[PLUG] Death in the open source community

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

This should be in your will and available to your attorney. If you don't
*have* a will and an attorney who understands what this means, get both.

Keith Lofstrom wrote:

>Losing Chris reminds us that we are all mortal.  Some of us are
>maintaining open source projects, and many of us have information
>and records well encrypted on our own machines.  While it is tragic
>to lose the individual, the tragedy is compounded when others depend
>on the information we keep secure.  And as Linux users, some of us
>keep our data *very* secure.
>
>In March 2004, the original author of Dirvish, JW Schultz, was
>murdered for witnessing a crime.   The Dirvish CVS tree was stored
>on his encrypted disks, and was unrecoverable by the best forensic
>computer scientists.  His death was a terrible loss to the development
>of Dirvish, and the CVS information took months to reconstruct.
>
>It might be helpful to set up some sort of "information escrow"
>mechanism for PLUG members.  For example, I could regularly construct
>a file containing all my secret information, encrypt it with my
>public key, and regularly send it to special email accounts maintained
>by a few trusted individuals. 
>
>Separately, I could send printed fragments of my private keys to
>other trusted individuals.  Some mechanism where some fraction of
>those key fragments can be combined to produce a whole one would 
>allow, say, 5 individuals out of 8 to combine their key fragments
>and get access to my data.  
>
>Setting up a tested mechanism for this might help our project teams
>and our families recover after our own death or disablement.   This
>possibility is only one drunk driver away.  Anyone interested in
>setting up such a mechanism?
>
>Keith
>
>  
>