When your data outlives you

File under (hmm.... how do I turn on categories in Blogger) Memory, The World is Flat, Tags

Back to thoughts about storage with a quote from The World is Flat:

On November 13, 2004, Lance Cpl. ___ was killed by a roadside bomb during a foot patrol in Iraq [...] his family was demanding that Yahoo! gave them the password for their deceased son's e-mail [...] Yahoo! denied the Ellsworth family their son's password, citing the fact that [...] all Yahoo! users agree at sign-up that rights to member's ID or account contents terminate upon death [...]

As we get rid of more and more paper and communicate through more and more digitized formats, you better sort out before you die, and include in your will, to whom, if anyone, you want to leave your bits [...] Somebody, please, sort all this out.

(Regarding "The World is Flat": it turns out that Bill Gates has read it too.)