Leaving a Password Behind

Continuing the last couple of posts on online presence, here's one more thing to thing about - now that we're increasingly managing our lives and connections online, what happens to your online identity when you die? I personaly have a friend who is no longer alive, and yet his profile is still up on one of the social networks. It's quite a dilemma - do I remove him from the "friends list"? Can, or should, his profile be changed or removed from the site?

There was a post on Slashdot not long ago asking this question:

"In the past, when a family member died, you could look through their files and address books to find all the people and businesses that should be notified that the person is deceased. Now the hard-copy address book is becoming a thing of the past. I keep some contact information in a spreadsheet, but I have many online friends that I only have contact with through web sites such as Flickr. My email accounts have many more people listed than my address book spreadsheet. I have no interest in collecting real world info from all my online contacts. The sites where I have social contact with people from around the world (obviously) require user names and passwords. Two questions: 1. How do you intend to let the executors of your estate or family members know which online sites/people you'd like them to notify of your demise? 2. How are you going to give access to the passwords, etc. needed to access those sites in a way that doesn't cause a security concern while you're still alive?"

I'll touch the subject of managing passwords in some later posts, but in my case just sending a couple of passwords to my parents mostly solves this issue in case I get struck by a bus or something tomorrow. One of the responders on Slashdot was really taking it seriously:

"I keep a USB drive in my home safe with my death kit on it. I encrypt that, copy that to CD and send it to my lawyer every few months. My sealed Will (at a different attorneys office) has a copy of the decryption key in it, and the will includes instructions on accessing the data.

I include the following:

- Personal information

-- Passwords file with usernames and passwords to all of the websites I use, personal computers and other electronic devices

-- Accounts file with basic information to all of my financial accounts, morgtages, life insurance,

-- Utilities file with all of the information about my utility services

-- Export of my address book

-- Death threats and persons of interest file (my work takes me to interesting places...)

-- House book with things like the keycode for my house, and all of the other stuff related to my house that only exists in my head otherwise

-- Auto book with copies of titles, etc

-- Letters to send

-Work file

-- Current copies of all importiant work related papers

-- Copy of my current Quickbooks file

-- A write-up of what someone needs to do in my job, along with sugestions of who to assign.

-- A copy of my personal file, complete with life insurance info

-- A usernames file with all of the UID and Passwords for running my buisness

-- A TO SHRED document, containing a list of files to be shredded upon my death"

Here's an interesting CNET article (from about two years ago) that talks more of various legal issues over online accounts, and the policies of different service providers (such as Yahoo, Google, etc.) in such cases.

Everyone Has a Name

Oh the same subject of online presence as in the previous post, there's another consideration to think about - how unique is your name? If your name is something like "John Smith", anyone looking for you or information about you will have to pick through more than 4 million results.

As a result, there is an interesting trend developing over the years with parents who prepare for a birth of a child and wish to establish his/her prominence on the search pages - they are looking for names that are unique on Google, and even buy domains for their babies prior to birth. Here's a quote of the parents from the second article:

"One of the criteria was, if we liked the name, the domain had to be available"

How unique is your name?

I Google You

Here's a video of performance by Amanda Palmer I stumbled on recently (the lyrics):

(found via Google Blogoscoped)

Besides being rather funny, it raises the point that whatever you put online, stays there forever for everyone to see, even years later. In case of social networks, this may even be something written by your friends and not yourself (such as being tagged in a photo on Facebook), and people are known to have been fired over online photos.

On the same subject, there was a case last month where a bartender in New York was fired after she blogged about a drunk Belgian politician that visited the bar she worked in. The politician was dismayed, and called blogging a 'dangerous phenomenon'. This however will only get worse, as more of our lives is being recorded every day. Already almost every new mobile phone has GPS and a camera built in, and I guess only a few years from now we all will carry a device that will record 24/7 our location and everything we see and hear around us, transmitting this to some service that will store this and serve as our personal offline memory.

