2025-06-24 05:20:14
Can Apple buy its way out of trouble? We discuss the promise and pitfalls of Apple acquiring an AI powerhouse… or literally anything else.
2025-06-24 00:00:19
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2025-06-23 23:15:51
I know we all like to get a good memento mori jolt now and again, particularly when the world is in turmoil! (That’s sarcasm.) But as I grow older, I can’t avoid thinking about my digital legacy, or that of my parents, as I am the executor named in their wills.
Six Colors reader David apparently has had his mind running down the same path, as he asks:
Should Apple users name a Legacy Contact for their Apple account? What is wrong with simply giving the password info to the executor of the estate without notifying Apple that the account owner has passed?
It’s an excellent question. While I am not a lawyer and this is absolutely not legal advice, this question plays into the larger issue of preparing for your or someone else’s incapacity or death if you or they want to have their digital footprint carried into the future.
Before the creation of the concept of the cloud, preserving your digital legacy often meant just making sure someone knew the password or passcode for physical devices. If you had accounts online that stored data, they often held lower-resolution images and video or synced items that were present on endpoints. I’m thinking, for instance, of Flickr, which was and remains for current users a way to push media out for private storage or public access, but would never be your sole repository.
You might also have had online storage you accessed via FTP or more secure methods and used to offload data or make it available to other people. Instead of “the cloud” it was “the server” on which you had an account—and you could easily also give someone that account information. (Sometimes that storage was really in the cloud, but it was all storage, like Amazon S3.)
The introduction of service-based storage and syncing, combined with iCloud’s promise of offloading data entirely from local devices, complicated the issue. I don’t know how many hosting companies kept a close watch on access to accounts after someone died as long as the account bill kept being paid.
But companies like Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft had made few plans about the legal and technical aspects of ownership and control, even as they accumulated hundreds of millions of user accounts with petabytes—maybe exabytes—of data. Often, an executor or heir would write a company about a late person’s account only to find that the account was instantly locked down or deleted.
Over time, policies emerged from these companies and others that explained precisely what you needed to provide as an heir, executor, or other party authorized by the deceased to obtain access to their cloud-stored data. That may require a step beyond providing a death certificate: an appropriate party has to obtain a court order, which I’ll talk about more below.
Companies then went further, creating special advance-directive tools like the ones from Apple, Google, and Facebook. By using one of these features, people inheriting your bits avoid cost and time as may bypass needing a lawyer to draft specialized documents.
Across the last several years, 47 U.S. states, D.C., and one territory have adopted the Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, Revised, or RUFADAA for short. This provides a near-universal legal standard for how you write your digital bequests or disposal requests into a will.
David’s question remains hanging in the air, however…
The American Bar Association has a straightforward answer, the kind of thing that you would generally not expect from a lawyer, as you assume there would be too many provisos. In a Q&A section about digital property, they ask and answer the following:
[Q.] A loved one recently passed away and I have all of her usernames and passwords for her online accounts. Can I simply log-on to her online accounts using this information?
[A.] Legally, you cannot log-on to her online accounts, whether you have the passwords and usernames or not, if the terms of service governing the account prohibit it. Some online accounts specify that only the original user may access the user’s online account, even when the original user is deceased.
Despite not being a lawyer, I should pick the nit that the original dead user is in violation of a contract, not the person logging in. This isn’t the same as hacking a computer, although without authorization by the decedent, it could be construed that way? (If you used an account to pretend to continue acting as the person, well, that’s beyond my opinion pay grade.)
I don’t know any case of a person being prosecuted for accessing an account innocently when they are a legitimate party to act on behalf of the person who is gone. However, I have read stories from time to time about cloud hosts and other service providers locking or deleting accounts when executors, heirs, or others continue to log in. It’s not like online services have death records feeds they use to close accounts, but there is some mechanism besides an estate contacting them that sometimes leads to awareness of death.
