What Happens To Your Data When You Die? 628
dacarr writes "Your data - that is, the personal web pages and projects you have worked on to make the 'net a better place - are presumably password protected. But sooner or later the time will come when you take that last breath, and with you goes your passwords, but not your data. It's still there for your benefactors to deal with. And while many famous people who are no longer with us (e.g., Douglas Adams or Chuck Jones) have a staff for this, well, many of us don't. As such, have you planned for the hereafter, and if so, how?"
Rest In Peace (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that it's relevent to the question at hand, but I never could understand what would cause someone to take their own life. Of course, logically I understand what causes it - complete and utter despair - but emotionally, I guess that I have never (thankfully) felt down enough to empathize with someone who commits suicide. It seems like such a waste. The summer before this he and I had decided to try to get into good shape for the upcoming rugby season, and we pushed each other at the gym and during runs and sprints. After he killed himself, I just had to wonder, what is the point of working so hard to get into good shape and then just ending your life?
Personal anectodes aside, I don't really see much point to this Ask Slashdot question (which is usually the case as Ask Slashdot is the lamest part of Slashdot by far). Your digital files will be treated the same way as your paper files after you die, and people have been dealing with the question of how to ensure that their personal effects are handled in the way that they would want to for thousands of years now. My advice to anyone reading this would I guess be to keep encrypted anything that you don't want anyone to see after you are gone, and for anything else, don't worry about it.
Tim Maroney... (Score:3, Interesting)
yeah, it is a kinda weird situation (Score:5, Interesting)
http://perazzoli.org/blog.php
Always be prepared (Score:5, Interesting)
Rehashed (Score:2, Interesting)
Work vs Personal (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a copy of the current server layout, (well, almost current) and ALL of the pertinent passwords WRITTEN DOWN, and kept in a safe. (Right next to the backup drives) My friend who covers for me when I'm on vacation is well known to my co-workers, and boss.
So... if I kick the bucket, there will be a way for everyone else to pick up the pieces, continute business and move on with life.
Now at home, it's a sticky wicket... I currently don't have anything up on our web site, so that's not a big deal. My wife gets to decide what to do... and I need to talk with her about this issue.
For me, the big question then is what becomes of my 80,000+ photos? I've got some good ones, that I even managed to sell. I'd hate for them to just get pitched. (Thus returning to the main question)
Odds are, if she wanted to, she could back all of my stuff onto a new spiffy $200 drive (200Gb now, and twice as much 15 months from now). I'm probably about to do something like this to save my late father-in-law's data.
Gruesome topic, but it's good to plan ahead.
--Mike--
I'm Immortal, so far
Service related to this (Score:5, Interesting)
software (Score:5, Interesting)
Heck, if you are really good you can write the program to simulate your daily digital life. In effect making it so people who only know you on the net think you are alive. He died on thursday? I IMed him on friday and he posted to
Oh, just so you know, I'm actually dead and this is a program I wrote that is posting to slashdot. ph33r!!!!
burn it (Score:1, Interesting)
Multiple paper copies of important legal and financial information are stored in secure locations.
Re:Work vs Personal (Score:2, Interesting)
It will take care of itself... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you have family and friends that care, the data will stay alive. If you don't, then it will probably fade away and be forgotten.
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, yeah. People, encrypt your pr0n. It can be quite nasty. Be nice to the sysadmins.
If it's a close relative, I may just want the stuff on the drive for posterity's sake... But still, it can be tempting to just format the whole drive without looking at anything.
Computers are such personal things. They're like an extension of your mind. Perhaps a little dirty extension of the mind? OK, now we're getting into mixed metaphor land. I think I'll leave it here.
Ahem, just hope my grandfather doesn't read slashdot... Not much danger in that though.
Re:Find a porn erase buddy! Seriously....... (Score:2, Interesting)
I had a roommate in college die. Me and the other roommates felt it our duty to 'censor' his random stuff in the dorm room that his parents. We found porn, fireworks, airline-sized booze and 2 joints. I think the memory we provided (lack thereof, more precisely) was worth the moral dilemma of 'intrusion'.
