this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
101 points (97.2% liked)

Programming

17313 readers
190 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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 :

  • Ask a country association through email if am I am dead.

  • 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Just have a requirement that you sign into the system every N hours and respond to a simple challenge. Once you stop doing that, it auto-fires when the time has run out.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (3 children)

There could be reasons other than death preventing you from accessing the system to update this though. Stranded somewhere, power outage, unexpectedly arrested and incarcerated, medical emergency, etc.

[–] Aedis 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

These are all situations that you would want to alert your loved ones though. And the power outage one will probably be solved faster than your switch hopefully.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Then the switch only serves to notify your loved ones that you're having an emergency. What if the switch is to, say, leak some documents to the public? You can't take that back so presumably you only want to do it after you die.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)