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.
I don’t have a great solution for this particular problem.
However any solution that you come up with has to be resilient enough that the nodes that execute such scenario are always available.
You don’t just want a system with high availability, you want a system that will stand the test of time. For example, it might trigger 30 or 50 years from now. You might not want to use AWS or Google or Azure or any sort of system like that. They don’t seem to keep their solutions available for that long. So you’ll need to host something yourself and make sure it’s resilient to a multitude of scenarios that might bring the “back end” down.
You’d also need to set-up some sort of test for the system to make sure it’s still running and it’ll do what you want it to. Maybe it runs every 3 months or so like a fire system drill.
Honestly the trigger can be something as simple as you hitting a button connected to your system every week with a way for it to ping and prompt you to do it you if you haven’t “reset” the counter in a timely fashion.
I would probably do something like that with a weekly cadence and a whole other week to make sure I don’t miss the reset.
You probably also want to be able to set it to different modes if you think you will be away for a while. Like a vacation mode or oh shit I’m in the hospital mode.
Additionally, I also wouldn’t be as fatalistic as sending goodbyes to everyone. I would use it more as a system to sound an alarm that I’m not okay and something has happened to me and communicate that with people who could do something about it. Like verify if I’m alive or not, or contact local authorities to post a missing persons report.
This same system of notifying could also allow closer people to me to trigger an “oh shit I’m dead mode” which would then execute whatever is in that idea of yours.
I wouldn’t rely on a technology solution entirely. I would pay multiple lawyers to send a specific file to different recipients in the case of my death. The file would contain the list of release mules and recipients.
If I had something worth my life.