Re:Find a porn erase buddy! Seriously....... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:software (Score:2, Interesting)
Memories (Score:4, Interesting)
My housemate, Cip, passed away a few months ago suddenly due to a rare blood condition. I had to clean all "unsuitable" materials from his laptop before his family could have it, but his personal emails and other things - well, they never really occured to me.
Perhaps the strangest thing is seeing old emails to/from him, forum posts by him, and the weirdest thing of all is still possessing "replays" of Strategy games we both played in - I can still see how he played.
Such an interesting topic...
Postmortem AI (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, this leads to a more practical idea of creating an AI to make sure that your wishes be carried out. Your AI would be financed by a trust and would be legally protected by your last will and testament. The will would state that the AI should be maintained as long as technically possible, perhaps employing programmers to keep it running should no longer run on current systems.
Who knows that use one would put their post-mortem AI to. Perhaps I should leave my old friends alone and program my AI to randomly send money to wacky startups!
- JML
Re:How about... (Score:2, Interesting)
She'd do this 4 or 5 times a day. When she was really depressed she'd do it for or five times an hour.
I can understand how important it is when your loved one is dead, but when you are still alive its fucking freaky.
if i die, my passwords will be known (Score:3, Interesting)
if they answer all the questions correctly it sends an e-mail to their account with a list of all my usernames and passwords.
there are accounts for all my family members. all they have to do to update the list of passes is send an e-mail to a special account with the username and password on two seperate lines and it adds it to their database.
i wrote this program after my uncle died, he was a network admin at a local public college, and no one knew his passwords for his home network, needless to say he filed his taxes online and the family was left with a slight problem becuase no one else knew any of his passwords.
Re:It will take care of itself... (Score:5, Interesting)
Fire safes are rated to keep the tempature during a a "standard" house fire, under about 300-400 degrees F. However, CD-ROM's are no good after about 150 or so if I remember correctly.
It's a fallicy that a firesafe will save electronic media. I've seen a number of people make that mistake in the "safe my emergency documents" plans. Even worse, the CD-ROM is likely to melt and ruin the paper documents at those temperatures. I'm not sure what will happen, if you want to see, put it all in your oven, turn the temperature up to 300 degrees, let it stay in there for about 10-30 minutes after it gets up to temperature (do this with documents you don't care about, and possibly this could ruin the firerating of the safe, I'm not sure if they are designed to go thru multiple fires). That's like the status you'll get your stuff back in after the fire department lets you back into your house.
My advice, go to a local bank, get a safety deposit box. Put your stuff in there, they only cost about $25/year. In the end, your stuff will be safe, when you die, the executor shows up with the key and a death certificate and your stuff is given to them. The only thing to be cautious of, is that I've been told that vaults can act like big magnets and screw up magnetic media. However, I've never had a chance to test that, and I've never read it from a source I deem "authoratative" to actually trust it.
Kirby
maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:software (Score:2, Interesting)
In the event of your death, or your three-day weekend in the mountains (out of cell-phone range), that is...
Case Study: Peter Francis & The Beadsite (Score:3, Interesting)
Whether you were talking about 90,000 year old beads from Africa [nationalgeographic.com] or ancient Sumarian seal beads [thebeadsite.com], one of the great resources available to us bead collectors was Dr. Peter Francis, Jr. and his website -- The Beadsite [thebeadsite.com].
Now Peter was a somewhat odd character, even in a world populated by odd characters, and people argue all the time about many of his theories -- some of which, I much admit, seem a bit unlikely. But many years ago he was kind to a young kid interested in beads, so he's always had a special place in my heart. And so over the years we've kept in sporadic touch mostly via his web site and the occasional conference where we'd run into each other.
Long story short - he unexpectedly passed away (on a bead collecting trip of course!), and no one quite knew what to do with his site. Still, it is full of detailed information about beads that is available nowhere else in the world. Rather than take it down and allow that information to be lost, his website remains up - as he left it - to serve as an online repository of bead information, as well as a place to solicit donations for causes that he cared about.
I can only imagine that for someone who devoted his life to study and research, this is as fitting a tribute as anything. I would hope that when my time comes, people think my electronic "voice" is worth preserving....
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:yeah, it is a kinda weird situation (Score:5, Interesting)
How ironic. The first line of the last post on the main page announces "Life goes on."
