Tag: YouTube video

Who will get your iTunes when you die?

An electronic immortality

Eleanore

Human fascination with immortality stretches back to the time of Greek mythology with history littered by charlatans, oddballs and megalomaniacs either claiming or seeking the secret to eternal life.

However, the modern tech-savvy generation has discovered, quite by chance, that an immortality of sorts is now freely available via the digital footprint they leave should they meet an untimely end.  It’s estimated that on Facebook alone, more than 30 million accounts belong to people who are deceased.

As if the pain of coping with the death of a loved one isn’t difficult enough, friends and family must now consider the implications of the deceased’s online life to go with their material existence.

Your online footprint
Think for a moment about your own digital presence.  You’ll almost certainly use online banking and shopping facilities, perhaps an online wallet like PayPal, email accounts, a frequent flyer program, a social media presence via Facebook or Twitter, along with potentially thousands of personal files, receipts and photographs.

Most people already understand the importance of estate planning to help pass on worldly goods such as housing, savings and mementos to their beneficiaries.  But how will your heirs even gain access to your computer and your passwords?

Like so many laws relating to the digital world, many are outdated or irrelevant, and several online services have already established their own policies.  For instance, Twitter allows family or friends to download a copy of your public tweets and close your account.  You need to nominate someone in advance to provide their name and contact details, their relationship to you, your Twitter username and a link to or copy of your obituary.

Digital executors
No laws currently exist in Australia to grant a Will’s executor automatic access to someone’s social media accounts.  However, there are still several options available to help decide on how your online legacy is managed.

The first step is to create a Digital Will.  In addition, you will need to select a trustworthy digital executor to handle arrangements for your digital assets and digital legacy once you are gone.  Similarly, if you run your own business, it will have its own digital incarnation and its own digital legacy to maintain.  Some Australian Will makers offer Digital Wills so people can ensure their online legacy lives on – or fades away – in accordance with their wishes.

Online vaults for safe storage
An increasingly popular alternative is to store important documents and passwords in an online vault.  The likes of SecureSafe, Legacy Lockboxor Assets in Order pledge to provide secure online storage of passwords and documents.

Password management accounts can be set up using software such as Norton Identity Safe while Google recently introduced a new program called Inactive Account Manager, which enables you to choose in advance exactly what you wish to have done with all your Google data – from Gmail accounts to YouTube videos.

Considering how much of our communication takes place online these days, it’s worth investing some time thinking about your digital footprint and what is required to manage it when you’re gone.  A good time to do this might be when next reviewing your Wills and Powers of Attorney.  With a little thought and preparation, you can leave a lasting legacy to your loved ones, well beyond photos or videos, and avoid complications associated with your ‘digital immortality’.

Gamers go vigilante as hacker’s character sentenced to suicide

Gamers go vigilante as hacker’s character sentenced to suicide

Eleanore

Light the torches, sharpen your pitch forks and say hello to death sentences for all online game hackers. A player who has been reeking havoc upon the Guild Wars 2 players was recently stripped, lead onto a high bridge and forced to jump to his digital death below. I have heard of human heads courtesy of the Mexican drug cartel but this is a message if I have ever seen one. Take a gander at the video link posted by the security team leader — link below.

DarkSide – the hacker’s character’s name, was using a series of illegal super abilities, anabolic cheats, impossible teleporting across the map and dealing ridiculous damage dominate player to player interactions. ArenaNet, the creators of Guild Wars opened up a can of your favorite episode of CSI to track down the alleged online killer, using a series of Youtube videos (like CCTV footage) and player’s descriptions (witness testimonies). The staff on the security team at ArenaNet and their leader Chris Clearly posted a video of their sentencing, killing, removing and banning of DarkSide and his other accounts from the Guild Wars game.

It’s a case that’s been getting a lot of attention but how do players in other game universes go about getting justice?

Forget about your personal late night quests to save your kingdom, killing online is big business for Call of Duty Players. At the 2015 Call of Duty Championship for instance over US$1 million dollars in prizes are given away.

The online gaming rabbit hole goes very deep, true hackers have become pretty rare as the new ability to add Mods becomes the next illegal play. Hackers seem to become famous and relentless, I spoke earlier to a gamer in Johannesburg who owns a Youtube chanel called JoziUnderground which he uses to record and share the videos of his Call of Duty tournaments.

His experiences from starting small and local tournaments seemed to be a scene out of a school yard overrun with bullies. Players known as modders, who install online steroids onto their PlayStations and then ruin the for everyone, are a source of particular vitriol. He spoke of a hacker called Milkshake Mods in one of his videos, see below.

Milkshake Mods is apparently involved with a group called Nastymods, which managed to DDoS poor JoziUnderground. In simple terms that means it stole JoziUnderground’s IP address and information through the Playstation network and sent what is basically a surge of Internet that fried JoziUndergrund’s internet line. Telkom had to reset everything and start Jozi’s connection all over again.

