A lot of folks suggest getting your own domain name for having control over your online presence but the question that I have always had is what would happen to them when I die?
Wouldn’t the domains eventually expire and anyone else would be able to register it and access my email attached to that domain? With that email, they can theoretically get into all my accounts which don’t have 2FA on (a lot of the sites just don’t have the option to turn on 2FA) via the ‘Forgot my password’ services?
Similarly, if I have a blog or website that I have poured my heart and soul into for my entire life, wouldn’t that just go down forever when the domain expires? Maybe services like The Internet Archive would help in that regard but I don’t know how many people are actively searching for an archived version of a website when they can’t access it on it’s actual domain.
I understand that after I die, all of this wouldn’t by my concern and wouldn’t matter but I still think about this a lot.
To the people who have their own domain, email and/or blogs, what are your thoughts on this?
There was an article around here yesterday that confirm your thoughts.
They did got access to old email and services via those email
Yeah, I made this post after reading that article. There is clearly a problem with how domains and their renewals are managed. I’m not sure what a solution would look like, though.
Throw lot of money and buy whole TLD for life. /j
I was actually going to do that for my domain, sadly 100yr registration is very expensive with vanity ones
When my dad died, no one renewed his domain, [last name].com, and some domain squatter bought it. A few years later the squatter noticed that I owned [last name].net and offered to sell it to me. I didn’t respond and I guess they figured out that an obscure last name isn’t worth anything and let it expire. I should probably buy it.
The ol’ Uno reverso countersquat technique, I like it
If you want your content to live beyond you, you would need to set up some kind of trust to conserve it. Some investments that would make enough money to continue to pay for maintenance, probably someone would need to keep an eye on it too as hosting companies won’t last forever, so things will need moving eventually.
Generally practically nothing we do lasts forever though, you can take measures to resist that for a while, but ultimately nearly everything is forgotten
You can’t guarantee it will live on, but unfortunately it’s more assured if you use somebody else’s platform to host your content. For example I can still go watch TotalBiscuit videos since he put them on YouTube (and also because his widow keeps up the channel)
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The email is stored on a server. The domain DNS points the appropriate URL at your matching email configuration. Someone registering your domain doesn’t give them information about the previous DNS configuration, name servers, and certainly not your server cpanel login credentials. So no, they wouldn’t get access to your emails. They could re-create the same email address using their new setup, but all of the previous email contents would still be sitting on your server. Someone could potentially use the matching email address to retrieve account resets from services you’re registered to, but they would need to know your exact email address and there would probably still be some additional roadblocks.
Regarding your blog and that sort of stuff. If you want it to persist after you die, then you should will it to someone, along with renewal information, admin access, and probably some money to cover the expenses. If you use a password manager like LastPass then you can set someone up as an emergency contact, and they can retrieve all of your logins after you die. They basically send a retrieval request, and if you don’t respond to block it in the given time period, it allows them to log in as if they were you.
If they control the domain, they can see all incoming mail delivery attempts to sniff for addresses that were used. They’d still have to know the domain of the email address for the login they were attacking, which might not be super useful if they’re going after a certain login. But, going the other direction would be more fruitful: buy a domain, dump all incoming mail into a catch-all box, and start looking for bank alert emails or other periodic/promo emails. You might find services that just use email addresses for a login name, or ones that have a “forgot username” feature that only uses email for recovery. Multi-factor auth spread across multiple services (email, SMS, authenticator codes…) would help mitigate significantly by making them also have to take over a phone number or get an old device. Not impossible, but then you’re making them work harder for it, and when good account recovery services heavily mask the available targets, it makes it harder to know what else to acquire (e.g., a specific phone number) even if they get as far as full email domain control.
That’s all true, but it seems like a long shot. To be safe, if you have assets after you pass and you want to leave them to someone, then definitely leave instructions on how to login to the domain and keep the email active, or remove it from every valuable service and shut it down. If neither of those things are true, then you’ll be dead and it wouldn’t matter. That’s kind of morbid and sad, but such is life (and death).
I started blogging in 1997 and still do today, and I would love for my writing and posts to live on after me, so I’ve been thinking more and more about this issue… Right now my idea is to write up a document about what needs to happen for it to continue, and hope my children consider it a worthwhile effort.
you could conceivably establish a trust to maintain the content’s online presence etc.
Would you care to link it, please? Or at least send it to me in a DM? I’d love to read.
What do you care? You are dead.
In general, everything will stick around as long as you paid for it. Your email account and your web site will probably be unceremoniously deleted once the money runs out, and the domain name itself will be freed up. While you use your domain to point to your web site and your email account, they won’t be associated forever: Once they expire, the name is available for someone else to fill it with new content, not to get access to your existing content.
Oooooor: You could bequeath all your online assets to a family member in your will (don’t forget to give them all relevant passwords), possibly along with some money to keep paying for the domain registration, email- and web hosting.
Once they expire, the name is available for someone else to fill it with new content, not to get access to your existing content.
While they may not directly get access to content after a domain has been recycled… nothing would really stop someone from registering your domain, and setting up your same email address again. Which would then give them access to basically all of your old accounts just by clicking on forgot password links.
