relatives or living will.
* A woman who had long lost control of her body, but not her mind, and was just never visited by any of her children.
* The many who would be tied down to their bed, to prevent them from getting up and wandering around.
* The profoundly retarded girl (36 yo) that staff would purposely put into (rigid) seizure, in order to make it easier to change her bedding.
* The Alzheimer's woman who thought I was her son. When she'd be combative to other staff, they'd have me ask her, "please mom, just eat this pudding," which had sleep meds mixed in.
* Bedsores.
* And Golda, senile and assumed incapable of coherent speech. Staff were just to lazy to listen between the word salad and half-words. She eventually spoke a full sentence to me ("I need to go to the bathroom"), the only one in five years, I was told. I took her in, stepped away, and she had her first taste of freedom in years.
Needless to say, I will not allow myself to fall into such a situation in infirmity. Adult children of old people –– Your parent knows that living alone at home, doing what s/he wishes to do, may suffer a fatal fall or similar in their home. They are probably at peace with this. Don't let your own fear of personal, potential guilt lead you to essentially put your aging parent in a white-walled jail for their remaining years. Would you want to spend your last 10 years of life in a bed, with only a TV to keep you company?
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.
I really dont understand people who only think of life and death in terms of $. I would go to the ends of the earth for my loved ones, money be damned.
Good-bye
Well, then, think of it this way: Shooting yourself in public in front of the police station means they are spared the pain of uncertainty about what has happened to you.
Money - treated properly - is only a proxy for other things. It is a quantifiable measure of time and effort. Do you want people to spend time and effort worrying about whether you have killed yourself, where your body is, what's happened to it, etc., or do you want them to know the answers - even if they don't like them? That's the choice we are discussing. It's a bit easier to discuss in terms of money - but that doesn't mean I'm thinking of it that way.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
If there's anything I've learned from being alive, it's that modern dying is about the most painful, horrific thing you'll likely ever experience in your lifetime. Death is quick and painless, but dying is the complete opposite. More than likely, you'll spend weeks, months, even years bedridden, wasting away in a hospice or assisted care facility until your body finally gives up. If you're lucky, you fall and it all ends in a few days, maybe a week or two. If you're not, you'll be stuck dying for years (technically, we're all dying since the day we're born, but by dying, I mean becoming more and more invalid physically and mentally).
Suicide can be folly, and I strongly believe is foolish for most of a person's life. However, suicide means you get to chose the time and manner of death. And even for the empowered, with everything to live for and every reason to keep living, it can be a blessing compared to the alternative. Personally, if given the choice, I'd rather have a meaningful death (e.g. rescuing a cat from a tree) than a senseless one (e.g. ODing on pain meds). But chances are, I won't be so lucky.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
On his website he describes why he chose this method and place. He wanted to make sure that it did work and did not simply leave him in a vegetative state (hence the firearm), did not cause any harm to other people (5 AM at a police station's parking lot - the coordinates are on his website), and he placed a suicide call to the police before killing himself to make sure that his body would immediately be found by someone professionally trained to handle the situation. I love life way too much to think about suicide, but apparently this gentleman put a lot of thought into it and wanted to make sure he caused the least possible harm.
I've made a dear friend promise that she will help me get what I need for the last hobby I take up when I feel I'm getting old - heroin-and-handgliding. Gonna go out with a splat!
Suicide and euthenasia are ancient taboos, with a strong religious influence propping that view up in the supposedly modern day. A truly enlightened populace would be able to maturely address, and deal with, such issues as simple life choices.
"Checking out today sir?"
"Yes, thanks; I've enjoyed my stay".
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
You should compare the various methods in the alt.suicide.holiday "Methods" file.
Another internet (albeit usenet, rather than web, originally) resource that was famously censored - repeatedly. And, true to form, the internet viewed censorship as damage, and routed around it.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
That just because you can't have something, it's somehow virtuous not to want it.
Virtuous to not want it? Or just a pointless waste of time to express that you do want it, before getting around to suggesting a "compromise" option that is at least plausibly consistent with the physics of the known universe, and has a reasonable probability of actually happening.
You know, to save us all time.
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?
Good plan! If I don't manage to get to Iceland before I die, maybe I should plan to get to iceland as I die!
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
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 ?