One week later, an internet surge comes knocking at JoziUnderground’s internet connection (surprise surprise) and once again his connection goes down in flaming codes and glory. I believe JoziUnderground managed to talk his way out of the targeted attacks through some of his network buddies that will remain nameless. The player is now playing on thin ice, shall we say.

Players have been caught with illegal software, doing things that aren’t supposed to be able to do and getting penalized severely and apologizing publicly in the way that professional sportsmen do when they get caught doing something illegal off or on the field.

 

Protecting your afterlife in the digital realm

Protecting your afterlife in the digital realm

Eleanore

Even when it isn’t Halloween, it can be a scary to think of how much of our lives we live online. Scarier still, perhaps, to think of the digital consequences once we sign off for good. Here’s David Pogue of Yahoo Tech:

Used to be, you knew what to do with all the memorabilia of your life. You’d put it in a box to give to your kids, or you’d write it into your will.

But these days, the most complete record of your life may not be in boxes; it may be online.

All those photos on Flickr. Videos on YouTube. Daily events on Facebook. Thoughts on Twitter. What happens to all that stuff, when you move on to the great cyber café in the sky?

Evan Carroll is an expert on what happens to our online stuff when we die. “We have entered this time as a society where we’re a bit ahead of our laws and our policies with respect to our digital property,” he said.

Carroll and his coauthor maintain a blog, and they’ve even written a book, “Your Digital Afterlife.”

“Some states have laws, some states don’t,” said Carroll. “Some people put these things in their wills now. Some people don’t. So there are so many different things that could happen.”

Nobody crashed into that messy state of affairs harder than John Berlin.

Earlier this year, on Facebook’s 10th anniversary, it offered every member a beautiful, one-minute musical montage of his or her Facebook life.

Jesse Berlin had died in 2012, and his father, John, dearly wanted to see his son’s montage video.

“Only problem with that was, you had to get on his page to request it. I didn’t have access to his page, I didn’t know his password,” John told Pogue.

So he had a desperate, great idea: he made a YouTube video.

“I took my iPhone, I propped it up on a picture against a wall, and I just poured my heart out on it to Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.”

“And we can’t access his Facebook account. I’ve tried emailing and different things, but it ain’t working. All we want to do is see his movie. That’s it.”

Three million people watched his plea.

“And by the end of the day,” said Berlin, “Facebook called me.”

Facebook gave John access to his son’s video — and further improved its existing policies. If your loved one passes away, you can ask for that Facebook account to be what’s called “memorialized.”

“Whatever privacy settings that were in place at the time that the account was memorialized, they allow those to persist,” said Carroll. “Your Facebook profile can become a memorial to you, and can be a place for communal bereavement where they share messages.”

On Google, you can specify in advance exactly what should happen if Google doesn’t hear from you for a few months.

“You can ask them to pass information to another individual,” said Carroll. “You can ask them to delete the account. You can set up an auto-responder to your Gmail account: ‘Hey, I’m no longer checking this account,’ for whatever reason.”

“‘Hey, I’m no longer alive!'” said Pogue.

“That’s a strange email to write!” laughed Carroll.

Already, about 30 million Facebook accounts belong to dead people. To some, that’s a business opportunity. There are now websites that, upon your death, automatically send your list of passwords to someone you’ve specified.

Don't Let Your Digital Assets Die With You

Growing importance of the digital legacy

Eleanore

Testators are increasingly being advised to leave clear instructions about their ‘digital legacies’ after their death.

The latest organisation to stress the importance of online assets is the Law Society. It recommends that people should, at the very least, keep an up-to-date list of all their online accounts, such as email, banking, investments and social networking sites, to make it easier for family members to recover or close them.

However, the society considers that the list should stop short of recording passwords or PINs. ‘An executor accessing [the deceased’s] account with these details could be committing a criminal offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990‘, said Gary Rycroft, a member of its wills and equity committee. Passwords should certainly not be listed in a will which will ultimately have to be published.

The term ‘digital legacy’ also encompasses computer game characters in online games like World of Warcraft; music and films; internet domains registered to the deceased; YouTube videos; and Bitcoins, all of which can represent valuable assets.

‘An experienced and wealthy game character takes time to create, and it appears it may be possible to sell such characters online,’ says Patricia Milner of Withers. ‘What such an asset would be worth for inheritance tax purposes on death is unclear as the market in this kind of asset is very new.’

Similarly, says Withers, YouTube videos can attract payments from advertisers if the video gets a large number of viewings.

Without proper records much of this can be lost on the owner’s death. According to Oliver Embley of Wedlake Bell, the best solution is for the testator to leave a letter of wishes giving executors access to online accounts and stating which accounts should be deleted after death.

However, executors are at the mercy of service providers and problems may be encountered if service providers do not recognise the consents given in a Letter of Wishes. Even where records exist, the licensing arrangements attached to some assets – such as Apple’s iTunes – specify that the assets die with the original owner.

There may also be jurisdictional issues, says Embley. ‘However, for the present, setting out express instructions in a letter of wishes gives the user the best chance of enabling his loved ones to inherit his personal digital effects.’