81–90 of 101 posts
Due to the sensitivity of the information being sent out, there is zero margin for error. Even an after death personal message is pretty hefty if it's a false positive.
I would much rather prefer a service that requires my family to get to the info from a will or lawyer to gain access to my sensitive info.
I'd be interested to hear about the business model to this.
Certainly we should regularly tell people that we love them, that they are important to us, etc, but I think being able to say a final goodbye is an entirely different thing. I hope my brother understands how much of a role model he is to me (and I will try to make sure he does know), but even so I would appreciate the chance to say so, one last time. My parents know I love them, but I think they would treasure a post-mortem letter saying exactly that.
However, I agree with everyone who pointed out that emails are a bit impersonal. I would prefer to be able to hand-write letters, and have them automatically posted via regular mail. I think that would be a pleasant surprise.
I remember a service like this at least 6 years ago, possibly much longer - would be interesting to see if they are still around and if they ever had to "activate" for anyone.
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putting a "i died, sorry!" message on any sort of automated system would be colossally stupid (unless you plan to kill yourself, i guess). just have it send out a message saying something like "this is an automated message: i have been unreachable by email for the last 52 days. maybe something is wrong - give me a call"
The email that gets sent out has a disclaimer above it anyway: has set up a Dead Man's Switch to notify you if they were unreachable, and we haven't seen them in a while, so we must assume the worst. If you need something, please email us at support@deadmansswitch.net.
I think I'd rather receive a more direct message about what exactly is happening. "So and so set up a Dead Man's Switch to notify you if they do not respond to us for a certain period of time. That period of time has now elapsed. If you need something..."
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Have 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.
You 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 i…
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You 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 i…
Easy. 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.
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What happens if your death coincides with the death of one of your secret holders (I.e. you and your mom die in a car accident)?
You could setup a scheme where just X (but no less) out of all Y (partial) secret holders are enough to recover the secret. There are cryptographic schemes for that.
[1] I'm fairly certain there's a real word for this, but I cannot think of it, anyone else know?
It would be cool if this service could monitor your Twitter/Facebook/etc for signs of life to cut down on the link-clicking required, and to add more resilience in the case of spam filtering.
That's a very good idea! I'll see if I can have some basic Twitter integration soon.
Obviously this site is a huge target for government organizations who have a lot of secrets - whenever a service like this springs up I bet the first order of business is for someone to install a permanent tap on it, and a way to block the emails if need be.