Now is that likely to happen to a random person? Not likely, but there’s not really anything to prevent it. Most services don’t prune old unused accounts very often, or ever really.
Most domain and web hosting plans expire when no one pays to renew them.
One thing you could do is put your work under a free license. That would allow people to copy it which should make sure that your work will be preserved by others.
You are correct. Once a domain registration expires, anyone will be able to register that domain again. If they set up a mail server, they’ll be able to make email inboxes to receive emails sent to that domain.
If you have a website or blog that you’re hosting on the domain, once the resignation expires, the server might still be up but nobody will be able to access that site via its domain name from the public Internet using that domain name any more, as the A/AAAA records pointing to that server will be erased. If there is nobody to pay the hosting bills, then the server will eventually be taken offline and all the data will be deleted. If you self-host, the data will stay on that server’s disk(s) until your heirs sell or recycle it.
If you want someone to continue running your server and keeping up your domain registrations, you will need to arrange that before you die. Otherwise, it will all likely be whisked away into the ether.
Depends on which country you live and which country you die.
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You’d have to self-host anything you want to have up “forever”, and that hosting would have to continue after your death by whatever means you set up. In reality what you’d want to do if you want to preserve your digital life is create physical back-ups of it so that family or friends can revisit it after you are gone. If everything is up on the web, and that’s it, then it will all be deleted as soon as the money stops coming in to whomever is hosting it.
The same goes for your email, though to a lesser extent. If you have a gmail account, I believe there was a kerfuffle about them deleting untouched accounts a few years ago, and I don’t know if they ever did or not, but your account with whomever you use will persist until such time as they deem it not to.
You need a succession plan for your death.
That can either be a will, a conservatorship, a trust. It can just be a bit warden account that has emergency access from a trusted friend, a lawyer, family member.
You can ensure your site is backed up by archive.org, and your online accounts are well documented in your password manager such as bitwarden.
Alternatively if you have the means, setting up a foundation that has direct access to the content and making yourself an officer with somebody else being next in line would make things easier for a transition. Depending on the depth of your content.
Sit down, and think about your goals, what do you want your legacy to be. And make sure you’re achieving those goals. It could simply be printing out all of your output and making a book, filing with the library of Congress releasing it as an ebook. Making sure it persists in the Gutenberg press etc
I’ve set up a cascading set of credentials that start with a single piece of paper in my desk. I’ve made sure all my kids know what that piece of paper is and what it’s for. They can choose to use it to unlock all my secrets and wealth or not. Up to them.
Sorry for yapping, but this is a very perplexing problem that even we as a collective civilization struggle with. For example: how do you keep future generations out of nuclear waste vaults on a 1000/2000/1`000’000 year scale (we don’t even talk about infinity, because it is surprise infinite times larger), because we cannot predict how even our language and (more than that) our culture would look like. One text/symbol/pictogram could tell something completely different to a person 10000 years in the future, than to a current-day one.
For me, the most interesting part was the conclusion: instead of using static language or pictograms printed on the walls (although some menacing skulls wouldn’t hurt) they instead opted out to a more dynamic and “updatable” forms of media - myths and legends (and maybe also a church, but I don’t remember). And that is not as ridiculous as it sounds - some of the myths from the past that we can read, like, right now, were created more than a couple thousand years ago (some even more than 10000). Also, an obvious note, but they weren’t created in a modern language. So this means that everything around them basically died/changed: the author, many many many of the ones who retold them, their first written forms, the printing company that first printed them, even the language (basically, transmission protocol) on which it was created is dead.
So (if we get back to the original scope of the question) that means that you basically have two choices:
- Make your web site out of stone and hide it somewhere around Antarctica.
“+”:
- the decay would be greatly slow down
- no one is going to (or, could) delete/destroy it
“-”:
- no one is probably going to see it for a looong time (and when the do, they might not understand a thing)
- Not be silly.
The thought of everything that you do/have/see breaking to dust is equally scary and relaxing - but it is true. No matter how much you paid for your domain name, or how your server is getting power out of solar, self-backups and self-repairs - everything eventually would break, catch fire, explode and turn off.
Or rather it will, without someone maintaining it. Because the only man-made things that live forever are doing so on the power of human resilience and preservation. It’s like this ancient art of a horse on some hill in the UK, that would be erased by the tides of history a loong time ago, but is still here because a couple of english mates have a bucket of white paint and some free time on tuesday.
So if you think about how this site that you poured your heart and soul into would instantly vanish as soon as you’re dead, remember: as long as someone cares and loves what you do (and with some coordination), the thing that you made would transcend the boundaries of some hostings, domains and internet protocols (and maybe even the language itself) and live in the minds of people, truly, forever.
For example: how do you keep future generations out of nuclear waste vaults on a 1000/2000/1`000’000 year scale (we don’t even talk about infinity, because it is surprise infinite times larger)
We actually only care about that for long enough for the radioactivity to wear off, which takes on the order of hundreds of years, not a million.
Yes, thank you for correcting. I was in the zone when writing and exaggerated a bit :)
Although I should note that it still is a really long time!!
