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Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

There are huge issues with current tech and death. Basically. If you die:

1) Your family (might) need your bank info, passwords, insurance policy information, asset lists. They are all doing this, while, their favorite tech guy... is dead.

2) Where are your docs? Kids want these. Journals (evernote), writings (dropbox), stories (jira), just anything. Old iphone photos, strange 3.5 disks, etc. As time goes these are deleted, lost or most of the time: never known about.

3) What about all the things you don't want found? Old contracts, xgirlfriend notes, company transcripts, etc. Welp, I hope you remembered to encrypt your disks, well, that would mess up 1) & 2). Whatever.

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There are huge issues with death in general, if you are not prepared. Many/Most older people are prepared, with wills, directives, and instructions on file with family.

If you are younger, without many assets, without children, those things are less important. But once you start a family, preparing for its continuity upon your demise is just one of those things you should be doing.

For me, it is pretty simple. Everything is jointly owned, and I have a "In case I get hit by a bus" document, which among other things) gives instructions on how to take control of all my domains and code, which bills are on my card. And it tells my wife to make her own decisions. I will be dead. I will not give a crap if my blog stays online. She might, so it is up to her.

In any case, I update that document once a year, or before I go under general anasthesia.

death in general, if you are not prepared

Sadly, most people aren't prepared for life either. There are so many people without proper health insurance, no backup plans for anything (career, immigration, children etc). So much of people's time and energy and money goes into this (they still don't get it right or even finish it) that "when I die" stuff takes a backseat.

You're overestimating the significance of material left behind after death. What'll happen is children or anyone left behind will harvest the photos folder of your laptop and then throw the computer to trash. It's extremely unlikely that they'll find the time to go through your digital documents otherwise, let alone figure out passwords or continue your life work. Life goes on, assets will be sold, money distributed, and so on.

I think that this is a good application for secret-sharing (a way to take a secret and split it into n pieces, of which k are required to reconstruct it).

One wouldn't necessarily want to split a secret amonst one's family (because families can feud), or even put the shares into the hands of people all belonging to one legal jurisdiction (because the odds of even a good government going evil within one's lifetime are uncomfortably high). But one could, say, pick three family members, three friends and three colleagues, distributed over the world, and then split the secret amongst the subgroups {family 1, friend 1, colleague 1}, {family 2, friend 2, colleague 2} & {family 3, friend 3, colleague 3} such that two members of each subgroup must agree to recreate the subgroup secret, and two subgroups must agree to share the actual secret. Assuming a reasonable amount of independence between the individuals, this should be okay.

In practice, this would probably have to involve sending each person an annual notice with his share, as well as detailed notes on how to recreate the appropriate secrets and information on the others who have received a share. And of course one would need to think hard about how difficult it would be for a second or third party to suborn the system (in the example above, all that's needed is for two family members and two friends in the same subgroups to live in the same oppressive legal jurisdiction: one subpoena later it's all over).

> 3) What about all the things you don't want found? Old contracts, xgirlfriend notes, company transcripts, etc. Welp, I hope you remembered to encrypt your disks, well, that would mess up 1) & 2). Whatever.

Smaller encrypted single-purpose filesystems (with seamless integration, like .zip files on Windows Explorer (or Mac Finder) or encrypted folders like EncFS. Then you don't have to choose an all-or-nothing approach.

The problem is that this requires people to be constantly pro-active about where they store things, which most people aren't or don't care about right now. "Well, I can always sort that stuff out tomorrow." or even something as simple as being in the middle of an e-mail conversation and usually waiting to archive/erase that kind of thing when you finish.

I feel the worst part is making sure to have redundancy for these things. I've lost so many pictures and chat-logs through the years from disk-failure. Backing it up somewhere else which is (or is not) encrypted offsite can make this even more bothersome, but it's often neccessary.

Also, encrypted storage adds a risk that if you ever forget your password or lose the key, your data is effectively gone.

Keys in private, non-bank safety deposit boxes paid for annually with cash.

This goes back to what 'sdrothrock wrote:

> The problem is that this requires people to be constantly pro-active about where they store things, which most people aren't or don't care about right now.

Also, the solution requires you to have enough free cash every year. Data usually can last over long periods of unemployment, and there's the temptation to think that "hell, still I have those keys on me, I can live without that safety deposit box for some time, until I have spare cash"...

> non-bank

Why? I would argue that a safety deposit box in a venue entirely owned by a bank would be the safest bet.

More off-grid, less failures. Private safety deposit box companies are excellent.

Banks aren't as discreet as private vault companies and it's not at all unlikely that a government entity would subpoena for your box contents.