To avoid this, there’s a reasonably straightforward set of operations you can carry out before you’re gone. Sub in “they” for “you” if you’re working with a family member or other person needing help to set this up.
This last step is a big help if you’re unexpectedly incapacitated and someone needs to run your affairs for you until (or if) you recover.
As Joe Kissell wrote in his Take Control of Your Digital Legacy ebook, a comprehensive guide to the subject:
Your digital legacy—whether, how, and in what ways your data will carry on without you—is a hugely important topic in the 21st century. No matter your age or health, something could happen to you at any time, and having a plan in place to deal with your accounts, files, and other digital data is a great kindness to your family and friends, to say nothing of future generations who may want to know all about you.
If you’d like step-by-step instructions to set up Legacy Contact for your Apple Account, see Apple’s help page or my book, Take Control of Your Apple Account.
You may decide or postpone carrying out the above steps, or find the cost of having a will drafted prohibitive, although many lawyers offer flat package rates for such work. More likely, though, you or someone who asks you for help as their technical expert will be the executor or heir of a person who left no instructions and took no steps to facilitate handing off their digital life. That’s very typical, though it should be less so with every passing year due to RUFADAA and growing awareness.
Reader David’s question was prompted, in fact, by a touching, richly informative, and long thread at TidBITS Talk, the forum used by our friends at TidBITS. A different David, Dave K., documented his struggle to get the right documents to recover the creative work of his late sister.
Because she had left no instructions nor set up a Legacy Contact, Apple told him they required a court order. I will be honest that I didn’t realize this was a requirement in that set of conditions, as I set up Legacy Contact as soon as it was available. Having that in place requires Apple to review a death certificate and possession of the contact key.
Without that in place or a conforming will, a court order would be required, not just for Apple, but likely for each service. While not a complicated document, it’s almost certain you need a lawyer to draft and process it so that it meets the requirements of the court, and the attorney can respond to any deficiencies. On your own, as posters in the thread note, you could mess it up and have the judge refuse to issue what is typically a pro forma response. Dave K. had a lawyer on tap who would manage this for $750, likely representing roughly two to three hours of work for a lawyer and paralegal.
In the end, he was able to negotiate with Apple over a long period to provide enough documentation and support that he could gain access to his sister’s Apple Account and retrieve everything important online. She didn’t leave passwords behind for her devices, and Apple has no way to provide those, so those remained inaccessible. He was able to get Apple to remove the Activation Lock on all of them so he could erase and resell them.
His story is both a cautionary tale for anyone you love who wants their digital life to be preserved or remembered, but also instructive that Apple listened and helped him navigate to a mostly happy conclusion.
Perhaps writing about Dave K. reminded me of Josef K., the protagonist and victim at the center of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Kafka, who died in 1924 at age 40, told his close friend Max Brod, who was also the executor of his estate, in the instructions in his will:
Everything I leave behind me…in the way of notebooks, manuscripts, letters, my own and other people’s, sketches and so on, is to be burned unread and to the last page, as well as all writings of mine or notes which either you may have or other people, from whom you are to beg them in my name.
Kafka wanted a few of his novels and short stories to remain available, but not all. Brod famously ignored him, published everything, and wrote a thinly fictionalized novel about his dear friend. Scholars have debated his actions for a century.
The RUFADAA has a Kafka Option, as do some of the legacy contact/inactive account tools. You can state in writing or configure your preferences for everything to be deleted. If that’s your intent, then there’s even more reason to get on planning. Those around us are more likely to be like Max Brod, and intentionally or accidentally preserve what you asked to be forgotten.
[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
2025-06-21 04:24:21
Kenneth Chang and Iera Hwang of the New York Times take a deep dive into the unique data challenges of the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is powered by a 3.2 gigapixel camera:
Each image taken by Rubin’s camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That’s 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture…. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night.
