5 ms·

Not only will they save money on record keeping, it’s a way to create sunken treasure chests. When people die, digital files can easily be removed without trace

by 1-6 3y ago

Not only will they save money on record keeping, it’s a way to create sunken treasure chests. When people die, digital files can easily be removed without trace. I expect this move will allow the government to purge lost records of dead people who never alerted their next-of-kin.

blibble 3y ago
how do dead people alert their next of kin? being serious: most wills are not sourced from the probate registry and are only sent there to obtain probate
- oniony 3y ago
  With automation. I have my Google account transfer to my wife after _n_ months of inactivity, for example.
  - Uehreka 3y ago
    That’s not a thing most people have set up (even if they should).
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  In the US, this could be done by monitoring the social security death master file published on a cadence. Currently advocating for a citizen friendly system to notify chosen parties at death event. Financial institutions consume this SSA data to freeze accounts, for example. https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/request_dmf.html https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/request_dmf.html
Xenoamorphous 3y ago
> digital files can easily be removed without trace As opposed to paper.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  Paper is much harder to secretly vanish (A) at scale and/or (B) remotely. I always thought it was cool how some Ghost in The Shell movie/anime stuff involved storing very sensitive secrets as barcodes on paper, to be kept physically-secure before being read by cybernetic eyes. There's also some line from one of the The Expanse books (Abbadon's Gate) which I can't easily call up here. The protagonist is inside an alien space-station following an AI's instructions to try to save the day, and he's curious why the AI doesn't just do it. The AI tells him that for the builders of that place, having physical existence was a kind of authority all on its own.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  fire is pretty effective at that. don't even have to torch the entire document, just enough to make it inadmissible for legal purposes.
- Two4 3y ago
  People are remarkably more hesitant to destroy physical records than digital ones, in my experience. Also, you have to go to a place and find the thing to destroy it - with digital records, you can press a button from across the world.
quonn 3y ago
You could hand out signed records that contain a hash of the previous record, similar to a blockchain. The government can have the burden of proof to show that the chain is complete if ordered so by a court.
- detritus 3y ago
  I'm fairly blockchain-ignorant despite having read up on it quite a bit, but THIS sort of task seems to me a pretty good use of blockchain. It wouldn't need to necessarily run in an entirely de-centralised set up, but how that would work (eg. sharing amongst a limited number of trustable centralised parties), I don't know. I did mull over something similar for voting a few years back, scrawling sides of A2-paper with notes and diagrams on the subject, but I'll be damned if I can make head or tail of whatever I wrote back then. I was a bit drunk at the time.
  - simonw 3y ago
    Right - you don't need a wasteful proof-of-work blockchain for this. The mechanism used for Certificate Transparency would work great here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency Same for "real estate on the blockchain" - when people argue for that, the bit they are usually arguing for is a trail of historical records that can't be corrupted. Certificate Transparency solves that really well.
    - junofan 3y ago
      How? It’s not designed for consensus.
      - simonw 3y ago
        You don't need consensus for this, unless I've missed something. We are talking about a mechanism to prove that no-one has tampered with the documents.
  - pdpi 3y ago
e2le 3y ago
>digital files can easily be removed Keeping only a single copy seems insane to me, any number of things could go wrong and destroy all that's stored there[1]. Digital copies wouldn't so bad if there were redundant backups (tape[2], film[3], etc.). [1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nypd-warehouse-fire-evidence-destroyed/ https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nypd-warehouse-fire-evi... [2]: https://www.ibm.com/tape-storage https://www.ibm.com/tape-storage [3]: https://archiveprogram.github.com/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/
- chefkoch 3y ago
  "Did anyone try to restore the backup recently?" "..."
- tivert 3y ago
  > Keeping only a single copy seems insane to me, any number of things could go wrong and destroy all that's stored there[1]. Digital copies wouldn't so bad if there were redundant backups (tape, film[2], etc.). I don't know about the UK, but according to an old episode of Dallas that I watched recently, in the US there are usually three official copies of a will kept: one in a government records office, one at the office of the lawyer who drafted it, and one with the individual. It sounds like this proposal is for wills >25 years old, so the biggest impact would be on historical-research use cases.
  - lesuorac 3y ago
    That might be how it works in TV but that's not how it works in real life. Pretty much all that needs to happen in the US is somebody shows up with a document signed by a few people (dead guy and some notaries). Whether that document was stored under the fridge or a law office -- nobody cares.
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      Wouldn't that make forging wills pretty easy and low risk?
pdpi 3y ago
This is more or less a solved problem. Tamper-resistant/tamper-evident datastructures like blockchains and merkle trees make it fairly hard to make things vanish without a trace. You dont need all of the Nakamoto consensus machinery of crypto currencies, you just need your central authority to publish the latest hash on a ~daily basis.

