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like The Internet Archive would help in that regard but I don’t know how many people are actively searching for an archived version of a website when they can’t access it on it’s actual domain.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.
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.
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.
Yeah but these days, if someone sets up mobile verification or 2FA, it’s not going to be that easy going through forgot password links. Codes will just be sent to a mobile phone or a recovery address that most likely won’t be seen and it’ll force the individual wanting access to go the route of hacking means.
I usually enable 2FA where possible. I just counted my accounts that use them: 14. My password manager stores around 100 accounts. So, yeah.
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
everything you describe would happen. unless you start a foundation to continue your blog only the internet archive would have it.
Not everything: if I buy your domain after it expires, I certainly cannot read your email!
I used to once believe, that a lot of what is on the internet lasts forever. It was a little naive to think, because over the course of my time online, I’ve seen things that I thought would last, ended up not lasting.
I would sometimes cross-search old usernames of mine because I do get around online. I can only now see my past accounts that I’ve made at least 5 years ago. Only 2 accounts that I recall, are 10+ years old when it used to be a bit more. It tells me that things will shut down eventually and it’ll take down many accounts with it.
Unless you are on platforms hosted by Google or Microsoft by using their services, it’s going to last for a long time because they’re a little too big to just simply vanish overnight.
Your best option is to just back up what you can and if you remember to before you die, make arrangements for preservation purposes with instructions to those you’d want in on it.
Just searched my old user names and found absolutely nothing except for one post from 2012 on Minecraft forums
It’s one part a lack of SEO/searchability and nine parts sites that are dead and gone taking that information with them.
I haven’t been the best about backups, passwords, etc but I’ll probably set up a dead mans switch at some point to release my passwords to my family and delete my drives if/when I can’t do it myself. I’ve already got bro on call to drive to my house and shred the drives •=•
