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Dead Man's Switch
- WantonQuantum 3y agoYou could achieve the same thing with gmail’s scheduled email. Or you could give your emails to a company based in the Caymans.
- tronster 3y agoI noticed that as well; surprised more aren't writing about it. There would need to be some level of trust established with any organization handling e-mails, likely filled sensitive content. An unknown, faceless company in the Caymans doesn't instill that trust.
- Ylpertnodi 3y agoUsing Gmail scheduled email would only work for suicide?
- edward28 3y agoYou schedule it for X months from now, and at X days before sending you reschedule it X months later, ad infinitum.
- hsjsbeebue 3y agoWhat is the dead mans switch guy dies?
- nthdeui 3y agoPresumably you'll get an email from him to tell you so
- hsjsbeebue 3y agoWhat if I am dead?
- cydodon 3y agohmm... if you trigger other actions with these emails you are halfway into the plot of "Deamon" by Daniel Suarez ;) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel)
- moinism 3y agoIt's a shameless plug, but I have built and use something similar: https://backupdiary.com https://backupdiary.com
- tempestn 3y agoThe "but" is that I will almost certainly outlive this service. I don't remember the name, but there was something similar, though a bit more built up and polished, a few years back. Seems like a good idea, so I set it up. A year or two later, it was gone. Thankfully, I'm not. I love the idea of something like this - even better if it included some digital housekeeping, deleting what I'd rather delete, and sending what I'd like to share - but I think I'll have to build and maintain it for myself if I want it to last.
- oliviabenson 3y agoProbably, but this service has been around for over a decade so it has at least proven that it has some longevity — plus the creator is an HN user and this concern comes up every time the service is discussed, so maybe it’ll outlive us all because of the universe’s desire to prove a bunch of cynical nerds wrong.
- xg15 3y agoMaybe some HNers should arrange to make this thread a yearly event where we regularly check if the service is still alive.
- ndr 3y agoThe tool itself could use a Dead Tool's Switch.
- 627467 3y agoI'm torn: the pricing is very good for a service that is meant - in spirit - to last a lifetime. but it also seems unrealisticaly cheap. a subscription seems more sustainable.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago> I will almost certainly outlive this service. You hope ;). You can't predict some things, so it's good practice to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. That said, the old fashioned alternative is to set up a will with a notary.
- juitpykyk 3y agoIdea: offer a separate service where you can pay to prevent one particular switch being activated. Price: $10k
- xg15 3y agoYou could make this into a bidding war. The dead man's switch owner makes a base payment to install the switch. An adversary can block the switch by paying double that, the owner can overrule the adversary by paying double of his bid, the adversary can override the override by quadrupling his bid, etc etc. I'm sure there is some VC money in this.
- segfaultbuserr 3y agoTo make it more "interesting", implement it as a smart contract on the blockchain, so an adversary can also choose to exploit software vulnerabilities for profit...
- xg15 3y agoIt's a nice marketing stunt and/or art project - but if I was active in circles where my sudden, untimely death was something to worry about so much that I need an insurance, then the last thing I'd want to entrust my secrets to would probably be some random startup with unclear financing and ownership structure that could pivot or get acqui-hired or just close up shop tomorrow.
- willi59549879 3y agoPeople are proabably better off with notes on paper or something self hosted. But the idea is nice. there are some projects on github with the same idea: https://github.com/kescherCode/dead-mans-switch https://github.com/kescherCode/dead-mans-switch
- Edd314159 3y agoI have somewhere between 0 and ~60 years left to live. I don’t trust this service (or any service!) to remain active and live for even 5 of those years.
- izoow 3y agoThe manual checking in part seems like a lot of hassle, even if it's only once every 2 months or so. If I wanted to have something like this, I'd want it to be as set-and-forget as possible. For example, me being alive could be determined by whether I logged into my machine over the last X days and a certain service ran. If it didn't, only then start bugging me to confirm manually. Also, as others have already mentioned, I'd have very little trust that such service will still be around when I'll need it to trigger. Something like scheduled gmail + a cronjob on my local machine that runs once a day and reschedules the email is something I'd imagine could work if I wanted to set up something like this for myself.
