Dead Programmers Aren't Much Fun
whattofix.com
whattofix.com
It's probably over-engineered, but the alternatives seemed not secure enough to feel comfortable using.
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:
If you think that this is farfetched, it's not - it's basically like http://iwl.me , but in reverse. The catch is that you need a lot of easily classified textual data about the person. But in the Twitter age, we do have that kind of information - or soon will.
Gracious Eloise[1] is a really cool idea, though it's going to create a nightmarish situation for forensics experts. Imagine if you combined the two - you could simulate what a person might say, and you could simulate their actual handwriting for it.
Wikipedia is one, but most of my edits will probably be buried by then. My Wikimedia user profile page will still be up, maybe.
Maybe the Internet Archive (archive.org).
Maybe the arXiv (arxiv.org), though it may be renamed or subsumed by then.
What else?
Maybe public libraries could offer some kind of digital archival service for people in the area they serve?
That seems to be the most likely scenario.
Proof: Hop into your time-machine and try to explain the internet to someone from 100 years ago.
Remember, the first computer (Z1) was invented only 76 years ago. The first commercial TV-sets became available 92 years ago. Our technology is evolving at a mind-bending pace.
I wouldn't be surprised if Star Trek style voice input was the norm by the time I bite the dust. I wonder if my grand-kids will still use keyboards or consider them a relic...
Second counterexample: Edison made his first big move redesigning stock tickers. I'm pretty sure Edison could grok the Internet.
ESR has a continuity page for the purpose of handing his projects over when he goes to California http://www.catb.org/~esr/continuity.html.
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?
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.
You can now listen to the earliest recorded audio[1] (which was never heard or playable in its own time), read many of Isaac Newton's original manuscripts[2] (with plans to triple the archive this year), and google ["yeeees" guy] to watch a clip of Frank Nelson[3].
You don't have to excavate at all; you just have to make it searchable so that someday, someone will run across it. This is what we have with just text search. Now add in PhotoSynth (the original, Flickr-driven version[4] with every photo ever, not the watered-down panorama app), automatic audio transcription, content-aware image search, "hum that tune" (Shazam, SoundHound, etc.). Within a decade, we'll have "imagine that video and search for it".
"Movage" becomes less of a problem because while it's not worth it for you to individually convert various old files on your hard drive, Google has no problem re-encoding their entire library to add HTML5 codecs: Write the script once and wait a few years for it to finish. It's already in some master, readable format, so they don't have the "ten versions of Word .DOCs" problem (or if they do, they hide it very well).
If anything, we're entering an age where nothing goes out of print, and there are no lost films. Ever. Yes, we have to fight some copyright battles, but the outcome is inevitable; in 50 years, all laws will be written by people who grew up with BitTorrent, not the DuMont network.
Someone coined a great term for this new age of digital plenty, but I forgot it. In ten years, I'll be able to Google that thought and tell you what it was.
[1] http://gizmodo.com/372994/earliest-audio-recording-resurrect...
[2] http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1
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 :)
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.
Donald Knuth probably can be credited for figuring out how to with this issue first.
Having done so is consistent with his place in the pantheon of programmers.
I can always just tell my wife my passwords, but what if something happens to the both of us?
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.
Sounds too complicated, though; that's why I haven't ever done it.
Reminds me again that I still have to print it out and store it somewhere safe...
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.
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.
Anything after that, social networks, blogs.. I could care less about. I won't be worrying about that after I die.
Also, hate to nitpick, but the phrase is "I couldn't care less," meaning your level of care is already at the minimum.
edit: bazinga!
As a web service?!
I'd love to see that as a free software daemon, or cronjob, which I can run on one of my website's servers.
However, storing very sensitive information at a central place - a place which aims to collect sensitive information from many other people? Well, that's an invitation to abuse! How could I ever trust my most sensitive data to such a system?
But assume they would hand encryption over to their users. Then, their service would become pretty pointless, as they would be nothing more than yet another data storage service.
Either way, I don't see any sense in that service, except as a very well-desinged satire on the current everything-as-a-webservice hype.