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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
> people often say similar things when it comes to art and literature, and even film and music. But those mediums have the kind of longevity that just isn’t afforded to modern digital apps.
This line stood out to me the most. Along with payment issues, one of the larger issues is bitrot. What if Windows phones gets a 99% market share next year? That's 99% of users who will never be able to play Hogarth's game because it was never ported. Even if we put aside proactive adaption, there's also an issue of the code stagnating in relation to its environment. Entire architectures might change such as Apple's move from PowerPC to Intel, or requirements might get tighter like sandboxing in the app store or the recent SPI mechanism that protects system files. Sure you might have emulators but that mostly relegates the software for later generations with more powerful hardware; to be played with nostalgia rather than in the moment.
I don't know what the solution is, but we definitely need to do something to preserve these kinds of things for the future, like how the Internet Archive is breathing new life into MS-DOS games using in-browser emulation. [0] For one thing we need to preserve the binaries of games like these in case they do go down, and related to that, the specific software versions they ran on. (I'm contradicting myself here because these are the only non-radical approaches I see right now as opposed to something like a reserve for source code to be released when it enters the public domain).
We already had a lot of architectural transitions throughout the computer history (a very small part of which I witnessed) and we could emulate nearly all of the deprecated architectures quite well. I am optimistic that it can be repeated.
On a more wider subject, I always wonder what happens to the developers just simply disappeared.
Phone apps, browser add-ons, you may only notice something happens when it stopped working.
Then you go to the forum, you go to the blog, there may be some rumors. There would be some people trying to pick up and carry on. But, sometimes, no one knows what really happens.
No emails has been responded from that weird email address ever since, no activities from that account.
Finally, you may go to tweak that apps you loved so much yourself. Or when you are lazy, you will try to find an alternative and accept it. But the question is still hanging in your head.
If you want your stuff to live on, there is an easy fix. You can set up your will so some or all of your stuff will be uploaded to a public place, such as GitHub or whatever. Or you can ask a friend to go through your digital possessions and use their own judgement regarding what to do with it.
Simply doing nothing and expecting app stores to come up with something like memorialized accounts is not going to work. The "best" they can do is delete your apps faster when notice of your death comes in.
If you're writing a will anyway, why not just include a clause about the data on your hard drives? Arguably, including a "data will" is probably more important to your legacy than the boring minutiae of how to split up your bank account.
This becomes so much more apparent when you work for an app startup (or downloadable console game publisher) that shuts down. The games I put hundreds of hours into while working for those companies have disappeared from their corresponding downloadable stores after only two years.
I still have copies of them on my devices and on my computer, and there's still a few copies floating around in torrent-land, and there's still a few videos and a couple reviews out there, but for the most part it's already difficult to see any evidence that those games ever existed.
In contrast, the Flash games I made on my own you can still access from about 2000 websites, including my own and Newgrounds, over a full decade later. Although even that is going to be a problem soon now that Flash is on its way out.
How the hell can a game developer keep up with this? I decided I can't, and coincidentally I got into board game design anyway, so now I spend more of my time working on board game designs. If those get published, then there will be many hard copies out there, and if they're popular enough, either myself or another company will develop a video game version of them, so they can exist in both mediums.
And you don't need to keep up with the latest tech to make sure your board games survive for decades, even hundreds of years. For me, this satisfies my preservation itch a lot more than the current state of digital preservation, which seems in terrible condition for modern games.
Hopefully the retro game emulation scene can keep up with the demands of it all. I'm thankful they allow me to play SNES games that would cost me $100+ to get a physical copy today, a physical copy that is not guaranteed to work on my machine (I bought a few SNES cartridges that didn't work recently).
He wasn't a real world friend, but we'd spoken via email a few times and I was in love with the game he'd written. He had really big plans for it, but sadly it died with him, and doesn't seem to be playable now without digging out an old browser and versions of java.
This was the days before github - I can only imagine that today this project and his others could have lived on in some way.
I would love to see a similar proposition with proprietary products run by companies.
If you run an infrastructure style product, there should be a living will involve where the product will become open source upon the bankruptcy or shutdown style sale of the company.
For example, FoundationDB was bought by apple and the product was shuttered. Under a living will, the product would become open source, as it is no longer developed by the company.
I realise this may lead to a lower selling price, all things being equal, however people/companies are also more likely to trust you when you are small, as they have a greater chance of survival should you fail.
My personal feeling is that most of these products should be open source from the get go, and it will probably have to be this way going forward, however this is a reasonable middle ground.
"For example, FoundationDB was bought by apple and the product was shuttered. Under a living will, the product would become open source, as it is no longer developed by the company."
Would it? I assume the tech is still being developed. It's just that the continuing development is not offered as a product.
Further, once someone buys the company, don't they gain control over that company's assets? So if they no longer want to offer a product for sale, why should they?
The idea expressed in the title is a kind of hell. Think how hard it would be for all of us if we were obligated to maintain every app past the lifetime of its creators.
