WikiLeaks Alleges Relationship With Web Activist Aaron Swartz

The whistle-blowing organization surfaces new claims of ties to the late Web activist.
Julian_Assange

Don’t Be Evil Dead

Obviously, there’s no benefit to Google. But it’s important to the company to help our families through this horrific if inevitable life event.

— Google “chief people officer” Laszlo Bock in an interview with Forbes, on the death benefit paid to the spouses or domestic partners of deceased Google employees: With 50 percent of their salary for 10 years, immediate stock vesting and $1,000 a month for any surviving children until they reach 19 years old

Talking About Death Online

As someone who lives out most of her life online and revels in the Web, I can tell you it feels very weird not to have an outlet for one of the biggest events of my life to date, right up there with graduating from college, getting jobs, moving to New York, all of which were shared, celebrated, praised on the Internet.

Jenna Wortham of The New York Times, in a post about discussing death online

Voices

Jerry Yang’s Brush With Death (Comic)

Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site.

There Are Seven Billion People on Planet Earth Right Now (Try to Keep Up, Facebook!)

It’s official: Seven billion people are alive in the world at this moment, a high population point of all time. And they are more digital than ever.

Viral Video: The Funniest Steve Jobs Spoof Ever

We all need to laugh a little after today’s sad news of the death of Apple co-founder and chairman Steve Jobs.

News Byte

I-Postmortem Wants to Make Us All Virtually Immortal

All of us who use the Internet are going to die at some point, and it’s not yet established what we’ll do with our online presences and whether we’ll leave digital legacies. A new entrant to the online cemetery space launching at the DEMO conference today is I-Postmortem, which offers sites for not-dead-yet people to create a sort of time capsule of their last wishes and documents stored at a Swiss data warehouse (costing a hefty $120 per year!). What seems problematic about this approach is that start-ups often die much sooner than people.

Handling the Digital Death — Or Not — Of a Business

Online acknowledgement of the death of a commercial establishment is perhaps not as touchy a subject as how the Web handles the death of a person — but it’s still pretty awkward.

QOTD: Keep Calm and Carry on, Twitter!

In any case, I hope Google+ succeeds. Given the blog posts saying this will kill Tumblr, Twitter, Foursquare, etc, you might wonder why I feel that way. Well first, I don’t think competitors kill companies and services. I think the vast majority of “deaths” are self inflicted.

A VC Fred Wilson, on the newest entrant into social networking game.

Voices

If You Die Tomorrow, Who Will Bury Your Data Six Feet Under?

Who is going to be reading your email after you die? Life Ensured, a start-up offering end-of-life planning, thinks this will be a grave issue in the future.