today is Ada Lovelace day.

this day has been organised to celebrate and draw attention to women who excel in technology. you can find out more about ada or other women in tech on the ada lovelace day collection and their twitter account

i wanted to highlight a woman who has been instrumental to the internet industry – particularly in the early days. perhaps someone who worked with tim berners-lee in developing hypertext. someone at BBN or USC/ISI who helped develop the domain name system (DNS). but all the internet history sites, like this one from the computer history museum, talk about the men – vint cerf, bob kahn, tim berners-lee, ray tomlinson, etc.

i tried to think of other internet women and came up with a few… esther dyson, kim polese, meg whitman, and even carly fiorina.

but it was really hard to find the names of any women who worked on standards, protocols, etc. do i need to search thru RFCs to find them? academic journals? they must exist!

so after spending a good chunk of time this afternoon searching, here’s 2 women i’d like to highlight:

Joan Margaret Winters
while i could barely find any information about her – it seems she was an early advocate for what we now call ‘user experience’ but then ‘human factors’. She worked with/at IBM from the mid-1979s on both software & hardware human factors projects.

slightly more info here.

Judith Estrin
Judith has co-founded 2 networking companies – Bridge which merged with 3Com and Precept which was acquired by Cisco. She has been on Fortune mag’s list of the most powerful women (3 times!) and was inducted to the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 2002. Last September, she wrote the book: Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy .

it has been quite some time since i’ve posted to this blog so why not start with a post about death…

death switch is a service which sends out emails of your choosing – after you die. you can be a polite internet citizen and unsubscribe to all those mailing lists and newsletters which you will no longer read. you can freak out friends by sending them mail after they’ve attended your funeral. you can say goodbye to those in an online community who are wondering why you’ve suddenly gotten so quiet. you can send family members passwords to accounts and even tell them where that secret treasure is buried.

but when will the service begin to update your facebook / twitter status? when does it post a farewell message to youtube and your blog? or whatever technology we’ll be using by that time.

how does death switch know you’re dead? periodically it sends your email address a message. if you reply to that email, it knows you’re alive. if you do not reply, it sends you more messages over x period of time (you control the time frames) and if you don’t reply to any of them, the system assumes you are dead (or in a coma / critically injured). the sample email on their website shows they attempt to contact you 10 times within a little over a month before they send your emails although the info on the site suggests you can change this to a year.

i like the idea of being able to tie up loose ends as well as send that final message but the current product offering is very limited in terms of how many emails & recipients you can contact. the service only sends 1 batch of emails too… you can’t schedule emails to go x amt of time after your death. pricing is $19.95 per year for 30 emails. that won’t cover most people’s fb friend lists.

i’m also not quite sure about how they validate your death but i haven’t logged in to see how complete the settings are. the site doesn’t have any information about the company so at this stage there is zero trust the company will still be around when you die or the security of your information.

would you use the service? how would you use it?

via lifehacker