So, you've died. Congrats, you're finally debt-free! Unfortunately, things are now a bit more complicated for your relatives. When someone dies, their debts don't simply disappear. Instead, for the most part, they become part of the deceased person's estate—the collection of all assets and liabilities left behind. Understanding how these debts are handled is crucial for both estate planning and managing inherited responsibilities. Let's take a look at what exactly happens when you die with debts to your name, and what you can do to ensure your family members are not left with an unwelcome surprise. And, of course, none of this is legal advice—it's simply an overview of what happens, generally speaking, to your debts when you die.

First off, the probate process

After death, the estate goes through probate. This is the legal process where an executor is appointed to manage the estate, assets are identified and valued, valid debts are paid, and remaining assets are distributed to heirs. During probate proceedings, any outstanding debts must be settled using property and funds from the estate. Heirs receive no inheritance until debts are settled.

Most states require debts to be paid in this order:

1. Funeral expenses

2. Estate administration costs

3. Federal taxes

4. Medical bills from final illness

5. Secured debts

6. Unsecured debts

If the estate lacks funds to pay all debts (aka an insolvent estate), debts are paid according to priority order. Lower-priority creditors may receive partial payment or nothing, while remaining debts typically die with the deceased.

Some assets bypass probate and are protected from creditors. These include life insurance proceeds, retirement accounts with named beneficiaries, assets in living trusts, and property held in joint tenancy.

Types of debts and what happens to them

Now that we know the order of debts that need to be paid, let's take a look at how different types of debt are handled.

Federal student loans

• Automatically discharged upon death

• Death certificate must be submitted to loan servicer

• Private student loans may have different rules; some require payment from the estate

Credit card debt

• Paid from estate assets

• Not inherited by family members unless they are: co-signers on the account, joint account holders, or required by state law (in community property states—more on that below)

Medical bills

• Estate is responsible for payment

• May be negotiable with healthcare providers

• Family members generally not liable unless they signed financial responsibility forms or live in states with specific filial responsibility laws

Mortgages and home loans

• Property can transfer to heirs, but the mortgage remains

• Options for inheriting family members are to assume the mortgage and continue payments, refinance the loan, or sell the property to pay off the debt

Car loans

• Similar to mortgages, lender may allow loan assumption by qualified heirs

• Vehicle can be sold to satisfy the debt

Impact on family members

The good news is that relatives are not typically responsible for repaying the debt of someone who’s died, unless:

• They're a co-signer on a loan with outstanding debt.

• They're a joint account holder on a credit card. (Note: This is different from an authorized user.)

• They're a surviving spouse and your state law requires spouses to pay a particular type of debt.

• They're the executor or administrator of the deceased person’s estate and your state law requires executors or administrators to pay an outstanding bill out of property that was jointly owned by the surviving and deceased spouses.

• They're a surviving spouse and you live in a community property state that requires surviving spouses to use jointly-held property to pay debts of a deceased spouse. These states include Alaska (if a special agreement is signed), Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin.

If there was no co-signer, joint account holder, or other exception, only the estate of the deceased person owes the debt.

Preventive measures

While you can't plan for an unexpected death, there are steps you can take now to protect heirs from debt complications. The most obvious step is to maintain adequate life insurance. Even if you're young and healthy now, you could still need a plan. Make things easier for your loved ones by keeping detailed financial records and regularly updated beneficiary designations. Finally, consider creating a living trust, and consult with estate planning professionals.

If you're the family member of someone who recently left debt behind them, consider consulting a probate attorney. Don't automatically pay debts from personal funds, and always request debt verification in writing while keeping detailed records of all communications.

