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.
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:5, Funny)
"Dad. Mom. I'm only gonna say this once. For the sake of your children, please encrypt your pr0n. We really don't wanna know."
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:Rest In Peace (Score:5, Funny)
That's what you think... sonny!
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:5, Funny)
Good thing I wasn't the one who had to go through his personal effects when he passed.
I just have to ask (Score:3, Funny)
Good thing I wasn't the one who had to go through his personal effects when he passed.
So, who did inherit his porn collection?
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they won't be. I have a cousin who's been doing estate law for ~40 years and I've helped him on some extremely difficult cases where clients did not leave their passwords. You're personal affects and papers are accessible, unless you take positive steps you're digital affects probably won't be.
A lot of folks may not want next of kin going through their hard drives, but there probably is stuff on there that an heir or executor will -need-. Give secure storage of these things and continuity of access real thought please.
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:3, Informative)
I use Secstore [dotgeek.org]
it's easy to use
to add a file to the encrypted file store
auth/secstore -p $filename
to retrieve it for editing/viewing/piping
ipso $filename
it also stores all my network passwords for ssh & pop3 & ftp access
it's a really neat bit of kit
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:4, Insightful)
For others replying here, why would you just assume that other people are so stupid that they don't know about boot disks? I mean, I know we're supposed to be arrogant because we're technical but isn't there -some- sort of limit to that? Most people (that I know) with estates who store private data on their FS' use encryption. Actually, not using encryption -would- be stupid IMHO and I assumed folks in a technical forum would be encrypting.
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the replies have been anonymous trolls, so I'll give you an actual answer with a name behind it.
I went through four years of clinical depression with suicidal intent. Eventually, you get to the point when all you really remember is pain, and you believe that all you ever will feel is more pain. You have difficulty getting up and out of bed, and if you're not showing up and interacting with people, your previous relationships get shot to hell.
If there's going to be no end to the torment, why not leave it behind?
You can contact me through my site if you have additional questions for a depression survivor. I'll close this with a poem I wrote in the midst of my depression that I think explains things a little more as well.
- Neil Wehneman
**********
Depression Kills
Do not let yourself be lulled into thinking that depression is simply a fancy way of saying that someone is "sad."
Mere sadness does not last for weeks or months or years.
Do not think that people with depression should just "snap out of it."
Don't you think that if we could we would?
And do not think that depression is simply a disease of the mind.
It literally destroys your immune system, depletes your energy, leaving only fatigue, and decimates your ties with friends and family.
Depression is not just an illness.
Depression kills.
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
Re:me too (Score:5, Insightful)
Generally there are two types of depression, although you rarely get one without aspects of the other. They also tend to feed off of each other.
The first is clinical depression, which means that chemicals are screwed up in your brain and you need medication. I was on so many different meds over the years until we finally found one that worked.
The second is situational depression, which basically means your life sucks. This can be manifested through physical or emotional abuse or so many other factors. Mine was more situational than chemical, but that's all relative. The chemical aspect alone would have been enough to take me out of life.
I refer to mine as "clinical depression" even though it was more situational just because that forces people to realize that there is a medical aspect to it.
My saying is that "medication gets you stable, counseling gets you fixed." If the meds that you are on aren't working and haven't been for several weeks, SWITCH. Effexor is what finally did it for me, but everyone is different.
Once you get some semblance of stability back, you have to get professional counseling. As my high school girlfriend's mother put it, "it took years for you to get that way, it's going to take years for you to get out." It's true, and you can't do it alone. Get help so you can talk through what has happened to you and get yourself sorted out.
Take care of yourself my friend.
- Neil Wehneman
which a great deal of mine was, and I simply refer to
Easy... (Score:5, Funny)
It will take care of itself... (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, I have a little fire safe that I keep important stuff in, like car titles, contracts and cd-rom backups of my computer files. Some of it is sentimental stuff like letters and writing. I imagine if someone decides it is worth publishing, it may live on significantly past my life time. Perhaps none of it will, but I'm not too worried about that, I'm happy that my "important data" lives on in the only place that matters, in the memories of my family and friends.