by 1-6 3y ago

blibble 3y ago

how do dead people alert their next of kin? being serious: most wills are not sourced from the probate registry and are only sent there to obtain probate

oniony 3y ago
With automation. I have my Google account transfer to my wife after _n_ months of inactivity, for example.
- Uehreka 3y ago
  That’s not a thing most people have set up (even if they should).
toomuchtodo 3y ago
In the US, this could be done by monitoring the social security death master file published on a cadence. Currently advocating for a citizen friendly system to notify chosen parties at death event. Financial institutions consume this SSA data to freeze accounts, for example. https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/request_dmf.html https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/request_dmf.html

Xenoamorphous 3y ago

> digital files can easily be removed without trace As opposed to paper.

Terr_ 3y ago
Paper is much harder to secretly vanish (A) at scale and/or (B) remotely. I always thought it was cool how some Ghost in The Shell movie/anime stuff involved storing very sensitive secrets as barcodes on paper, to be kept physically-secure before being read by cybernetic eyes. There's also some line from one of the The Expanse books (Abbadon's Gate) which I can't easily call up here. The protagonist is inside an alien space-station following an AI's instructions to try to save the day, and he's curious why the AI doesn't just do it. The AI tells him that for the builders of that place, having physical existence was a kind of authority all on its own.
red-iron-pine 3y ago
fire is pretty effective at that. don't even have to torch the entire document, just enough to make it inadmissible for legal purposes.
Two4 3y ago
People are remarkably more hesitant to destroy physical records than digital ones, in my experience. Also, you have to go to a place and find the thing to destroy it - with digital records, you can press a button from across the world.

quonn 3y ago

You could hand out signed records that contain a hash of the previous record, similar to a blockchain. The government can have the burden of proof to show that the chain is complete if ordered so by a court.

detritus 3y ago
I'm fairly blockchain-ignorant despite having read up on it quite a bit, but THIS sort of task seems to me a pretty good use of blockchain. It wouldn't need to necessarily run in an entirely de-centralised set up, but how that would work (eg. sharing amongst a limited number of trustable centralised parties), I don't know. I did mull over something similar for voting a few years back, scrawling sides of A2-paper with notes and diagrams on the subject, but I'll be damned if I can make head or tail of whatever I wrote back then. I was a bit drunk at the time.
- simonw 3y ago
  Right - you don't need a wasteful proof-of-work blockchain for this. The mechanism used for Certificate Transparency would work great here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency Same for "real estate on the blockchain" - when people argue for that, the bit they are usually arguing for is a trail of historical records that can't be corrupted. Certificate Transparency solves that really well.
  - junofan 3y ago
    How? It’s not designed for consensus.
    - simonw 3y ago
      You don't need consensus for this, unless I've missed something. We are talking about a mechanism to prove that no-one has tampered with the documents.
- pdpi 3y ago

e2le 3y ago

>digital files can easily be removed Keeping only a single copy seems insane to me, any number of things could go wrong and destroy all that's stored there[1]. Digital copies wouldn't so bad if there were redundant backups (tape[2], film[3], etc.). [1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nypd-warehouse-fire-evidence-destroyed/ https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nypd-warehouse-fire-evi... [2]: https://www.ibm.com/tape-storage https://www.ibm.com/tape-storage [3]: https://archiveprogram.github.com/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/

chefkoch 3y ago
"Did anyone try to restore the backup recently?" "..."
tivert 3y ago
> Keeping only a single copy seems insane to me, any number of things could go wrong and destroy all that's stored there[1]. Digital copies wouldn't so bad if there were redundant backups (tape, film[2], etc.). I don't know about the UK, but according to an old episode of Dallas that I watched recently, in the US there are usually three official copies of a will kept: one in a government records office, one at the office of the lawyer who drafted it, and one with the individual. It sounds like this proposal is for wills >25 years old, so the biggest impact would be on historical-research use cases.
- lesuorac 3y ago
  That might be how it works in TV but that's not how it works in real life. Pretty much all that needs to happen in the US is somebody shows up with a document signed by a few people (dead guy and some notaries). Whether that document was stored under the fridge or a law office -- nobody cares.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    Wouldn't that make forging wills pretty easy and low risk?

pdpi 3y ago

This is more or less a solved problem. Tamper-resistant/tamper-evident datastructures like blockchains and merkle trees make it fairly hard to make things vanish without a trace. You dont need all of the Nakamoto consensus machinery of crypto currencies, you just need your central authority to publish the latest hash on a ~daily basis.