Leave instructions in your will for your executor to carry out after you are gone. The high tech stuff is not needed. Several times on forums or in other places, someone passes away and word gets around. In some cases the member’s widow will log in to relay the news and maybe share some memories of the deceased. That means they must have been given the account password for such purposes.

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Tech people are overthinking this. You pay a lawyer to do something when certain conditions are met.

Deviant has a talk about setting up a similar protocol for their group of friends to access passwords - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6ihrGNGesfI

In that case the protocol involved the lawyer contacting certain people to ensure consensus that the person is really in need of help, but the protocol can be whatever you want.

I always thought it was just like an email set to future send in say a week or 2, then every few days or every week you go in and bump forward the date.

I always heard a Dead Man’s Switch defined as a switch which goes off once you stop pressing it. So you just set up something to go off in the future, then for as long as you’re alive you keep preventing it from going off.

Thor from Pirate Software (a game studio) does this. He has his set up so that if he doesn’t log into a specific server for a year, the source code to his game will be automatically published.

You could do the same thing. Just grab a super cheap server that checks the last login date and sends out emails.

I think the classic choice is a ping with a wide enough margin of error to allow for temporary incapacitation. There are a plethora of ways to do this and the main concern would probably be obfuscation of the trigger and a proof of identity. In the modern world the cheap solution I’d suggest is connecting a server with a 2FA app on your phone and having a request string/web page where you can input a token. If the server goes a few days without a correct token it triggers the death script.

I’d avoid anything that actively pings you since that traffic would be predictable and easier to snoop - potentially alerting a bad actor to the fact you have such a system setup… you also, obviously, don’t want to tell anyone you have such a system. And you definitely want some kind of rotating identity proof so that replay attacks can’t indefinitely delay the script trigger - random ass 2FA apps might be too easy to identify in this regard but it’s so trivial and accessible to implement that I think it’s a reasonable choice.

Some form of compute with a recurring job that checks for a DNS address or domain.

Choose a domain that needs to be regularly paid for as a target.

Reason I would choose something you pay for as the trigger is because not paying a bill after your death is one thing that will be actioned on no matter what.

#!/bin/bash

SERVICE="irl_heartbeat"
LOGFILE="/var/log/heartbeat_monitor.log"
EMAIL="friends_and_family@example.com"
SUBJECT="Alert: irl_heartbeat service stopped"
BODY="See y'all in hell"

if systemctl is-active --quiet $SERVICE; then
    echo "$(date "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S") - $SERVICE is running" >> $LOGFILE
else
    LAST_ACTIVE=$(systemctl show $SERVICE --property=InactiveExitTimestamp | cut -d'=' -f2)
    CURRENT_TIME=$(date +%s)
    LAST_ACTIVE_TIME=$(date -d "$LAST_ACTIVE" +%s)
    DIFF=$(( (CURRENT_TIME - LAST_ACTIVE_TIME) / 60 ))

    if [ "$DIFF" -gt 20 ]; then
       echo "$BODY" | mail -s "$SUBJECT" $EMAIL
       echo "$(date "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S") - Email alert sent: $SERVICE has been inactive for more than $DIFF minutes" >> $LOGFILE
    else
       echo "$(date "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S") - No alert sent. $SERVICE has been inactive for $DIFF minutes, which is less than the threshold of 20 minutes." >> $LOGFILE
    fi
fi

pls test it accordingly before use

I’ve actually given this a lot of thought over the years. The biggest issue for me is all my AWS services that no one in my family knows about.

So the idea would be to, at minimum, let my family know what services are being used.

Unfortunately there isn’t a turn-key solution. I’ve seen a number of well-meaning solutions and some that are quite novel but they all suffer from the same problems: how do you deal with false positives and how do you verify your deadness.

I imagine that the problem is similar to the Yellowstone trash can problem, in that any solution to mitigate one will make it harder on the other.

The best solution I’ve found is to have a two-person solution, similar to launching a nuke. You have automation that tests if you are active that emails a close friend or relative to verify you are indeed dead.

Ideally there would be more than one person on this list a confirmation from two people would kick off all of the automations you code.

Well, if you can tolerate Google, they actually offer this. If I don’t interact with my accounts for 3 months, it will send the email I’ve composed to designated recipients.

Man, if I ever become suicidal I’m gonna become a whistleblower first so I can leave chaos and confusion in my wake

Make it check a lemmy or x account. If you don’t post for 24 hours it should run.

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.

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!

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.