Basically, usefull and/or popular information has an indefinite life span because people will preserve, expand and share it. Call it the natural selection of information. We don't really need to do anything different to keep that going. Frankly, it's a good thing that useless and unimportant data dies, I'd hate to think that a future historian would be forced to search through petabytes of things like 100 year old Slashdot first-posts in order to find information about our recent war with Iraq.
Re:It will take care of itself... (Score:5, Funny)
maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:maybe (Score:5, Funny)
Re:maybe (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure is heavy though, over 100lbs. and it only fits 100 dvd's.
Fire safes- from a locksmith and firefighter (Score:5, Informative)
Document containers consist of two thin layers of steel, which have a hydrated compound stored between them; used to be plaster of Paris, or calcium sulfate hemihydrate (same as gypsum sheetrock). Upon heating, the hydrate gives up its water, flooding the inside of the container with water vapor. This serves two purposes. The first is that the heat of vaporization absorbs large amounts of heat, so the container heats up less rapidly. The second is that the water vapor displaces oxygen, making it less likely that documents will burn- unless, of course, the container fails. Remember- it's just two pieces of sheet steel. A fire safe is not necessarily a burglar-resistant safe, and most of the common safes on the market can be manipulated ("cracked") very easily by even a novice- they're not SUPPOSED to prevent theft. One needs to purchase a UL-rated burglar resistant container for that sort of thing. Safes can combine theft and fire resistance ratings; consult a security professional (like a SAVTA member) for the appropriate safe.
Also important to remember is the location: If a safe is on the 2nd or 3rd floor, once that floor burns through, the container will fall. If it cracks open- there goes your contents. So- put it in the basement. BUT- make sure you don't have heavy objects located above it (refrigerators, etc.), which will crack it open. Put the safe on blocks if you can so that the contents aren't soaked from the firefighters flooding the basement!
Media containers should follow the same general rules (be careful where you put it, etc.), but work on a different principle. Last I checked (it could have changed), media containers use wood as insulation. This keeps the contents at an acceptable temperature, provided everything works. Wood is a great insulator, and it burns relatively slowly unless it is divided in a manner than allows combustion.
None of this means that every fire-rated safe will survive. In fact, a review of areas swept by wildfires in California in... 1991, IIRC, showed that even home-made safes worked as well in some instances as UL-rated containers. However, the best containers were all positioned in the slab, or in some other large, non-combustible heat sink. In-floor safes fare well, although exceptions (such as where the dial melted and dripped into the money stored within, causing most of it to burn) were noted.
So- in short, look for the UL rating. No, the $50 toy safe at the discount store isn't the same as the $500 media vault from a locksmith, even if they ARE both rated. No, the people who sold you the $50 safe will know nothing about how it works, or how well it will protect your data, or how to open it and retrieve your property if your house *does* burn down. No, the $50 safe will not come with a professional who knows how to open your container if something DOES happen to go wrong with it. A professional SAVTA member will be able to help you with all of this, as well as sell you the appropriate container.
But, of course, if you want to try the $50 safe, go right ahead if it helps you sleep better. They have to meet the minimum standards from Underwriter's Labs (UL 72 for Class 125 and Class 150 containers). And it will depend upon where you live (across from a fire station in a Class 1 noncombustible structure, versus Uncle Marty's trailer home, 25 minutes from the nearest volunteer fire department), of course. But for GOD'S SAKE, don't assume that because the label says "FIRE SAFE," that they're all the same, or that they'll save your data no matter what.
Disclaimer: No, I'm not a SAVTA member, and I don't currently work as a locksmith or a safe/vault technician.
Re:It will take care of itself... (Score:5, Insightful)
A safety deposit box can useful for such things, or even just a friend. He keeps yours, you keep his. The meatspace version of posting it to an ftp site and letting everyone mirror it. Hey, maybe he's got some pr0n you haven't seen yet.
