This week I read a post about the death of the Boeing whistleblower, and how Boeing might have suicided him.
I don’t care about if the rumors are true or not, however someone mentioned in the comments that in such situations one should always have a Dead Man Switch.
For those who don’t know a Dead Man Switch is basically an action TBD in case you die, like leaking documents, send messages/emails, kill a server etc . . .
The concept tickled me a bit, and I decided I want to build a similar system for myself. No, I am not in danger but I would like to send last goodbyes to friends and family. I think it would be cool concept.
How would you go and build such service?
I thinking of using a VPS to do the actions because it would be running for a while before my debit card gets cancelled.
The thing that is bugging me out is the trigger, I will not put that responsibility onto someone that’s cheating, so it would have to be something which can reliably tell I am dead and has to run regularly.
Where is what I come up with :
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Ask a country association through email if am I am dead.
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Check if I haven’t logged out on my password manager in a week. If it’s even possible.
TLDR; Give me ideas on how to build a DEAD MAN SWITCH and what triggers should I use.
Leave instructions in your will for your executor to carry out after you are gone. The high tech stuff is not needed. Several times on forums or in other places, someone passes away and word gets around. In some cases the member’s widow will log in to relay the news and maybe share some memories of the deceased. That means they must have been given the account password for such purposes.
Tech people are overthinking this. You pay a lawyer to do something when certain conditions are met.
Deviant has a talk about setting up a similar protocol for their group of friends to access passwords - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6ihrGNGesfI
In that case the protocol involved the lawyer contacting certain people to ensure consensus that the person is really in need of help, but the protocol can be whatever you want.
The human in this protocol fixes the “false-positive” problem:
Consider the case where the technical system has just sent an alarm that “ransomwarelettuce hasn’t been following their usual internet routine for the last week, and therefore they must be dead”
ransomwarelettuce meanwhile is unconscious in a hospital after an accident that destroyed their phone and all of its 2FA methods, but will eventually wake up and be super-embarassed if their documents were published!
If the technical system is primary, it immediately publishes your “don’t publish this while I’m alive” documents.
If the technical system is filtered through some human system such as the remote lawyer, they try to phone you, contact your family, contact the hospitals, search for news stories about you, before publishing the “don’t publish this while I’m alive” documents.
Is it the word “lawyer” or spending some small amount of money?
Lawyers are bound by law and an ethical code to conduct business in a particular way. They also tend to have support infrastructure and continuity plans that private individuals do not.
If making sure something actually happens is important to you, this is the best option.
I always thought it was just like an email set to future send in say a week or 2, then every few days or every week you go in and bump forward the date.
I always heard a Dead Man’s Switch defined as a switch which goes off once you stop pressing it. So you just set up something to go off in the future, then for as long as you’re alive you keep preventing it from going off.
As long as you’re okay with the edge cases on that: jailed, hospitalized, or other event lasting two weeks and your switch goes off.
Yep, false positives are a problem for a dead man’s switch.
Two weeks without being able to get internet access or word to a friend is definitely possible but seems pretty unlikely.
You could make it more than 2 weeks out but I think that’s a good middle ground between avoiding false positives and striking while the iron is hot, you know? Imagine sending an email beginning “if you’re reading this I’m dead…” and having recipients think “Yeah, that was ages ago.”
Yeah that’s my problem, a false positive in this situation is not something that atrocious, but I would catch slack by my friends for the rest of my life hehehe.
Just make it ridiculous. Like instructions to get an artifact that will resurrect you from a museum in France… Then if it goes off by accident, it is comedy.
This is the core issue with the traditional dead man’s “switch” – it doesn’t require death to go off, just letting go of it, and there are other reasons why that might happen. By extension, a switch that requires you to log into something periodically might be problematic if you’re predisposed. Personally I’d just set a longer timer, a month is probably fine and, unless your “exposure” is extremely time sensitive, a month won’t matter once you’re dead.
Thor from Pirate Software (a game studio) does this. He has his set up so that if he doesn’t log into a specific server for a year, the source code to his game will be automatically published.
You could do the same thing. Just grab a super cheap server that checks the last login date and sends out emails.
