Your Digital Inheritance? 370
eldavojohn writes "I wrote a journal entry musing on the idea of passing on accounts and digitally stored information from generation to generation. Has anyone done this or inherited anything? Does anyone else plan to do this? Is there a slip of paper in your deposit box at the bank with websites, account names and passwords?"
Sounds like a movie plot. (Score:5, Interesting)
Generation without a past (Score:5, Interesting)
Kind of.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly, he still about 50-100 spam emails per day.
Hmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
My music is the only non software thing that I have paid for, file wise, on my computer.
But truth is, I sincerily hope all my software is obsolete by the time I die!
Anyone remember the case of the guy who died in Iraq, and his parents wanted his Yahoo password to see what was in there for sentimentality? I believe Yahoo ended up having to give the password to his parents...
When I was deployed however, my wife and I sent some emails that I definately wouldn't want my parents seeing, so I think this guys p-word should have stayed private....
In case of my death... (Score:5, Interesting)
I also have plans of sending out a "dead man's switch" email.
The worst things I have seen are the web pages of the recently departed. There are static pages out there that only the owners can change due to privacy and passwords.
I think this kind of thing is neglected... (Score:1, Interesting)
A while back this very issue surfaced where a US soldier was killed in Iraq. Yahoo refused his family access to his account and the clock started ticking for account deletion. I don't know what became of the problem, but it does highlight the difference between a locked safety deposit box which one receives when one's grandfather snuffs it and the current digital equivalent. I very much doubt the soldier would have minded his family reading over his final few letters if he was no longer around.
I think there should be an "opt out" scheme whereby if one dies, by default, one's relatives can send in proof of the death and be granted access to accounts (email and otherwise). If one specifically decides otherwise the account could be deleted as per normal.
Most users of the net are young and therefore haven't gotten around to this type of thinking.
Longevity (Score:3, Interesting)
The NY Times actually had a story about this (Score:1, Interesting)
That story prompted my wife and I to write down all of our user names and passwords and store them in our safe.
Family domain name (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
more important than some would think... (Score:3, Interesting)
More and more I see the reality that family websites, and other hosting/presences become heirlooms after time. My in-laws already like that my wife and I put some photos up on a website for them to be able to get to, I can see that expanding. Eventually the family website might be the magical thing that is passed down from matriarch to matriarch within a family the way the photo albums are now. Someday my son or daughter may be maintaining the old site and see blogs I posted and get all misty eyed like I do about the stopwatch my grandfather left to me.
Now my porn? Well that I will be encrypting.. for all the reasons mentioned above.
porn! (Score:5, Interesting)
"And now, as expressed in his will, all the porn on Dale's computer will be shown to the mourners."
Now that's a way to go!
If I ever work up the guts I might put something like this in the will.
got the idea from this comic [alessonislearned.com]
(which I hereby shamelessly plug, because they deserve to be slashdotted)
Re:My Digital Legacy (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably not to my family (Score:3, Interesting)
I own a couple of domains, one is celardore based, and the other is my IRL name. It would be cool to leave some money behind - say enough for domain registration of my IRL name for 100 years, and then have the URL on my tombstone. After it runs out? I won't care.
Re:Kind of.... (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO, it's better to walk away from death than to wallow in it.
Online Communities (Score:3, Interesting)
This actually happened with one moderator at one of the forums I frequent [livingwithstyle.com], She passed away suddenly and someone in her family notified the admins on the site. We got a huge collection together and sent a whole bunch of money to her family.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a real issue in the news (Score:1, Interesting)
My Life Bits (Score:2, Interesting)
Check out the My Life Bits [microsoft.com] project.
From the description: "MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort."
Too bad it doesn't seem to be publicly available at all, let alone for Mac OS X or Linux.
Re:Kind of.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd rather my digital data not be found... (Score:1, Interesting)
Ick so low tech and no fun... (Score:4, Interesting)
The fun is that there are 3 more caches with only Lattitude and longitude for the next cache....
I so love screwing with people 50 years from now.
Re:Go ahead, punch me (Score:5, Interesting)
I compose and record music. I struggle with certain kinds of DRM and copy protection, because I would seriously like to be able to put my tools and my work in a time capsule and have it be usable to future generations.
I understand that digital media can be volatile. Plastics evaporate. Magnetic bits realign. Etc. I can handle that, because that makes *me* responsible for the media.
What I *cannot* handle, is any form of crypto that "protects" my work, or "protects" the software needed to reproduce my work. If it's tied to a certain piece of hardware, if it needs to call home, or if it prevents me from making a copy, it is completely unacceptable to me. I take it as far as considering it to be an abridgement of my own rights if the tools and media are not open to me, particularly if they are closed through hard crypto.
I started a Masters Thesis on the work of Bach (I'm a Music Theory major). One thing that fascinated me was the amount of detailed understanding that we can derive from Bach's manuscripts, both the ones he created himself and those that were copywritten. For example we're able to deduce whether Bach had a particular composition complete in his head before he sat down to compose, or whether he sketched out a framework and filled it in over a period of time. We have a pretty good sample, and he had different processes for different kinds of musical ideas. It's even possible to make deductions based on the way he started drawing the staves. Open to debate, to say the least, but regardless of where you stand on the controversy, it is very fascinating to have some visualization into the thought processes of a composer, particularly, Bach.
It's unlikely and ironic that anyone 500 years from now will be able to look with the same level of detail at the writing processes of our contemporaries. It's not even clear that our media will *last* that long, even most contemporary paper and ink self-destructs. When you add DRM to the equation, you introduce yet another risk: That mathematics will not happen to have advanced to a point where current cryptosystems are rendered ineffective. Imagine a future archaeologist needing to break a 1024 bit public key system... I'm not the sort of optimist that believes future generations will know how to do such things in their head by third grade...
rant off.
Re:So what's the value of a 3-digit /. UID? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why bother? (Score:2, Interesting)
If it's information, hard copy it and put it with the will.
If it's the family photo JPG archive, burn a DVD (or get prints) and put it with the will. (or in a box for Christmas!)
If it's my bank account, forget on-line access. The trustee's gonna be doing a lot of paperwork anyway...
I just don't see anything online that I'd pass on to my son that can't be stored in a long-term physical format.
Re:The mind reels (Score:4, Interesting)
I do think it would be a neat idea, though, if we had something like the Library of Congress for computing. Or at least data storage. Manufacturers, send in two units of your storage device, and one set of associated signal-processing equipment which produces a standard output. Keep them in some big warehouse somewhere. Maintainance would be a bit of a problem, I suppose (I'm thinking of some old open-reel decks I've seen where the rubber parts have slowly "melted" into puddles in the bottom of the cases). Oh, well -- you have to admit that would be a cool facility to visit, though.
Just happened to me. (Score:2, Interesting)
The only password that gave me fits was her churches financials which she kept on her computer. Of course the congregation wanted their giveing reports for last year. That one was fun.
I used her address book to notify some of her most frequest E-Mailing buddies of her passing and I still check her E-Mail on a regular basis to see if there and any more genealogical contacts that come through.
Even though my mother was far less computer literate than the typical slashdotter...it was amazing how much she had in the on-line world. Had I not known her passwords, much would have been lost or unknown.
Learning from this, I am planning on making sure that I can pass on my locked information to the appropriate people.
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Not the strongest of passwords, but it was mainly to keep my college roommates at the time from using it.
Re:A current topic for me (Score:3, Interesting)
UID 56 bought on ebay... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118075&cid=99