Software dies. Maybe there will be some OS code that runs for a hundred years. But I think every application is going to die that doesn't have some cult like group of fans who maintain it, probably mostly for sentimental reasons.
well the article identified but failed to address both of the core issues: copyright and who pays for it.
but most importantly failed to mention or aknowledge this https://archive.org/details/internetarcade which is doing exactly what he vouches for, preserving memory (especially relevant since he's talking about a game)
[+] [-] ransom1538|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] codingdave|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] QSIITurbo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeveb|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] pyre|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Kenji|10 years ago|reply
Well you're dead so how does that matter? :D
[+] [-] rimantas|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dheera|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lugus35|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zemanel|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] relet|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cooper12|10 years ago|reply
This line stood out to me the most. Along with payment issues, one of the larger issues is bitrot. What if Windows phones gets a 99% market share next year? That's 99% of users who will never be able to play Hogarth's game because it was never ported. Even if we put aside proactive adaption, there's also an issue of the code stagnating in relation to its environment. Entire architectures might change such as Apple's move from PowerPC to Intel, or requirements might get tighter like sandboxing in the app store or the recent SPI mechanism that protects system files. Sure you might have emulators but that mostly relegates the software for later generations with more powerful hardware; to be played with nostalgia rather than in the moment.
I don't know what the solution is, but we definitely need to do something to preserve these kinds of things for the future, like how the Internet Archive is breathing new life into MS-DOS games using in-browser emulation. [0] For one thing we need to preserve the binaries of games like these in case they do go down, and related to that, the specific software versions they ran on. (I'm contradicting myself here because these are the only non-radical approaches I see right now as opposed to something like a reserve for source code to be released when it enters the public domain).
[0]: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games
[+] [-] egeozcan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steve371|10 years ago|reply
Phone apps, browser add-ons, you may only notice something happens when it stopped working.
Then you go to the forum, you go to the blog, there may be some rumors. There would be some people trying to pick up and carry on. But, sometimes, no one knows what really happens.
No emails has been responded from that weird email address ever since, no activities from that account.
Finally, you may go to tweak that apps you loved so much yourself. Or when you are lazy, you will try to find an alternative and accept it. But the question is still hanging in your head.
[+] [-] Udo|10 years ago|reply
Simply doing nothing and expecting app stores to come up with something like memorialized accounts is not going to work. The "best" they can do is delete your apps faster when notice of your death comes in.
If you're writing a will anyway, why not just include a clause about the data on your hard drives? Arguably, including a "data will" is probably more important to your legacy than the boring minutiae of how to split up your bank account.
[+] [-] cableshaft|10 years ago|reply
I still have copies of them on my devices and on my computer, and there's still a few copies floating around in torrent-land, and there's still a few videos and a couple reviews out there, but for the most part it's already difficult to see any evidence that those games ever existed.
In contrast, the Flash games I made on my own you can still access from about 2000 websites, including my own and Newgrounds, over a full decade later. Although even that is going to be a problem soon now that Flash is on its way out.
How the hell can a game developer keep up with this? I decided I can't, and coincidentally I got into board game design anyway, so now I spend more of my time working on board game designs. If those get published, then there will be many hard copies out there, and if they're popular enough, either myself or another company will develop a video game version of them, so they can exist in both mediums.
And you don't need to keep up with the latest tech to make sure your board games survive for decades, even hundreds of years. For me, this satisfies my preservation itch a lot more than the current state of digital preservation, which seems in terrible condition for modern games.
Hopefully the retro game emulation scene can keep up with the demands of it all. I'm thankful they allow me to play SNES games that would cost me $100+ to get a physical copy today, a physical copy that is not guaranteed to work on my machine (I bought a few SNES cartridges that didn't work recently).
[+] [-] ljf|10 years ago|reply
He wasn't a real world friend, but we'd spoken via email a few times and I was in love with the game he'd written. He had really big plans for it, but sadly it died with him, and doesn't seem to be playable now without digging out an old browser and versions of java.
This was the days before github - I can only imagine that today this project and his others could have lived on in some way.
[+] [-] lbradstreet|10 years ago|reply
If you run an infrastructure style product, there should be a living will involve where the product will become open source upon the bankruptcy or shutdown style sale of the company.
For example, FoundationDB was bought by apple and the product was shuttered. Under a living will, the product would become open source, as it is no longer developed by the company.
I realise this may lead to a lower selling price, all things being equal, however people/companies are also more likely to trust you when you are small, as they have a greater chance of survival should you fail.
My personal feeling is that most of these products should be open source from the get go, and it will probably have to be this way going forward, however this is a reasonable middle ground.
[+] [-] s73v3r|10 years ago|reply
Would it? I assume the tech is still being developed. It's just that the continuing development is not offered as a product.
Further, once someone buys the company, don't they gain control over that company's assets? So if they no longer want to offer a product for sale, why should they?
[+] [-] georgeecollins|10 years ago|reply
Software dies. Maybe there will be some OS code that runs for a hundred years. But I think every application is going to die that doesn't have some cult like group of fans who maintain it, probably mostly for sentimental reasons.
[+] [-] mendelk|10 years ago|reply
Get Your Shit Together[0], and related discussion[1]
[0] http://getyourshittogether.org/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569934
[+] [-] LoSboccacc|10 years ago|reply
but most importantly failed to mention or aknowledge this https://archive.org/details/internetarcade which is doing exactly what he vouches for, preserving memory (especially relevant since he's talking about a game)
[+] [-] hoers|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hoers|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]