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:2, Interesting)
For those of us who see/have seen our lives as nothing but a deepening pit blackness, it does make a good deal of sense to plan for this sort of thing.
I know, most of the stuff on my hds isn't worth shit. Most people won't care about all the freeware I've downloaded or want to grab some packages that I've recently updated so that they can bring their system up to date quicker. However, there is some stuff on there that they might care about. I know several friends who would like to get their hands on my mp3 collection, for instance, or my collection of commercials. Most importantly, however, would probably be my writings and my aim logs. I have many MBs of those, and I'm sure my friends would want to get ahold of those, as sort of a final letter thing. I know that when one of my friends committed suicide awhile ago, I made sure and backed up all of my logs with her, and so did all of my friends who log.
So I decided to plan ahead, cause you never know when you'll finally be able to get through the physical pain to end the emotional. I wrote a letter to my best friends, with passwords, locations of final notes to them which are longer and more personal than I'd leave to the group, and things like that on it. I keep it in a place where I know it will be found should I move on. I think all of my stuff is shit, it sorta comes with the territory of thinking the rest of my life is, too, so I'll let them decide what to keep and what to throw out. After all, they're memory is going to be the only thing left alive of me, so I might as well give them the opportunity to decide what it will be.
Re:maybe (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure is heavy though, over 100lbs. and it only fits 100 dvd's.
I expect my friends to hack me. (Score:2, Interesting)
Allow me to explain. I know a lot of people online, some of whom none of my RL friends/family are aware of. I expect my friends to be aware of this, and to break into my computer (I dunno, rewrite the root password hash or something) to get at my AIM buddy list and email address book to make sure everyone hears about what happened to me. I also expect them to do appropriate things with my various (mostly useless) data. There are a very tiny few things I wish to die with me, and those are encrypted.
I hope my friends realize I'd want them to do this for me, and I'd definitely do it for them. It's not like I'd go in there snooping and spying and stuff, I'd be very sensitive to their privacy... but some things need to be done.
PKI nightmare (Score:3, Interesting)
A small company with a large E-business element had a guy who was the chief IT guru, a greybeard who did pretty much everything. He died.
Well, they didn't outsource PKI, they ran a Root CA. The Root CA was created and promptly taken offline. To the guy's house. Actually, the whole server wasn't taken - just the hard drive. The house was a pigpen, and that's being nice. They didn't know if he had stuck the drive in a safety deposit box, nothing.
To make an ugly story short, they pulled all the certs they used, and re-issued new ones, updated the CRL list to all their business partners, asked them to delete the imported cert. PITA.
The irony was, they didn't need to be doing PKI. They just had a few SSL web servers. Shoulda just bought em.
Donate my organs, Cremate my laptop. (Score:2, Interesting)
Whether or not you want your laptop cremated depends on your personal data, but planning ahead is definitely recommended.
--
Re:Case Study: Peter Francis & The Beadsite (Score:4, Interesting)
I've relied on Peter Francis' site (and his printed works) for years, and I was very much concerned when he died--and heartened that his friends maintained his body of work on the Web. I've noted the same thing when scientists or engineers of note have passed on. Their friends or the institutions to which they belonged have kept the legacy going.
How much better it would be for people with a legacy of that nature in any discipline if pre-planning could be done. Maybe it should become an adjunct to making a will.
Regards,
Anne
Diverse reactions (Score:3, Interesting)
But then I recalled last summer when my father had a heart attack and, due to a string of complications was going to have more than usual risky surgery. If all went well, then it would be considered a minor surgery, but if not... Sunday evening before the Monday morning surgery my family gathered with my alert yet sober dad and began to have "the talk." Eventually he began to tell us the financial arrangements he had made for our step mother and finally he told us his passwords and password methodology. Something about disclosing the initimate, closely held passwords made me realize he might really not make it.
After a few somber minutes my brother broke the silence and said that, strangely enough, he had developed a similar way of creating and remembering passwords as had my dad. I, wanting to try to keep things serious relunctantly gave out my methodology, too, which was coincidentally similar to both my dad and my brother's way. The laughter not only broke the tension, it strengthened our bond.
Everything turned out well; we are quite thankful.