Debt settlement is tricky enough while you're alive. Understanding what happens to your debts when you die is the best way you don't leave a mess for your estate once you're gone. For more, here's how to talk to your kids about your estate plan now.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple has agreed (PDF) to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then sold to third parties for targeted ads. In the proposed class-action settlement (PDF) -- which comes after five years of litigation -- Apple admitted to no wrongdoing. Instead, the settlement refers to "unintentional" Siri activations that occurred after the "Hey, Siri" feature was introduced in 2014, where recordings were apparently prompted without users ever saying the trigger words, "Hey, Siri." Sometimes Siri would be inadvertently activated, a whistleblower told The Guardian, when an Apple Watch was raised and speech was detected. The only clue that users seemingly had of Siri's alleged spying was eerily accurate targeted ads that appeared after they had just been talking about specific items like Air Jordans or brands like Olive Garden, Reuters noted. It's currently unknown how many customers were affected, but if the settlement is approved, the tech giant has offered up to $20 per Siri-enabled device for any customers who made purchases between September 17, 2014, and December 31, 2024. That includes iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, MacBooks, HomePods, iPod touches, and Apple TVs, the settlement agreement noted. Each customer can submit claims for up to five devices. A hearing when the settlement could be approved is currently scheduled for February 14. If the settlement is certified, Apple will send notices to all affected customers. Through the settlement, customers can not only get monetary relief but also ensure that their private phone calls are permanently deleted. While the settlement appears to be a victory for Apple users after months of mediation, it potentially lets Apple off the hook pretty cheaply. If the court had certified the class action and Apple users had won, Apple could've been fined more than $1.5 billion under the Wiretap Act alone, court filings showed. But lawyers representing Apple users decided to settle, partly because data privacy law is still a "developing area of law imposing inherent risks that a new decision could shift the legal landscape as to the certifiability of a class, liability, and damages," the motion to approve the settlement agreement said. It was also possible that the class size could be significantly narrowed through ongoing litigation, if the court determined that Apple users had to prove their calls had been recorded through an incidental Siri activation -- potentially reducing recoverable damages for everyone.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton has backed Elon Musk's legal challenge against OpenAI, criticizing the AI startup's shift from its nonprofit origins toward a for-profit model. "OpenAI was founded as an explicitly safety-focused non-profit and made various safety related promises in its charter," Hinton said in a statement through AI advocacy group Encode. "Allowing it to tear all of that up when it becomes inconvenient sends a very bad message to other actors in the ecosystem." Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left in 2018, filed an injunction last month to block the company's transition to a for-profit entity. OpenAI dismissed the filing as "utterly without merit." Hinton, who won the 2024 Physics Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in neural networks, has previously criticized OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in October for prioritizing profits over safety concerns.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln returned to its homeport in San Diego on Friday after a multi-month tour at sea — including an unusually long stint of 107 days without a port call. But the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier had something that’s been unheard-of until now: high-speed internet connectivity, even when it was thousands of miles from shore.

The connectivity sailors had available during the Lincoln’s sea tour was the biggest demonstration to date of a Navy project called Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore, which aims to bring shore-grade communications to underway ships, and the related Flank Speed Edge, the Navy initiative to extend its cloud computing offerings to places where bandwidth is a major challenge.

Using proliferated low-earth orbit satellites and 5G cellular networks, the Lincoln was able to transmit and receive volumes of data that previously would have been unthinkable in an afloat environment: about eight terabytes per day.

But the project first started more than two years ago, when officials first realized the technology was now available to connect ships to networks for purposes other than mission-critical tactical and business applications.

“In August of 2022, we went full-in on trying to figure out that solution. We also wanted to provide connectivity in a meaningful way for sailors, because we’re all connected in the world,” Capt. Kevin White, the Lincoln’s combat systems officer, told Federal News Network in an at-sea interview this month, shortly before the ship’s return home. “When you disrupt connections by going to sea, you disrupt one’s own identity and how they conduct their life. We believe that as you enable connections, it’s a way to enable retention in the United States Navy. It’s also a way for people to feel a more meaningful connection to their job.”

‘Layered’ approach to personal, mission-related connectivity

During the five-month deployment — covering some 78,000 miles — the crew used those new connections for everything from YouTube and Instagram to Navy business applications to the warfighting systems that the military’s older, much slower satellite communications links were first set up to serve decades ago.

And while the new Sailor Edge connections offer orders of magnitude more bandwidth than those traditional military SATCOM links, planners also had to keep in mind that they were going to be serving a crew of 6,000 people aboard the Lincoln, so some amount of rationing needed to be taken into consideration.

Still, as long as the ship was operating in areas where network connectivity wasn’t an issue for operational security, in general, there turned out to be plenty of bandwidth to go around, White said.

“What we did was we took a layered concept. One thing we expect is for sailors to be able to text message or call home anytime, so we built a series of layers in how we bucket the traffic and then how it is prioritized amongst available bandwidth,” he said. “We prioritize our business applications — we have quality of work traffic shaping layers, and those are our highest priority. But it also turns out that those are really kind of low traffic sources. And then we have many quality of life traffic shaping layers … at any given time, the layers are provisioning bandwidth across those services.”

Each sailor on board was given an account to log into the ship’s WiFi network, similar to the portals one might use at a hotel.

