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.
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.
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.
Yeah, so you set the number of hours with that in mind. Not every 12h, something like every 240h so that there’s time to adjust or make a phone call.
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.
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.
Yes, this is what I think of when I think of a “dead man’s switch”. It relates to the concept of a physical device that deactivates or activates if you let go of a switch, like a light saber for example.
I think an interval of weeks would be more convenient than hours to avoid false positives. But I think Patrick Stewart’s character did daily check-ins in the movie Safe House. The dead man’s switch was actually the central plot point in that movie.