Although Rubin will take a thousand images a night, those are not what will be sent out into the world at first. Rather, the computers at SLAC will create small snapshots of what has changed compared with what the telescope saw previously… Just one image will contain about 10,000 highlighted changes. An alert will be generated for each change — some 10 million alerts a night.
Storing, transmitting, and disseminating that much data leads to some interesting problems, like having enough storage onsite in case of outages, stringing fiberoptic cable across the Atacama desert, and processing the images to provide manageable data for astronomers to access remotely.
2025-06-21 02:15:58
Last week’s Six Colors podcast was recorded entirely on iPads running iPadOS 26, mine in California and Dan’s in Massachusetts. The podcast is usually just for Six Colors members, but you can listen to it here if you want.
You’ll be disappointed if you expect to hear anything special about it, though. We both recorded it on our usual Shure MV7 USB microphones, and it just doesn’t sound any different at all. (For the full iPad extravaganza, I should’ve edited it in Ferrite on my iPad, but for expediency’s sake, I didn’t at the time. I’ve since done that just for kicks, and that’s the image at the top of this story.)
It’s probably worth explaining why this feature has so many podcasters and other creators in a bit of a tizzy. Many podcasts record remotely, with people all over the world, and they usually use some sort of app to have that real-time conversation. It was Skype back in the day, and these days it’s often Zoom or a web-based recording program like Riverside. Because those apps prioritize real-time audio and video over quality, the quality is frequently bad by necessity.
To ensure that the very best audio and video is used in the final product, we tend to use a technique called a “multi-ender.” In addition to the lower-quality call that’s going on, we all record ourselves on our local device at full quality, and upload those files when we’re done. The result is a final product that isn’t plagued by the dropouts and other quirks of the call itself. I’ve had podcasts where one of my panelists was connected to us via a plain old phone line—but they recorded themselves locally and the finished product sounded completely pristine.
The problem has been iPadOS and iOS, which won’t let you run a videoconferencing app and simultaneously run a second app to capture your microphone and video locally. One app at a time is the rule, especially when it comes to using cameras and microphones. Individual iPhone and iPad videoconferencing apps can choose to build in local-recording features if they want, but in practice… they just don’t.
Apple has solved this in an interesting way. What it’s not doing is allowing multiple apps access to the microphone (so far as I can tell, I just tried it and the moment I started a FaceTime call, my local recording app stopped). Instead, Apple has just built in a system feature, found in Control Center, that will capture local audio and video when you’re on a call. It doesn’t work when another app is not currently using the microphone and camera, so it can’t be set to surreptitiously record stuff, and it displays a recording symbol at the top of the screen when it’s running. When you’re done, you can tap that symbol and it’ll save the file to the Files app.
The file it saves is marked as an mp4 file, but it’s really a container featuring two separate content streams: full-quality video saved in HEVC (H.265) format1, and lossless audio in the FLAC2 compression format. Regardless, I haven’t run into a single format conversion issue. My audio-sync automations on my Mac accept the file just fine, and Ferrite had no problem importing it, either. (The only quirk was that it captured audio at 24-bit, 48KHz and I generally work at 16-bit, 44.1KHz. I have no idea if that’s because of my microphone or because of the iPad, but it doesn’t really matter since converting sample rates and dithering bit depths is easy.)
Even in Developer Beta 1, this feature is pretty solid. What’s missing is a better preview of the audio levels and the ability to adjust audio gain, since different microphones have different gain levels and not all of them are easily adjustable. Beyond that, though, this feature is a winner. Podcasters should be rejoicing—I know I am.
2025-06-21 01:00:31
My thanks to Turbulence Forecast for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Whether you want to keep your nerves in check, are flying with kids, or even want to know the best time to get out of your airline seat for a dash to the bathroom, Turbulence Forecast is the easiest way to know in advance just how smooth or bumpy your next flight is going to be.
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Turbulence Forecast can see out as far as five days, making it easier to pick a calmer day if your plans are flexible. They’re even tracking their forecast stats so you can see how steady their predictions have been over time.
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