Keeping duplicates of such records in storage is also one of the traditional roles of the family lawyer, if anyone out there is still so quaint as to have one of those. If not maybe you should think about getting one, because he's going to be the guy who takes care of your will.
Papers, passwords (in a sealed envelope to be opened in the event of your death), etc go to your lawyer. You also designate an executor. That's the family member/friend you wish to see carry out the provisions of your will. The executor gets the envelope of passwords and instructions for what to do with them from the lawyer, and carries them out.
It's really all fairly standard stuff. The inclusion of computer files doesn't alter things at all really. People have been dying for years.
KFG
Re:It will take care of itself... (Score:3, Insightful)
There is one group that would care, and that are future historians trying to understand us. All the written letters, document, newspapers, records of various sorts are what the historians have to work with. Future historians may in some sense have less to work with due to problems preserving digital data.
Re:It will take care of itself... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It will take care of itself... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It will take care of itself... (Score:5, Funny)
Scotty will find a way.
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
Re:It will take care of itself... (Score:5, Informative)
The only reliable way to protect your data from fire is have offsite backups.
Re:It will take care of itself... (Score:4, Informative)
If the safe is just one of those standard melt-to-seal-with-little-water-vapor-beads fire safes, you'll be disappointed to see your CD backups molten and warped into uselessness after a fire. I'm pretty sure those safes are designed just for paper and other things that don't melt and need a fairly high temperature before burning.
The best policy is to keep backups somewhere else, such as another building separate from the house. If you have outbuildings that are not close to the house, that's one option. Bank boxes are another option for saps in the 'burbs. Just remember physical security, since pathetic teenagers just might walk away with your backups! In other words, put a lock on that barn door.
Re:It will take care of itself... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrongo. Example:
When I was eight years old, my mother died. Many years later, I began to wonder what kind of a person my mother was. Oh, I have memories of her, but they are the memories of a child. I know little about what made her a full-dimensional person. What her politics were, for example. Or what kind of music she liked, etc.
My mother was a prolific letter-writer. She was from a fairly poor family, and considered a long-distance phone call a luxury to be reserved for birthdays and holidays. Consequently, she wrote many letters to her mother, even up until her last days. Unfortunately, few of her letters survived her. My sisters and I eventually found ten or twenty of them, but I would give anything if her mother and my father had kept more of the letters.
Yes, nobody will probably care about your extensive pr0n collection, or that flamefest you got sucked into on comp.windows.lusers, but much of the data that you consider to unimportant now might become priceless after you're gone... at least to the people who care about you.
So save your e-mail (not the SPAM). Keep backups of your weblogs. Hell, make hardcopies and save them in a notebook. These things say more about you than you might realize, and somebody might someday be glad you kept them.
How about... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How about... (Score:3, Funny)
That should make her stop, or it may drive her insane.
Tim Maroney... (Score:3, Interesting)
To be released upon the event of my death.. (Score:3, Funny)
Aw, shucks.. You can have it now.
yeah, it is a kinda weird situation (Score:5, Interesting)
http://perazzoli.org/blog.php
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."
Simple (Score:5, Funny)
Sooner or later they will discover a vulnerability.
Re:Simple (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Simple (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Simple (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Simple (Score:5, Funny)
chimpo13 - annoyed
Re:Simple (Score:5, Funny)
<p>
Liar. Spaces aren't allowed in passwords.
<p>
Re:Simple (Score:3, Funny)
Dead man's handle (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Dead man's handle (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dead man's handle (Score:4, Informative)
This would also be useful if you had the goods on some Maffia bigwig or high government official and wanted to make sure you stay alive. Simply arrange for the data to be transmitted to 100 newspapers (CRON process?) every week at a pre-designated time, unless you explicity logged in and told the server you wre alive every week. If the wrong password is given, (hack) the data gets fired out immediately.
