costela.net

I’ve been seeing some thoughts brewing up around the web^{1, 2, 3} about what happens to all the content you’ve created and all the information you’ve amassed online after you kick the proverbial bucket.
Death has always been a somewhat troubling theme for me and I’ve never been totally comfortable discussing it, but somehow when it touches technology, it becomes something else and I actually entertain the thought for some time.

The idea is specially haunting for those of us whose only means of production are digital and centralized, since everything is basically guaranteed to vanish a relatively short time after joining the choir invisible.

On closer inspection, I’d say this is nothing new and probably inevitable, considering there must have been many unknown analog writers out there who died and took their potentially wonderful work with them to the grave, never to be read again. This should serve as a reality check on the fickleness of life and as a reminder that unless your work can survive by freely spreading like a meme, it’s probably best not to get too attached. Unless, of course, you’re an Egyptian Pharaoh, in which case you could very well just embalm yourself and take your digital gold and servants with you…

By “work” I don’t mean just the professional sort, but actually anything and everything you create, public or private, like this useless blog post or my incredibly long and ridiculously idiotic email conversations with some friends, so I don’t particularly agree with what Russel Coker said on his post on the subject:

Archives of past correspondence to/from someone who is dead is one category of secret data that is really of little use to anyone unless the deceased was particularly famous. Probably the majority of encrypted data from a dead person would be best wiped.

I disagree firstly because people can have their work recognized posthumously, attaining fame and becoming the interest of biographers, fanboys and whatnot, and secondly because personal letters can be a treasured family heirloom, telling a lot about the people that came before you and what made them tick.
I, for one, have read some letters from deceased family members and learned a great deal through the experience, so I consider this the perfect case for wanting your email – for instance – personal while you live, but public when you, bereft of life, rest in peace.

So I’ve joined the group of people thinking about what to do with my digital production, however insignificant it may seem to me, once I expire and go to meet my maker. The best solution I can imagine at this point would be a combination of Shamir’s Secret Sharing Algorithm, physical backups, pre-paying my hosting sollutions and having people you trust in different social circles. The last part might sound strangely obvious, but if you go down the paranoia road and argue that simply giving close relatives all your passwords isn’t optimal because you’d lose your privacy, what would be keeping them from ganging together and opening up your email when you decide to take that unannounced vacation?
I wouldn’t say I have untrustworthy relatives, but I certainly have many curious and nosy ones, that don’t share my principles regarding the privacy of people who’re still breathing, so this becomes an issue. Not to mention the many people I know who have actively distrustful relationships with the closest of kin…

At any rate, I still haven’t done any of this, so if I go push up the daisies in the near future, well, there won’t be any more posts like this… which is a good thing, right?

PS.: Michael Palin’s funny cause he can’t stop laughing about his own jokes, specially in contrast to John Cleese.

I know everyone’s been talking about it, and that I’m not supposed to be a news blog or anything like that, but I’m pretty excited about Google Wave after watching the presentation.

I try really hard not to be a Google fanboy, but I must admit I sympathize with the company and the way they work. The “do no evil” stuff might not be entirely true, but it’s corporate behavior is certainly well within what I consider a reasonable trade-off between the modern needs of a huge company and the lofty ideals of social responsibility.
It could all be a ruse to get big enough to rule the world and the paranoid side of me isn’t completely dead, but I give them the benefit of the doubt for now.
Anyway, I digress in my justification of admiration for Google.

I haven’t yet read the protocol specs, but I’m curious to see how they deal with connection problems between federating servers and the conflicting edits that might arise from such a situation. Also curious about possible desktop client integration and offline use.
I’ll hopefully have time to browse through it in the next few days.