> The Internet is not there yet, people on the Internet have only just started dying, and there are not yet any automatic routines or generally perceived procedures for informing the people and communities who should know, or for tying up the loose ends, accounts, repositories and memberships on the Internet.
Has anything improved since then? How should the internet deal with death?
I think that is seeing things from the wrong end, the question can ever only be "how should people deal with death?"
If you are anything like me, you probably attended less than a handful of funerals until your fourties, and then, as part of growing "really" up, making sure the dark respectful clothes are always ready became a thing.
The problem is we built the internet before we turned 40, so we never thought about how deaths figured into it.
I still think the two most important aspects are A) Ensure access. (ie: write down crucial passwords) and B) Making sure the news gets round.
Failing A) may leave practical and economical heart-burn.
Failing B) will make the people you leave behind much more uncomfortable and sad than you would want.
And, of course: Make sure to tell people how much you appreciate them, while both you and they still are.
I have customers in several countries. If one of them died and I was sent, say, a Danish death certificate, I wouldn't know how to verify/authenticate it. With ~200 countries and almost as many languages, that becomes a non-trivial issue. How do $megacorps deal with this? Is there anything a small business can learn from them in that regard?
On http://varnish-cache.org/docs/6.6/phk/lucky.html you say
> The Internet is not there yet, people on the Internet have only just started dying, and there are not yet any automatic routines or generally perceived procedures for informing the people and communities who should know, or for tying up the loose ends, accounts, repositories and memberships on the Internet.
Has anything improved since then? How should the internet deal with death?