3 ms·

I actually had the idea to help prevent this quite some time ago but unfortunately lack the skills to bring it to fruition. Maybe someone else can if I put it o

I actually had the idea to help prevent this quite some time ago but unfortunately lack the skills to bring it to fruition. Maybe someone else can if I put it out there. Likely not, but here goes. It's rare to impossible for a single institution to maintain all such personal record. The internet archive does a valiant job, but barely scrapes the surface. The only way for this to work is if individuals maintain their own historical record. So the question is how? I figure most people aren't savvy so a company who provides a storage device, and perhaps services to help gather said data, would be essential. I'm thinking it works like life insurance where someone pays over time and their data is then delivered to them, at the conclusion of any payments, or to their family in the event of a death. Perhaps this could simply be rolled into life insurance or something of the like? That's the basic gist. Put the power to save this information in the hands of the people to maintain going forward. Like having someone's written notebook kept long into the future. Except it's a storage drive. Tech hurdles there for sure, but with things like MS's Project Silica, and the like, perhaps not insurmountable.

woojoo666 4y ago
The two solutions I've seen for this are Dead Mans Switch [1] and Shamir's Secret Sharing [2]. There's an interesting related discussion on StackExchange too [3] [1]: https://www.deadmansswitch.net/ https://www.deadmansswitch.net/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing [3]: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/239111/how-to-share-passwords-only-after-death https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/239111/how-to-s...
Jill_the_Pill 4y ago
>> "The only way for this to work is if individuals maintain their own historical record." Why's that? We have long had effective institutional preservation of knowledge and historical records by public and university libraries. Why shift to the inefficiency of individual, amateur preservation rather than support skilled professionals to do it right? Right now, I am having a hard time tracking down a 2002 or 2003 CD-ROM (New_LocClim) that may have contained the weather station data underlying the FAO/GPCC rainfall product. It seems far more likely that a library or other institution, rather than some random person, would have preserved that information in a way I can discover and access.

woojoo666 4y ago

The two solutions I've seen for this are Dead Mans Switch [1] and Shamir's Secret Sharing [2]. There's an interesting related discussion on StackExchange too [3] [1]: https://www.deadmansswitch.net/ https://www.deadmansswitch.net/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing [3]: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/239111/how-to-share-passwords-only-after-death https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/239111/how-to-s...

Jill_the_Pill 4y ago

>> "The only way for this to work is if individuals maintain their own historical record." Why's that? We have long had effective institutional preservation of knowledge and historical records by public and university libraries. Why shift to the inefficiency of individual, amateur preservation rather than support skilled professionals to do it right? Right now, I am having a hard time tracking down a 2002 or 2003 CD-ROM (New_LocClim) that may have contained the weather station data underlying the FAO/GPCC rainfall product. It seems far more likely that a library or other institution, rather than some random person, would have preserved that information in a way I can discover and access.