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Show HN: What happens if you disappear
- kidmenot 10y agoThose two "Sign up" buttons hide the last line of both paragraphs for me. Also, the three buttons at the top ("login with") look a bit funky.
- staticautomatic 10y agoHow do I know the site won't die before I do?
- pomnia 10y agoIt's comfortably running within GAE free quota so even if we disappear it should be up and running ... Gotta pay that domain for max years though ;) Good question, thanks!
- tga 10y agoComfortably running on the GAE free quota makes it more, not less likely to disappear unless you're there to move it when Google pulls the plug.
- pomnia 10y agoYeah you are right. I think we are safe for now in the cloud wars ... maybe.
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoYou are in the least safe position possible. You're on a free Google service. In spite of the longevity of a few of these services, those are shut down all the time. You say: > To make sure you are well and sound, Cronu will charge your card a dollar a month. I would insert "and to ensure your message remains available", as written this feels so inauthentic as to be mildly offensive. And then take that dollar a month from myself and from a few others, and spin up some paid instances. Pick a couple hosts that are likely to be around for a long, long time, and get a box from each, and make your service redundant. Show that you've paid for service from these providers and have paid up for the next 10? 50? 100 years. Register cronu.com for the next 10? 50? 100 years (this expiry date is easily verified with whois) because you obviously can't send email from cronu.com if your domain registration expired. Right now, your expiry is in September of next year. Paying for these instances is what distinguishes you from a free monthly dead-man-switch email and makes you worthy of receiving that dollar.
- jyriand 10y agoI'm constantly losing/breaking my credit/debit cards and forgetting about the services I have subscribed to. Usually I'm reminded by an email from a service telling me that they were unable to charge my credit card. Does it mean that next time it happens and i'm subscribed to your service everyone related will be notified of my death? Edit: I read the description one more time and it seems that you send an email three times. But still I don't see how not answering email is a good way to determine that I'm dead.
- pomnia 10y agoYou will get 3 emails before it happens or you can use email only but then you will need to click on a link every month, whichever works for you.
- pomnia 10y agoIt really comes down to "we need to know you are around". Month is acceptable cycle, email or card it's up to you. The email assumes you are the only one with access to that email.
- midgetjones 10y agoCool idea, but what happens if, for instance, I lose access to my email account? Or if the messages start going into my junk folder? I'd hate to scare my loved ones with an email implying I've disappeared/died.
- pomnia 10y agoYou will need to lose access to all (3) of your social accounts and your email, highly unlikely. One of the reasons why we don't have our own account management ...
- donretag 10y ago3 social accounts? As a person that does not really do social media, I wonder what those 3 accounts are.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoWhat 3 social accounts?
- simonsarris 10y agoGoogle already has a service for this: https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive
- pomnia 10y agoGood one. Although not available for me using custom domain : getting "Inactive Account Manager is not available for your account. We are sorry, Inactive Account Manager is not available for your account."
- codingdave 10y agoReal life already has a service for this. They are called lawyers. They can keep your records on file, you know who they are, they have legal responsibility to keep everything confidential, and when you die... things just work. I guess this would work for more casual documents, passwords to facebook, whatever. I have a document printed out and kept in our file cabinet for such things, so I would not use this service, but I can see where other people might.
- pomnia 10y agoYes, lawyers ... good or nothing for those. Thing is, your friends and family must know where that document is and then who gets to read it first?
- Raphmedia 10y agoSimply add to your will "My Facebook account goes to my mother."
- codingdave 10y agoYeah, no system is perfect. If your will cannot be found, that is a problem. Of course, digital documents won't be notarized, so that is also a problem. Your service has some use cases... but please do not tell me you seriously expect it to replace lawyers when it comes to managing one's estate.
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- king_magic 10y agoIsn't this essentially MetLife Infinity? https://metlifeinfinity.com https://metlifeinfinity.com
- pomnia 10y agoClose but not really storage. I guess more of detection and notification although Google and Merlifeinfinity very close ...
