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I concur, with the following additional reasons. First, depending on what you meant by "mess up": there's a chance they're not trustworthy (would read something
by corin_ 15y ago
I concur, with the following additional reasons. First, depending on what you meant by "mess up": there's a chance they're not trustworthy (would read something you don't want read), and there's also a chance they screw up (and lose what you want sent - or send it when it shouldn't be sent).
Perhaps an even bigger thing for me is that an email seems so... off-hand, informal. I think if a friend/relative/etc died and an email was automatically sent to me from them I would feel a lot less... less something, can't quite think of the word, than if I got a properly written letter. Less sentimental I guess, less appreciative of it.
- wccrawford 15y agoI actually hadn't even considered that they might read my letters without me knowing. I simply meant that a server went bonkers, or some bad code made it live and they accidentally sent my mails early. As for the informal, bit... I certainly wouldn't let my mother be informed this way. But friends? That's how I mainly communicate with them anyhow.
- StavrosK 15y agoHey guys, I read the entire frontpage and somehow missed this story: I made Dead Man's Switch, and the beta is the second iteration, hosted on GAE. I certainly didn't expect it to be HNed so early. These are all valid concerns. This isn't meant to replace wills or lawyers, it's just something to tell your friends to maybe look for you in the mountains if you don't respond in X days. Some people also had the idea of using it to monitor infirm/elderly people, so I wrote this second version to hopefully have more flexibility to interface with phone/sms/etc. I'll be glad to answer any questions you may have!
- Splines 15y agoSorry for the morbid curiousity, but can you share any stories of "successes"?
- StavrosK 15y agoHmm, I don't have any of those (I get an email whenever someone's switch triggers, but just the username, and the emails have been deleted at that point), I suspect most are just tests, or the friends/relatives aren't too inclined to email me about it. I do have a "success" story (used very very loosely due to the morbid nature), I'll write it up when the service is out of beta and link it here.
- fishtoaster 15y agoHave you considered setting up an api? If I used this, I'd worry that if I forget to respond to the emails or something. Letting me hook it into other events that indicate I'm alive, such as logging into my laptop, etc, would prevent this. It'd really be a one-action api- send a post request to some url to keep me alive, with some level of authentication.
- StavrosK 15y agoYou can load any webpage on the site, and it will keep you alive. It's as simple as doing a POST on the form, but it should be trivial for me to implement a simple API, so I'll write this soon! It will probably be something like: https://www.deadmansswitch.net/api/checkin/?username&password However, GAE can't do https on that domain yet, and I don't feel very secure passing credentials like that, so I might have to issue API keys. Still, not very hard, thanks for the suggestion!
- jmcqk6 15y agoEasy. Instead of sending a username and password, generate a long key of some kind that would be unique to each user and use that instead.
- palish 15y agoI'm not sure the elderly would respond very well to your application's (perfectly awesome!) name.
- StavrosK 15y agoHaha, hmm, you're right there. However, that is the standard name of any device that triggers when the user loses consciousness or is otherwise incapacitated.
- coderdude 15y agoSorry to spring this on you, but it looked interesting and I figured HN would dig it. Hopefully you're getting some good feedback though.
- StavrosK 15y agoI am, thanks! Luckily everything is going fine so far, and GAE is a champ.