Dead Programmers Aren't Much Fun

I didn't want to trust an online service for sharing credentials to these types of assets, so I created an open source program to split up secrets securely: <a href="http://www.moserware.com/2011/11/life-death-and-splitting-secrets.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.moserware.com/2011/11/life-death-and-splitting-se...</a><p>It's probably over-engineered, but the alternatives seemed not secure enough to feel comfortable using.

<i>If you're a programmer it's certainly possible you might have some pre-canned scripts to run -- perhaps telling nephew Susie she should have a great birthday and life once she turns 18. Maybe you have something to detect jokes your Uncle tells and add in a "lol" in a comment. Aside from being weird, is that socially acceptable? Should relatives help you do this?</i><p>This is the paragraph of the article that I found the most interesting from a sociological point of view (the rest has been covered many times in the past, and as other commenters have pointed out there are several services who deal with it). I wrote a bit more about it a while ago, as I think that this will become something potentially very real in the next few decades:<p><a href="http://gardaud.posterous.com/digital-ghosts" rel="nofollow">http://gardaud.posterous.com/digital-ghosts</a>

I was thinking about a related issue yesterday: In 100 years, which <i>free</i> web services, where I can post content, will still be around, with high probability?<p>Wikipedia is one, but most of my edits will probably be buried by then. My Wikimedia user profile page will still be up, maybe.<p>Maybe the Internet Archive (archive.org).<p>Maybe the arXiv (arxiv.org), though it may be renamed or subsumed by then.<p>What else?<p>Maybe public libraries could offer some kind of digital archival service for people in the area they serve?

I find it strangely unsettling that if I die, my Minecraft clan will never know what happened to me. I'll just vanish one day. They will spend some time trying to contact me but probably won't make a connection with anybody who can tell them what happened. And nobody who is sure to know about my death would know to contact them.

All of our digital ephemera (photos, blog posts, emails, reviews, tweets, code, and accounts) and so forth can theoretically last forever. In reality, disk drives and servers can die, domain registrations will expire, data formats will become outdated, and more.<p>Even if you have the bits and you can read them, you may be faced with a excavation job. Who has time to dig through someone else's email? Are we generating more data than we can process or appreciate? I just checked my family camera archive -- 279 GB, 135,042 files. When does this legacy turns in to a liability?<p>At some point, long-running sites will have to start making some interesting and difficult decisions. They can start to purge the seemingly dead members, they can have a way to flag a member as alive or dead, and they'll have to report their membership as 10 million live and active users, 20 million dead [and presumably inactive] users.

To make it right we, human beings, should be closer to one another. He is right about too complicated digital assets structure. And probably even few evenings will be not enough to explain all of it. I believe this communication should happen always, not only during last days... in ideal world.<p>Now, we are not in ideal world and probably never will be. Children often hate what parents love, significant others do not want to hear what their other part up to. This complicates things even more :)<p>I do not think anything really changes with digital age, same old issues in new light - that's it. Love your parents, encourage your children, genuinely ask what bothers your spouse at work.

The answer isn't adding a layer of complexity, your heirs don't want to deal with your Github account in all likelihood. The author's uncle probably cleaned out his garage before he invited everyone down. Doing the same digitally, should begin much earlier.<p>Donald Knuth probably can be credited for figuring out how to with this issue first.<p>Having done so is consistent with his place in the pantheon of programmers.<p><a href="http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html" rel="nofollow">http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html</a>

This got me wondering about how I could provide my passwords to people if something were to happen to me. Not even so much for Github or the like but for my online banking, credit cards, etc so it would be easier to wind down those affairs. I have online billing set up for those so it's not even like you could wait for the statements to come in the mail and settle them that way.<p>I can always just tell my wife my passwords, but what if something happens to the both of us?<p>I was almost tempted to start a document that would keep all that stuff, and share it in Dropbox with a few trusted people. It would be encrypted; I would keep the public key on my computer so I could continue to update it. The private key would be on a CD in a safe deposit box with instructions that those people could access it if I am incapacitated.<p>Sounds too complicated, though; that's why I haven't ever done it.

Society overall and human mind in particular have a great tool that handles that situation: forgetting.<p>Stuff that is not in use is gradually getting forgotten. So if you do not update your project (because you abandoned it or because you are dead), then the project is getting useless and is gradually forgotten.<p>Yes, you can put some effort into maintaining your digital project after your death, but it worth the overhead only in a very rare cases. Most of the time it's better to spend the effort on creating new project, than on maintaining someone else's digital project.

My logins are all saved in Chrome - going through those would be a way a family member could recover 99% of my digital footprint.

For me, the most important thing is to leave info on any sites/accounts that make me money.<p>Anything after that, social networks, blogs.. I could care less about. I won't be worrying about that after I die.

Is there a business opportunity here? Find widows of deceased programmers and offer a lump sum for the rights to all digital works?

Set-up a one time password for your email and put it in your will. Then let your family decide what to do, or not do.

That's exactly what <a href="http://www.deadmansswitch.net" rel="nofollow">http://www.deadmansswitch.net</a> is for.