I wonder if Dad changed his...never mind...
Re:It will take care of itself... (Score:1, Interesting)
Information Theoretic Death (Score:5, Interesting)
Your brain is information.
The degree of information retrieval from a frozen brain is dependent upon the sophistication of the information retrieval technology. Same as retrieving information from a shattered hard drive. It can be done, but you need some good equipment.
Cryonics DOES preserve information, but is it enough for revival?
Well, how much information is preserved depends not so much on the cryopreserative technology used today, but instead on how sophisticated is the information retrieval technology of the future.
But "the future" when it comes to reviving a frozen cryo, is NOT set. If the information retrieval technology at year N is not sufficient to revive, then wait K years.
So, I hope you see that the odds are quite possibly good that there will exist some year N + m*K years from today in which the information retrieval technology is sufficiently sophisticated.
So, in retrospect, destroying information LONGTERM is actually difficult.
For more information on Information Theoretic Death, see Ralph Merkle here [merkle.com] and here [merkle.com] and here [merkle.com].
Leave it online... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.espy.org/ [espy.org]
IIRC, his parents are keeping his webserver & stuff online for as long as they can.
Re:Find a porn erase buddy! Seriously....... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, seriously, this is an interesting problem to me. It can be generalized to "When I become incapacitated, how do I set certain pre-planned events in motion?" Maybe I die and I want my porn buddy to clean up. Maybe I get really sick (coma) and I want bills to be paid. Maybe I get amnesia while on a secret mission and I want my ex-CIA buddy to find me (and bring me a suitcase full of spy-toys, natch). Maybe I die and want my enemies smited from beyond the grave.
The traditional method for this situation is a will (including living wills). But they do not cover enough situations, take too long to activate, require certain legal events to have occurred (death certificate, etc.) and are "public" ("...and to my brother I leave my DVDs. Now, a message for my ex-CIA buddy: SMITE!"). The mylastemail.com service mentioned elsewhere suffers from these faults. I want a system that I can secretly maintain that has flexible targets. Maybe it will give access to a safety deposit box to a trusted friend (I have a safety deposit box fetish, just ask my friends). Maybe it will forward info on an enemy's shady business deals to the government. It has to be fast, too. Ideally it will detect my demise and set things in motion well before my death/illness becomes public knowledge.
I could ramble on for a while (I have spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about this). But I'll stop (for now). Any thoughts? Implementations? Cool things that you would like to see done after you die?
ESR's plans (Score:2, Interesting)
Store passwords with your will (Score:5, Interesting)
Ideally, I'd like to have a method for cleaning up certain things. There are probably files I wouldn't want others to see, in addition to files I *do* want them to see, but only after my death. Might be interesting to write a script that they would be told to execute, that would clean stuff up and print out my will. Of course, I'd have to put in protections to keep it from being run before my death....
I did some work on this a while back, dealing with splitting up passwords among N people such that any M people could recover the password (MN, of course). That way they all have to agree I'm dead, which prevents cheating.
You don't have to be dead... (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a hypothetical situation -- you keep all your finances (check register, bank balances, etc) in Quicken/M$FT Money/et al, as well as policy numbers, loan payment schedules, yada yada yada.
Your home directory is encrypted (via something like Mac OS X's FileVault) when stored, and decrypted only upon a successful login.
You're in a car wreck and are comatose for 6 months.
During that time, your car is repo'ed, your home is put up for sale due to lack of property tax payments (I think there are probably things to protect one from the mortgagor, but not from your friendly local gummint) -- you get the idea.
It's a good idea to have someone you trust (Fox Mulder notwithstanding) know how to get in and manage things in your absence.
If you're fortunate enough to have TWO people you trust (or almost trust), you might devise some sort of digital equivalent (this IS Slashdot, right?) of the old "2 halves of a dollar bill" key used in the movies. It would seem like a variant of the RSA scheme would work nicely. Maybe a large number that is the product of two (or as many trusted folk as you have) large primes could be the key to your digital castle...