- themoonisachees 3y agoKind of cool, but also consider that you will outlive your machine and probably Gmail too.
- tempestn 3y agoAlmost certainly your machine, but presumably you have a process to port services to your new machine. Gmail, I'm not so sure..
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago> Something like scheduled gmail + a cronjob on my local machine I would want a non-local machine, what if my house burns down with me? Whole point is that if I die, it fires
- izoow 3y agoThe local machine would be what's keeping it from firing, not what's making it fire.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoQuite amusing, but receiving a payment every month is a pretty good indicator if someone is still alive.
- sho 3y agoI had a very similar idea to this a long time ago and built a basic thing, registered a domain etc, was ready to put it live.. and then I spoke to a lawyer, who told me to think very carefully about whether I really wanted to deal with the possible legal and personal ramifications of sending potentially explosive material on or around someone's death. I decided I probably didn't want to so I shelved it. I think it's important something like this exists but I'd also ask the author if he's really thought this through.
- echoangle 3y agoWould you really be responsible for this? Like, what’s the worst that could happen? People putting threats or insults into their messages? Can’t you just remove it as soon as it is reported, and be fine? Is there a legal need to proactively monitor your content?
- tjoff 3y agoIANAL, but I feel a bigger risk would be that you trigger it before it should. Maybe a bug in your emailserver or that the configuration option that you used to correctly turn off the spam-filter had a bug in it and caused some of the I'm-alive signals to be dropped.
- marci 3y agoOr worse, your final message gets silently filtered out by the recipient's Gmail/Hotmail for some reason.
- swader999 3y agoProgrammable crypto might be a better foundation to build this sort of thing on top of.
- nojs 3y agoA fun thought experiment is to consider what would happen if you forgot to check in and the switch fired, and emailed all your loved ones the things you wanted to tell them - would your life get better or worse? Maybe this would function as a layer of plausible deniability for telling everyone how you felt.
- tveyben 3y agoInteresting concept, but can I really trust that this system is alive and working when it’s my time to leave this planet? The date not planned, but hopefully not until after XX years and god knows how many dot-com’s… Maybe we also need a dead-man’s-switch for this dead-man’s-switch service
- ciccionamente 3y agoShameless plug: https://weexpire.org https://weexpire.org
- resuresu 3y ago[dead]
- coldblues 3y agoBitwarden's Emergency Access (https://bitwarden.com/help/emergency-access/ https://bitwarden.com/help/emergency-access/) would be a much better way to go about it.
- mud_dauber 3y agoSounds like an ideal tool for the day that you get laid off. Especially if you’ve got an ax to grind.
- ThomasMidgley 3y agoWhat if this service has a bug and sends all messages even if you are going well?
- morningsam 3y agoI don't know how it works in other countries, but at least in Germany, the judiciary essentially provides this service: When you have your will notarized, they will offer to send a copy to the district court who will keep it safe until you die, at which point they will retrieve it to decide what happens to your inheritance. As far as I know, you can also put non-inheritance related things in there, including asking people to forward messages (in sealed envelopes, if you wish) on your behalf. In countries with this kind of system, the only use case I can imagine for an additional commercial e-mail based service is if you don't trust your next of kin at all, so you don't want to leave the message forwarding up to them, or have messages whose recipients you want to keep secret from them.
- _boffin_ 3y agoMade by: https://www.stochastic.io https://www.stochastic.io Which has an address of: 5th Floor, Genesis Building, Genesis Close George Town, Grand Cayman Cayman Islands, KY1-1106 Which also shares an address with: https://mcgrathtonner.com https://mcgrathtonner.com Which also show up in the Paradise Papers: https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/81077405 https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/81077405