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.

  • lthlnkso@programming.dev
    7·
    8 months ago

    One concept I would add is that the machine hosting the dead man’s switch should have a booby trap.

    Suppose your enemies know about the dead man’s switch. (And they probably should know as it would encourage them not to murder you.) They want to disable it, so they abduct and torture you for the details. You must be able to give them details that will plausibly allow them to disable the DMS - so that they stop torturing you, while secretly triggering your backup.

    I imagine this as the VM running the DMS has a process that runs on login. The process silently runs, sleeps for an hour, and then sends a message to a second VM, configured from a totally different account. That second VM will wait a month (long enough for your enemies to stop torturing you and assume they’ve won - or for you to disable in the case of an accidental trigger) and then post your information on various socials. When you login to the DMS machine you have an hour to kill the process or a month to kill the second machine if you forgot to do so.

    I would also say that you can pay for your VMs in advance using bitcoin or monero (njalla accepts both!). Pay in advance for 10 years from separate wallets, configure your DMS and backup, and let them go!