Alternatively, you could set up a CRON process to do a low level format on your hard drive if you failed to log in for xx days, to make sure nobody gets your sensitive data after you die.
Rumor has it J. Edgar Hoover maintained his position by keeping a file cabinet full of nasty stuff on powerful politicians in his office. He ordered his assistant to destroy all of his "personal" files in the cabinet upon his death, which she did. I wonder how much history could have been re-written if those files had been retained.
Re:Dead man's handle (Score:3, Insightful)
If one of the targets found out he'd told his assistant to destroy the blackmail material then that target would have a very powerful motive to have Hoover killed. If it wer
Find a porn erase buddy! Seriously....... (Score:5, Insightful)
Timothy Leary [leary.com] is another good example of dedicated fans who keep the site running after he died and an even better example is Peter McWilliams [mcwilliams.com] who put the entire text of all of his books online before he passed on. I recommend Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do. The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Country [mcwilliams.com].
Frankly as far as data and death are concerned most of you
Re:Find a porn erase buddy! Seriously....... (Score:4, Funny)
Really? In the course of administering her father's estate, she's broken her pelvis or torn her gluteals? Wow. That's dedication.
A definition (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Re:Find a porn erase buddy! Seriously....... (Score:3, Informative)
Wills are great (Score:5, Insightful)
Always be prepared (Score:5, 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)
Re:Service related to this (Score:4, Funny)
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!!!!
Re:software (Score:3, Informative)
Re:software (Score:4, Funny)
Heck thats real easy on Slashdot. I am going to write a script that posts the following posts randomly in various discussions:
1. Cowboy Neal jokes
2. In Soviet Russia jokes
3. 1-2-3-profit jokes
My karma will keep improving (even after I am dead!). And with my amazing Karma I will be reborn as Neo in my next life.
Script (Score:4, Funny)
My solution (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My solution (Score:5, Funny)
You know.. I just had this really weird vision of a medical examiner removing a glass vial from your windpipe.
"Cause of death? He choked on his passwords.."
Da Vinci Code (Score:3, Informative)
For those that don't know what I'm talking about, Da Vinci Code is a book by Dan Brown that has been in the news quite a bit since it hit the market a couple of year ago because of it's questioning the Christian religion. The book is a murder mystery (thriller?) and the way to solve it is to follow a fairly cryptic path of riddles and clues. The guy that dies (this is the first thing you read in the book) is the curator for the Louvre (sp) and he died in a very weird way (which is where the clues start pouring in)
Sorry, gotta do it (Score:3, Funny)
- RustyTaco
Easy (Score:3, Funny)
Not my data, but work's... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't delude myself into thinking that someone cares about getting into my personal data, but I have another envelope in a safe at home, and the combination is left with my lawyer with instructions to give it to my beneficiary.
-buf
Not just death... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
The Great Modem in the Sky (Score:3, Funny)
The answer is quite clear (Score:3, Funny)
Adopt a favored staff member.
Post-mortem involuntary brain transplants (IANAL, but this could be deemed illegal in your jurisdiction. One of the places where that fabulous wealth will help to smooth things over.)
Use your new body as the plaything that it is.
Repeat after it is worn and haggard.
Will (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone over 18 should have one, not only does it protect what you own, you can reach out and exact revenge upon people after your death with a Will.
Someone always mean to you? Will them a Nickel as a fuck you. Someone who betrayed me is getting a "bright shiny quarter" from me because "that's all they are worth." Have a friend with questionable musical tastes? Will them some CDs. I've got a buddy who is getting my classic rock collection so he "listens to something else".
Have a beer, and dictate your will to someone, sign it and be protected. In many states if you kick without one, the State gets all your stuff.
My arrangements... (Score:3, Informative)
The will contains a person nominated to take ownership of my machines and conclude my online affairs, including notifying interested parties and posting a message on my website [gerv.net].
