
Dead Programmers Aren't Much Fun - cnolden
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2012/03/dead-programmer.php
======
moserware
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: [http://www.moserware.com/2011/11/life-death-and-splitting-
se...](http://www.moserware.com/2011/11/life-death-and-splitting-secrets.html)

It's probably over-engineered, but the alternatives seemed not secure enough
to feel comfortable using.

------
GuiA
_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?_

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:

<http://gardaud.posterous.com/digital-ghosts>

~~~
jchampagne
I agree that this is the most interesting part of the article, sociologically.
My father was a tech guy who passed away over ten years ago, I believe that if
you had the power to do so it would be an invaluable gift to your loved ones
to leave them little messages every so often… (as long as your relationship
was healthy!) But unlike the attached article implies, psychologists shouldn’t
be concerned as I don’t think most people will ever feel like we are truly
“communicating” with our deceased loved ones as communication is always a two-
way streak. A robot giving standard-human like answers (or a relative enabling
that) isn’t really your loved one communicating unless that loved one somehow
took the time to sit there and guess what you might answer in different
scenarios. As much as I’d love periodic messages and jokes sent from my dead
father to appear every once and a while (and would look forward to and
treasure them) I could never feel compelled to reply back to him, or desire a
robotic answer, and once you cross that line then I think it falls into
“socially unacceptable”.

~~~
chimeracoder
What about when we get to the point where we have an AI capable of simulating,
if imperfectly, an individual's response to a given question?

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.

[1] <http://www.graciouseloise.com/>

------
troymc
I was thinking about a related issue yesterday: In 100 years, which _free_ web
services, where I can post content, will still be around, with high
probability?

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?

~~~
billforsternz
I'm intrigued at your speculation that Wikipedia will likely still be around
in 100 years. Clearly the internet phenomenon is important, becoming more
important every day, yet still changing so fast that it's still in its infancy
relatively speaking. Will it mature into something much more stable ? Is it
like the automobile industry in 1920 or so, and Wikipedia, Google and Facebook
are something like GM, Ford and Chrysler ? Maybe. On the other hand perhaps
the rate of change is so great that its leading to something completely
unrecognisable in 100 years, which none of today's players will feature in.

~~~
moe
_perhaps the rate of change is so great that its leading to something
completely unrecognisable in 100 years_

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...

~~~
niels_olson
You need to work on your proofs. Counterexample: hop in your time machine, go
back to 1550, kidnap someone, take them back to 1450, and have them explain
the printing press. Easy peasy.

Second counterexample: Edison made his first big move redesigning stock
tickers. I'm pretty sure Edison could grok the Internet.

------
extension
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.

~~~
tomjen3
Leave a link to some site that you have instructed your family to update in
case of your death.

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>.

~~~
vog
I think he should have signed that text crytographically. (in case his site is
hacked, or in case the server goes down and different people pretend to have
conflicting versions of that text)

------
jeffbarr
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.

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.

~~~
jaylevitt
Maybe that's theoretically true - but so far, copyright wars aside, it's been
moving in the other direction, as storage and bandwidth get ever cheaper. One
person finds a Super-8 film when they renovate the attic, it gets transferred,
they upload it to YouTube, and now it's permanently on the Internet.

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...](http://gizmodo.com/372994/earliest-audio-recording-resurrected-
scares-the-genitals-off-us)

[2] <http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1>

[3] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA_r1Ynl4Ls>

[4] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-DqZ8jAmv0>

------
hippich
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.

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.

------
brudgers
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.

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.

<http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html>

------
ben1040
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.

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.

~~~
tripzilch
If it's not a really long GPG key or anything, it's probably easiest to just
write it down on paper and store it at a secure place. Secure being, if you
trust your cupboard to hold the binder with your bank statements, that would
work fine.

------
dennisgorelik
Society overall and human mind in particular have a great tool that handles
that situation: forgetting.

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.

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

------
AznHisoka
For me, the most important thing is to leave info on any sites/accounts that
make me money.

Anything after that, social networks, blogs.. I could care less about. I won't
be worrying about that after I die.

~~~
gk1
Apparently my father agrees with you. He is doing fine, but last year he
decided to share with me his account info from money-generating websites. (He
gets about $300/month from a stock photo site.) I suppose it gave him comfort
that if anything were to happen, the fruit of his labor (ie, income from his
designs) would continue to benefit the family.

Also, hate to nitpick, but the phrase is "I couldn't care less," meaning your
level of care is already at the minimum.

~~~
polymatter
See
([http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2010/may/20/la...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2010/may/20/language-
usa)) about "I couldn't care less"

------
hermannj314
Is there a business opportunity here? Find widows of deceased programmers and
offer a lump sum for the rights to all digital works?

~~~
hippich
sexism here! why you think about widows and not widowers???

edit: bazinga!

~~~
hermannj314
Husbands of deceased female programmers? You can target the niche markets.

------
7952
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.

------
StavrosK
That's exactly what <http://www.deadmansswitch.net> is for.

~~~
vog
I like the idea, but ...

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?

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Well it should be software you run on your own machines. But that wouldn't
suit the Web 2.0 fad.

~~~
StavrosK
Why not just write it, rather than complain?

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I write lots of stuff that runs on the user's machine. Is there a particular
application you'd like?