There's an interesting artice by Bruce Schneier about the effect this has on our lives - The Future of Ephemeral Conversation. Here's a passage from it:

Cardinal Richelieu famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all our ephemeral conversations can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply. Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence. Words uttered in haste over morning coffee, whether spoken in a coffee shop or thumbed on a Blackberry, are not official pronouncements. Discussions in a meeting, whether held in a boardroom or a chat room, are not the same as answers at a press conference. And privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our basic humanity.

So, do you know what Google has to say about you?

Tip - Terminate Programs Quickly

This is an old tip that I rediscovered recently. When a program becomes unresponsive, it is sometimes necessary to terminate the process from the Task Manager. However, after confirming that the process should be killed, there may be a long delay before it happens, especially on a busy computer.

Why is that? Because when a program crashes, Windows XP prepares an error report, using a program called dumprep:

The Dumprep.exe tool is a Windows XP fault logging program. If a serious error occurs, Dumprep.exe writes the error details to a text file. The Dumprep.exe tool then prompts you to send the error information to Microsoft. The Dumprep.exe tool is a non-essential system process that is installed for third-party use.

This is quite useless, and can be easily disabled:

1. Open "System Properties" dialog (My Computer => Properties)
2. Open "Advanced Tab"
3. Press the "Error Reporting" button
4. In the dialog, select the option "Disable Error Reporting" and press OK.

After this change, programs will be terminated without delay.

Teaching Programming To Kids

Kids are quite computer savvy these days, and my (10 years old) brother is no exception. He is used to growing with technology and the Internet all around him - he works with MS Office programs and Paintbrush all the time, uses Wikipedia and Google to do his homework and knows how to move music and photos between the computer and mobile phone using Bluetooth. His interest in the computer and trying new stuff was another reason for my interest in online backup, as well as various virtualisation and sandboxing solutions for programs (more on that in a future post).

So, today I've started teaching him a little about programming. And to those who know me and are wondering - I did NOT start with Perl and Regular expressions, but rather found a nice book about Python programming for kids. So far he liked it and was very enthusiastic to learn more. Since some visual feedback will have the most appeal for him, I'm looking for some ideas for simple programs to do with graphics and gaming. Any ideas?

In the meantime, I'm going to check that everything is truly backed-up, before my brother finds a creative way to blow up the computer...

Headphones For Walking Around

I've been walking around Tel-Aviv today, taking some pictures of the sunset. I like to listen to music (or audiobooks) when going somewhere, but on the street you mostly hear the the noises of the city and the traffic around you.

One solution is to increase the volume to block out the noise, but it doesn't help much and isn't too good for your hearing. Instead, I recently bought myself in-ear headphones. This type of headphones are inserted a little deeper into the ear, and are sealed with small rubber tips. They provide the best possible isolation of external sound, compared to all other types. Since buying them, I'm listening to music at half the volume, and hear much better. Furthermore, they have excellent, crystal-clear sound, right inside your head.

I would recommend the CX300 model by Sennheiser. They have very good sound quality as well as a reasonable price, compared to other headphones in this category. One word of caution however when walking outside - look around, since you won't hear much. With those headphones on me, I'm looking twice before crossing a street, and I'm walking close to the side of the sidewalk, so someone on a bicycle could drive by - I won't hear him approaching.

Filter Your Email With Plus Addressing

There's a little known feature supported by most email providers (Gmail included) - in the first part of the email address (before the @ sign), everything after a plus sign is ignored. So, for example, email sent to myname+news@gmail.com will be treated the same way (and received in the same inbox) as myname@gmail.com.

How is this useful?

When some site requests your email address, you can tag all the mail coming from this site by adding any string after the plus sign - this is called "Plus Addressing". You can then create filters to perform actions based on the tag of the incoming mail, such as moving it to a certain folder.

For example, here's an incoming mail marked with the +blog tag:
Now I can create a filter which will direct such mail to a certain folder (label):

Another possible use is to give each site a different address (such as myname+sitename@gmail.com). This way, if some site gives it away to spammers (or perhaps it was hacked and the email was stolen) - you know where it comes from, and can block all mail coming to this specific address.