- poof_he_is_gone 10y agoThere is also https://www.fidsafe.com/ https://www.fidsafe.com/
- runjake 10y agoI can see so many things go wrong with this: - Company tanks. - Company gets acquired, and your private data gets mined. - Company gets hacked and database dump gets posted. I think I'd rather stick to the old methods of sealed envelopes and trusted friends or a lawyer. It's more reliable and requires less brain time slices ("Does the comapny still exist? Has it been hacked or acquired?" etc)
- pomnia 10y agoAll valid. Then again envelops tend to get lost, misplaced or simply forgotten ...
- 0xmohit 10y agoAnother possibility is: - An insider misuses powers.
- pomnia 10y agoThat shouldn't be possible, everything is encrypted with the OAuth provider ids that are not stored and available only through the login ... then again SSH was broken ...
- joshfraser 10y agoThen how are they going to decrypt the messages to send to your loved ones?
- codingdave 10y agoDude... People are raising valid concerns about your product, and instead of listening and accepting early feedback from HN, you are all over this discussion, defensively arguing with everyone. Just sit back, hear what people have to say, and then decide for yourself if you want to make changes, or reject the feedback.
- dvirsky 10y agoOr per a single user, even if all else works well: - Email account gets hacked, and you can't respond to emails anymore. - Spam filter bug filters the service's emails for 3 consecutive weeks. - You are simply hospitalized for a few weeks, maybe under anesthesia, maybe in a temporary coma, maybe some memory loss. A "dead man switch" needs to be more robust for really sensitive stuff IMO.
- antisthenes 10y ago> If a subscription charge fails three consecutive weeks, Cronu will release your message. Oh boy. I can see so much going wrong with this.
- pomnia 10y agoWhat else can detect your disappearance? Other than email pings. We use stripe so your card expiration should be covered ... still valid point there.
- inimino 10y ago"Sorry for the false alarm everyone, I'm not dead, I just didn't check my email for a while."
- angry-hacker 10y agoYou can easily be hospitalized, trap in another country without communication etc. etc. for three weeks.
- joenot443 10y agoCall me cheap, but $1 a month seems a little steep for this for me. I'm not planning on dying for another 50 years or so. Even if your site is still around at that point (which, let's be honest, isn't likely), I'll have paid $600 for you to send off a couple email for me. It's a cute idea, and maybe something I'd consider for a small, one-time fee, but I definitely would never pay monthly for it.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoAlso an old email with long-expired passwords etc.
- pomnia 10y agoYou are not cheap (cause I think the same) so there is the email option. If you value your one click a month less than $1 then that should work? Thanks!
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoCan't you send an email on a timer? Say a day or two after your birthday or some holiday. Every year on your birthday you reset the timer. It could take some time after you disappear for the info to arrive.
- pomnia 10y agoWe can and we do. Just the cycle is month not a year cause we think your friends and family won't like to wait a year ...
- nommm-nommm 10y agoThey don't want to wait a month either.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- throwanem 10y ago> The system can not generate the key required to decrypt your data unless you are logged in. Our staff have no means of accessing your data at any given time. If this is true, how can your service work? If I'm dead, I can't log in to generate a decryption key so my message can be sent in the clear. If your service works, how can this be true? If it can decrypt and send my message in the clear when I'm dead, I very evidently don't need to log in for decryption to occur.
- pomnia 10y agoWhen you add recipient your message is (decrypted using your id) copied and the copy is encrypted with the recipient email. Once the recipient logs in (their OAuth id becomes available) the email (verified by the OAuth) is used to decrypt the message copy and encrypted again this time with his/her id. That temporary email encrypted message is decryptable of course although there is no utility or UI for us to do so. I guess we'd better store the owner Id and don't make copies, since it doesn't change anything security wise ... Yes, rogue admin can do harm ...
- ezekg 10y agoHow is this secure? You yourself (or somebody who works for you – a rogue employee) could access your database and decrypt all of your customers passwords and sensitive data for their accounts. This adds a single point of failure for everything you store/send with it. You get hacked, and now they have access to everything.