Otherwise, recovering from a coma could be one of the most unpleasant surprises you'll ever have.
auto-erase (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:yeah, it is a kinda weird situation (Score:3, Interesting)
Everything it just as he left it. You have to wonder, if he had known he was going to die, would he have straightened up first?
beating depression (Score:4, Interesting)
What helped me a lot was to recongize certain negative thought patterns as "cognitive distortions". Once you recognize it, you can work at changing it - retraining your brain. Or, translated into Geek: "You must unlearn what you have learned."
This link describes the concept of cognitive distortions: http://depression.about.com/cs/psychotherapy/a/co
Personality simulation (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Store passwords with your will (Score:1, Interesting)
After a while your hwebsite-host will get pissed enough with your apparent lack of payment, to delete your account.
Problem solved.
Re:beating depression (Score:3, Interesting)
CBT helped me a great deal. Basically CBT says that feelings are caused by thoughts and thoughts are caused by belief. We have to trace back to our core beliefs if we want to understand what's happening to us.
For example, let's say I ask a woman out and she says "no." I ended up feeling sad, depressed, and lonely.
My feelings are "sad, depressed, and lonely." Feelings are always true and real, as I am really feeling lonely, and it true that I am lonely.
What thoughts triggered these feelings? Well, the thought that I'm alone and going to stay that way. Again, thoughts are always real, but not always true. It is very real that I am thinking that I'm alone and going to stay that way. However, it is not necessarily true that that I am alone AND going to stay that way.
Finally, what beliefs triggered those thoughts? Well, the belief that if one woman turns me down, it is indicative of the fact that all women will turn me down. Beliefs are often not real and / or not true. For example, my belief that if one woman turns me down it is indicative of the fact that all women will turn me down is definitely not true. It is also not necessarily real, as at my core I still have a faint glimmer of hope.
Once we recognize that we can begin to work on changing beliefs to something more real and true, which will cascade into more enjoyable / workable thoughts and feelings.
- Neil Wehneman
Dead Person's ICQ (Score:1, Interesting)
True enough (Score:3, Interesting)
I can look at my life and say yeh, I'm not happy, and there's lots of things that could change to make it better. Problem is that I've already been in that better place - shortly before it all turned to shit and I landed up here. What's to stop it happening again? Nothing. I've gotten through the worst of it - the out-of-control phase and the suicidal phase - and now I just don't give a shit. Being depressed is actually a choice now, because the alternative of getting better and later hitting that rock bottom again just isn't worth the risk to me. If it happens again, I know I'll top myself because it's a less painful option than 3 or 4 years of being fucked up.
BTW, one of the catch-22s is that "cognitive distortions" work both ways. Your shrink is messing with you in a good way rather than the bad way you may have been doing it to yourself. Same process is going on though, and likely niether are "reality". Still, if it works for you that's great.
That's nothing, look at the last line (Score:3, Interesting)
*Freaky!*
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:1, Interesting)
My girlfriend's uncle, who had spent his life collecting all manner of geekly goods, decided to blast off the top of his skull with a 9mm pistol. His poor wife didn't know what to make of the computers and parts, the radio tubes, cameras, guns, and so on. So it fell to said dead uncle's friends to sort out the cameras and the more valuable guns, leaving the radio parts and computers to the geeky boyfriend (me -- I did have my pick of some good firearms, too -- yeah, geeks-with-guns, ala Eric Raymond -- but could not, as apparently his buddies could not, bring myself to obtain the fine 9mm Beretta that said dead unc used to do the deed). I did the Good Boyfriend Bit and sorted the radio and computer parts by value, tossed what was trash, and eventually it was time to help with some family data on a few hard drives. No one in my girlfriend's family was computer savvy enough to know what to do, so I agreed to find where the important family data was stashed. Enroute to discovering this significant data I learned that said dead unc had a big appetite for 'Net pr0n (with tartar sauce) and the sizeable collection was weighted torward imagery that looked physically impossible and horrifically painful. I broached the tender subject with my relatively naive girlfriend: "Uhm... perhaps I should erase this stuff before we return the hard drives--?" She quickly agreed and made me promise to never tell anyone in her family about said dead unc's penchant for painful pr0n. (Whichof couse makes the tale perfect for
Morale of the story? Sigh... you never forget your first taste of really bad pr0n....