Certainly a private vault company could be subpoenaed, as well, but for that to happen a prosecutorial or other undesirable entity would need to actually know you have a box there.

Set the box up, making as-few-as-humanly-possible trips to it, pay for it in cash for years in advance.

One caveat: I would use a bank vault for items like passports, documents, heirlooms, etc. Things that have no potentially-incriminating value or that government would have anyway (passports, DL copies, SS cards)

3) What about all the things you don't want found? Old contracts, xgirlfriend notes, company transcripts, etc. Welp, I hope you remembered to encrypt your disks, well, that would mess up 1) & 2). Whatever.

Well you're dead so how does that matter? :D

No need to make your family members suffer. People like kink, people might have done things they regretted. What good is it to hide it all your live for your and others' good and then have it out in the open when you are gone? It will only make the living sad/mad.

If I am not sharing something alive, I have no wish for that to be shared after I am dead.

Encrypting your disks will only keep people from reading them for a century or two. Technology from the future will be able to break today's encryption in a heartbeat, whether it's simple Moore's Law, quantum computing, cryptographic loopholes in today's algorithms, or something else entirely. So if historians from the future care about you, nothing you leave behind will be truly safe.

If you really want to mess with people from the future, do what Beale did, make up a bunch of bogus stuff, and throw it in with all your encrypted documents.

> Technology from the future will be able to break today's encryption in a heartbeat

I don't believe that's necessarily true. IIRC, certain algorithms would require computations involving every particle in the universe, operating for billions of years, to brute-force, provided that they are not actually broken. Will every current algorithm eventually be broken? Probably—but if not, they should be good.

Many of our current encryption algorithms can be broken by sufficiently powerful quantum computers [1]. We're still a while off from usable quantum computers, but they are coming, eventually.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

Symmetric key encryption is resistant to quantum computing, you just need to double the key size

Unless something drastically changes, this does not hold true for symmatric encryption.

When you die, your domain names expire soon or later, and your blog and personal sites disappears too. But do you want your blog to live after you passed ? and until when ? one century ? two ?

They live on in the Internet Archive. As long as people care about the Internet Archive, hopefully forever.

Unless whoever gets the domain name after you doesn't want to be on the archive. Then all the history will be deleted.

Indeed. And that totally sucks. Something needs to be done so that Internet Archive doesn't have to retroactively apply robots.txt or deletion requests (sans criminally illegal content).

If you care for something to be preserved, you preserve it and do not rely on someone else to do it for you, forever.

What if all the authors of culturally/historically significant works throughout history had thought like that?

>What if all the authors of culturally/historically significant works throughout history had thought like that?

Nothing much would have change, since it wasnt up to them whether their works surviced, it was up to their "fans".

In fact, if they had thought like that it would have helped, since they would have assisted this process (trying themselves to get their works preserved).

Besides, 99% of the internet is not culturally or historically significant except in the broadest sense (in which everything is, as an artifact of its era, etc..).

Yeah, the Internet Archive hasn't exactly been a stable repository for old stuff, really. Even without death, sites die: this is as true for archive.org as any other site on the web.

Coincidently, i've been thinking about creating a pet web project to solve #1 utilising PGP.

The general idea is that you (the user, manually or through a client) locally PGP encrypt the text with the public PGP keys of the friends or family whom you'd like to receive the text by e-mail. The encrypted text is then sent/uploaded to the webapp. If you don't report back after X amount of time, the web service sends the text by e-mail to the selected friends or family. The webapp would not have any private keys therefore no access to the unencrypted text.

Not sure if there's already a similar service.

One of the problems I could see here is that PGP is all but guaranteed to be irrelevant in 40+ years when most of the people who'd use such a service are currently expected to die. It'd certainly be helpful in the short term, though, which arguably has more merit.

True. Another problem is that people lose PGP keys and they also expire but i guess it's hard to find a one size fits all solution. In 40+ years, the secret info might not even be relevant anymore.

The same issues pretty much existed before $TECH.

Did they? Save for stuff in safe deposit boxes (I can't remember what happens to that when you die), everything was likely to be in your home somewhere, pretty trivially accessible unless you use a safe or secret compartments or something.

No the sheer disrespect shown by companies for their customers data and the fact that it is a lot easier to loose digital data than anything else have increased the problem.

This could end up being just another one of those dark ages in history where very little can be found since everything was digital and most of it was just deleted in an effort to reuse space or discarded by companies who went bankrupt or got bought out.

I don't buy the "dark ages" thing. Even if 99.99% of the digital data about you disappears, you'll still leave a much, much bigger footprint than even your recent ancestors did. I know a lot about my parents, a few bits and pieces about my grandparents, and nothing further back except a name and maybe a photo.

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