“And as they do, that tracks how much data they use, and then we have some mechanisms that enforce where they are allowed to go versus where they are not allowed to go per DoD policy,” White said. “We actually layer up content based on the value that content provides somebody combined with how bandwidth-heavy it is. I expect everybody to be able to make a phone call and send a text message, and then some level of personal entertainment value. However, it is definitely not unlimited.”

Testing the waters with more providers

During long transits far from shore (the Lincoln’s tour spanned from the Western Pacific to an unexpected deployment to the Middle East), the high-speed links were supplied mainly by Starshield, SpaceX’s P-LEO offering for government customers. But White said several other satellite providers have expressed interest in the Sailor Edge effort.

“We’ve had some awesome opportunities to exercise some of those game-changing capabilities,” he said. “It’s kind of like if you build it, they will come, and we’ve now seen a full force effort of folks interested to scale out both our capability on ships, as well as in various shore sites around the world. So that’s fantastic, and that was exactly what we envisioned from the start.”

But closer to land, the Lincoln’s latest deployment also demonstrated the ability to connect the ship to commercial 5G towers at what turned out to be surprisingly long distances.

“We tested a multi-5G cellular aggregation capability with cellular antennas, and the intent of the test was if a ship is in a foreign port, what value does (5G) that provide that ship from a cost and a scalability perspective? But we also wanted to see if we could actually get some measurable traffic to pass while we’re actually at sea,” White said. “And it worked. It worked phenomenally. I was quite surprised at how far away we were able to pass traffic at sea — in excess of 100 miles. And it just shows the scalability of one the Sailor Edge Afloat and Ashore capability, as well as how we can integrate with other options and continue to move the needle.”

The post Lincoln returns to port after proving out ‘game changing’ connectivity first appeared on Federal News Network.

President Biden on Monday signed the SHARE IT Act (H.R. 9566) into law, mandating federal agencies share custom-developed code with each other to prevent duplicative software development contracts and reduce the $12 billion annual government software expenditure. The law requires agencies to publicly list metadata about custom code, establish sharing policies, and align development with best practices while exempting classified, national security, and privacy-sensitive code. FedScoop reports: Under the law, agency chief information officers are required to develop policies within 180 days of enactment that implement the act. Those policies need to ensure that custom-developed code aligns with best practices, establish a process for making the metadata for custom code publicly available, and outline a standardized reporting process. Per the new law, metadata includes information about whether custom code was developed under a contract or shared in a repository, the contract number, and a hyperlink to the repository where the code was shared. The legislation also has industry support. Stan Shepard, Atlassian's general counsel, said that the company shares "the belief that greater collaboration and sharing of custom code will promote openness, efficiency, and innovation across the federal enterprise."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bird flu has been around for a long time, but a major U.S. outbreak of H5N1, ongoing since March 2024, has raised concern for a wider spread that will affect more than just birds. Also at risk: indoor cats, who are highly susceptible to the virus and likely to experience severe illness if infected. Several animal deaths have already been reported across Oregon and California.

If you have a pet cat—or have feral or barn cats nearby—you should be aware of the symptoms of bird flu in felines and take preventive measures to protect your animals from infection.

What are the signs of bird flu in cats?

Symptoms of bird flu infection in cats may include lethargy, fever, and loss of appetite as well as mood and behavior change (such as unusual hiding or excessive sleeping). Some cats will also develop redness in their eyes and/or discharge from their eyes and nose, and may experience respiratory difficulty (labored breathing, sneezing, and coughing) or neurological symptoms (seizures or tremors).

If your cat shows any of these signs, keep them away from other cats and anyone with a compromised immune system and call your vet right away.

How to protect your cat from bird flu

There are a few preventive measures you can take to minimize the risk of your cat contracting bird flu:

• Do not feed them raw meat or unpasteurized dairy, including raw milk. (Cooking and pasteurizing kills viruses and germs that are dangerous for animals.) Check the ingredients in your cat's food to ensure it doesn't contain any raw meat or dairy. Northwest Naturals has already recalled frozen pet food with raw turkey—the affected batches were sold in 12 states and in British Columbia, Canada.

• You should also keep your cat away from livestock, poultry, and wild birds, all of which may carry the virus. Keep them indoors, or at least prevent them from wandering unsupervised around outside, where they are likely to encounter and hunt birds.

• Finally, you should wash your hands after touching poultry and any animals, including your cat. Do not interact with sick or dead birds without sufficient protection.