Hard to say goodbye... (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux Takes Care of This (Score:2, Interesting)
Matters more than you might think (Score:3, Interesting)
The new thing since the proliferation of computers and the Internet is that people suddenly have immaterial assets to be considered too, but their existence might well be unknown or their location unclear.
Then, proving credentials to get access to the data can be difficult:
For instance, just think how Internic handles domain transfers when your ISP disappeared or locked you out - they want confirmation from the same e-mail address used to register the domain, yet you cannot access that account right now.
what if the deceased's data is hosted in a foreign country, in an attempt to escape local laws forbidding that type of online content? Picture a case where you know for fact that the deceased scanned and stored important data, uploaded it to a foreign server, but left no trace of the password anywhere. how do you recover the data?
Add to this the fact that people might create e-mail or shell accounts on different hosts for different purposes: free software development, meeting sex partners, job, other hobbies... How do you keep track of them all, yourself? Can you positively say whether you still have an account on the Dead Hackers Society BBS and what the password might be? What about that free e-mail account that you use to correspond with your mistress to whom you had promised to give that old but cozzy summer place nobody else but you and her knows about?
This being said, I just got married and these are all things I have to worry about, as I update my last will... *yikes*
Re:Find a porn erase buddy! Seriously....... (Score:3, Interesting)
I love thinking about this; maybe I'll spend some dream time on it.
In the hollywood movies and TV, it's always someone very trusted who puts things into motion, like a butler, a sister, a friend who knows about your secret and sinister past.
If you're running Linux, you have tools like kalarm [kde.org], which can send text OR RUN COMMANDS at specified times. On login, you could timestamp an empty file with the command "touch". Every day or week or other, you could have kalarm run a script to check the stamp. If it's been a while since you've logged in, the script senda a warning e-mail about self-destruct. If, after another 2 days and 2 more warnings the file's timestamp is unchanged, self-destruct commences.
Of course, it would be cool if someone would write a script like this, call it SELF_DESTRUCT, and place it under the GPL. It's a fantastic way to piss off the greedy capitalist trolls on slashdot, and you would have many adoring fans.
What happens after you die? (Score:3, Interesting)
A friend of mine, my best friend actually, killed himself in 1999. We were able to guess the secret answer to get into his Yahoo account and see who he had contacted and let them know that he passed on. Once we had access to his Yahoo account, we got the password to his ICQ account from it. No clue in either accounts as to why he committed suicide.
Most of his stuff ended up in a rental locker, and a year ago his widow was going to take the stuff out and inventory it, so she called the rental locker to cancel the account. The next day the locker was cleaned out, everything was gone. He had written stories, RPG game adventures, computer programs, had a ton of books and videos, a lot of IP that he worked on. A goldmine of stuff, but it was all stolen the day his widow called to cancel the account.
A fraction of the stuff, Traveller, AD&D, books were given to me for safe keeping as we were still using them in role playing games. My best friend was the Referee and another friend took over and needed access to the books. That is all that is left of his legacy beides his widow and daughter and whatever family he had left (his mother died of cancer soon after he killed himself).
So basically theives took over the best parts of his life that was left over, and only a few trusted friends have what is left that was not stolen. No matter what, the theives cannot steal our memories of him. Rest in peace, my good friend.
Here is my plan (Score:3, Interesting)
2. In the event of a terminal illness over a longer time, I will burn a CD of the stuff I want them to have (will save them having to go through a bunch of extraneous files after my death).
I have a literary executor (Score:2, Interesting)
This discussion let me to think about also including my CVS repository of all my code. I'll think about this and probably do it.
Now that I think about it, having the password with my will introduces a single point of failure. I need to find a better way to deal with that.
documenting my life (Score:2, Interesting)
The two problems are a) who would take on this responsibility, and b) where do I put all this info so that it cannot be used until I *want* it to be used. I am talking to friends, family, lawyers, etc - but it would seem like this would not be an unusual situation.
One small component of this is making sure the appropriate person gets notified if something happens to me. I *thought* I remembered a software package or web site that operated as a "dead-man switch" - if you did not check in periodically, it would assume you were dead and take appreoriate actions - like delete pr0n, send email notification, etc. But I have not been able to find this. Any suggestions?
Re:yeah, it is a kinda weird situation (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think it's ironic. I think it's right on.