So don't worry guys, if the hit succeeds, you'll find out fairly quick
Gerv
How soon they forget (Score:4, Informative)
sign copylefts to FSF (Score:3, Insightful)
Put them in your will (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't put them in your will. (Score:5, Informative)
Second, most states require that original wills be lodged with the court within a certain amount of time after your date of death. Your will would then be accessable to the public (for example, you can buy a certified copy of George Washington's will, if you want one).
Third if you're paranoid, telling the lawyer your passwords and have them kept for safekeeping by some other means would result in a situation where the lawyer's staff would probably have access to your passwords, even while you're still alive.
What I think we have here is a business opportunity. A company can maintain a completely off-line registry of passwords in envelopes that aren't even opened by the company that are turned over only after your executor delivers your death certificate to the company. I'm operating under the assumption that any on-line registry of passwords is simply insane and cannot be truly secure under any circumstances.
Of course, this company already exists: It's your bank. Just write down your passwords, put them in sealed envelopes, and put the envelopes in a bank safe deposit box. If the box is titled solely in your name, no one would have access to it except for your conservator (if you get put into a conservatorship), your agent under a power of attorney, or your executor/trustee after your death.
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...
Death Certificate (Score:5, Informative)
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
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.
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: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
My Last Will and Testament (Score:3)
just try and get my passwords, bitches.
My father's data (Score:3, Insightful)
he might have had some information stored on his Palm, but the battery died and everything was lost before i even thought to check it. That still irks me.
It is weird whenever i stumble upon an archived forum post made by him. It's like he's still alive, but nowhere near me physically. That's a little piece of his mind, words said and recorded. The same goes for his email. When I was making sure to tie up loose ends, i was reading mails he had sent and recieved just a few days earlier, when he was in seemingly perfect health.
Data, especially communication, is much like a photograph. Only instead of archiving some physical thing or event, it's a snapshot of someone's brain or personality.
what happens to my data when I die? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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...
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.
It's ok (Score:3, Funny)
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)
Not a bad idea to let someone else in (Score:5, Insightful)
Trust transcends death (Score:4, Insightful)
Bigger Picture: Human History and Civilization (Score:4, Insightful)
All that is good and all, but there is more than that. Think about your accounting records for example (Quicken, GnuCash,
That is the stuff on your computer. What about the stuff you put on the net in one form or another? For example that blog you setup? Or that web site?
Once you die, the PC eventually becomes obsolete or unusable. Chances are, your spouse of kids are not interested in what is the computer, and it is gone. Your web hosting account will probably be terminated due to non-payment.
Before archeology, our only sources of data on past civilizations was from historians. These were often porfessional people writing for posterity, and had some bias or other.
After archeology came into play in the 19th century, our knowledge of past civilization had a quantum leap, after we found fragments of daily life from average people (like you and me and him). Whether it was Greek ostraca, or baked clay tablets with list of goods, or pottery shards with writing practice in hieroglyphs.
Which brings me to the point of this post: the bigger picture, not individuals, or families, but societies and civilizations.
All this meta data about humanity in the last 2 decades of the 20th century, and the 21st century is on perishable and fragile media. It is even volatile (web hosting account?)
How would people several centuries from now view this entire civilization? How would they guage the reaction to say Sept 11, or invasion of Iraq? Would they see the US population as pro or anti war, or divided evenly? How would Bin Laden and Bush be assessed? Blair? Aznar? How would they get a glimpse into people's daily life.
Remember that as things are happening, it is easy to think that the information you gather on the event/person/concept are always clear and available. However, if you give it a decade or two, you yourself will not remember much details. How about people from a different culture/mindset/civilization/society? What would they think and how would they perceive you from the little they manage to recover?
The only hope here is the wayback machine at http://www.archive.org But will it endure? Is it enough?
Hard to say goodbye... (Score:4, Interesting)
With apologies to Mr. Cobaine (Score:5, Funny)
They don't go to heaven where the angels fly.
They go to a folder of
Won't see em again 'till 2038.
Re:With apologies to Mr. Cobaine (Score:5, Informative)
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].