
Show HN: Deadman.io - a digital dead man's switch - m3ntat
http://www.deadman.io
======
StavrosK
I made the same thing seven years or so ago:

<http://www.deadmansswitch.net>

As for the trust issues, you can easily just say "look under the porch in my
house", you don't have to reveal all the information there. Or, just encrypt
things.

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jonpaul
Nice. Do you actually make a reasonable amount of money the on service? The
reason I ask is because these dollar/lifetime web services are popping up
more, and I find it to be an interesting pricing model

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StavrosK
Not overly, but it's just a side project for me. I should start marketing it
more, I chose the lifetime pricing model because downgrading someone's account
if they died didn't really make sense for the project...

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fudged71
For a while now I've wondered if possibly your service could tie into IFTTT.
That would be really cool.

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StavrosK
I'd definitely be up for it if IFTTT were. Do you mean as a "switch triggered"
thing, for Twitter, Facebook, etc?

A problem with that is that people can have custom intervals per-message, so
they can have one for "I'm missing for a day", one for a month, etc, so
there's no "one" switch. I could make one, though, I guess.

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MattRogish
Yes, I'd gladly share my super-secret - so secret I only want it revealed when
I die - stuff with some random website. No bueno. I'm sorry, but this is
basically one of those services you can't really run on a hosted environment.

I think the ultimate solution is a dead man's switch that is tied to something
physical, aka a password in a bank vault that unencrypts a file somewhere.
Yes, you have to trust the bank, but it's unlikely the bank knows what to do
with this random password.

This is what I do - all my passwords and super-secret stuff is in an encrypted
file with the passphrase something I have memorized. It's also written down
and stored in a secure location that my wife has access to, should something
bad happen to me. I don't care if she accesses this password when I'm not dead
- it's only in a secure location to prevent accidental disclosure (theft) of
it.

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genwin
Perhaps a better method for less trustworthy heirs is to give them half of a
worded password. Say the password is "pond elephant evergreen tennis
skyscraper electric". You give them "pond elephant evergreen" now (in
searchable e-mail), and let the dead man's switch give them "tennis skyscraper
electric".

Alternatively, let the dead man's switch alert heirs to swap their half of the
password, so that all heirs now have the full password. Then you don't overly
depend on the dead man's switch.

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ryan-c
That's one of one of the main use cases I had in mind when I wrote this:
<https://github.com/ryancdotorg/threshcrypt> \- you encrypt a file using N
passwords and require that at least M passwords be presented in order to
decrypt. At the moment it's not suitable for non-technical users, though you
could make a bootable thumb drive that autoruns it and saves the decrypted
file. I was also able to embed it in an initramfs on Debian for use with full
disk encryption.

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alex_h
Users need a huge amount of trust to use a service like this. The notification
about running on free quota and submitting bug reports does not engender this
trust.

~~~
m3ntat
I totally agree. This isn't a "hey this is a service you should pay for" post,
this is more of a "hey I built this in 17 hours at a hackathon, check it out".

If it ever does become a service for real I'll need to do some work to secure
it, add features, etc.

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mbrock
"100% Secure/Durable." Okay, if you say so. Why should I trust this? Now I
have to decide whether it's more likely that I get struck by lightning or you
do. Well, you spent 17 whole hours on it...

Sorry, I don't mean to diss your thing, it's a nice idea. I'm just sick of all
the exaggerated reliability claims of these startup projects. Maybe I'm crazy,
but if you claim "100% durability" on something fairly important, you're
taking on serious responsibility. What are the odds of this site working in
three years? Three months?

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m3ntat
Yeah that's kind of tongue-in-cheek. It's most likely not either of those at
this point. I just threw some stuff up there that a service "might" say if it
was for realz.

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pavel_lishin
Sorry, I only give away my reveal-only-after-death secrets to businesses that
are _totes_ for realz, not ones that are only pretending to be.

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jefflinwood
In case the OP doesn't mention it, he won the LSRC hackathon with this idea!
Congrats!

He also had a pretty funny presentation, pretty tongue-in-cheek.

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tbrooks
Interestingly enough, he never mentioned it was built on Python/GAE.

Sorry to out you buddy!

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m3ntat
Cat's out of the bag. :)

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jefflinwood
Hah! No worries, my hack was 90% objective-c, with only a few lines of Ruby on
Heroku as a backend.

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gadders
You might find the below article from the Economist of interest/motivation:

Deathless data

 _What happens to our digital property after we die?_

<http://www.economist.com/node/21553011>

"..Service providers have different rules—and few state them clearly in their
terms and conditions. Many give users a personal right to use an account, but
nobody else, even after death. Facebook allows relatives to close an account
or turn it into a memorial page. Gmail (run by Google) will provide copies of
e-mails to an executor. Music downloaded via iTunes is held under a licence
which can be revoked on death. Apple declined to comment on the record on this
or other policies. All e-mail and data on its iCloud service are deleted on
the death of the owner.."

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ricardobeat
<http://www.deadmansswitch.net/> has been around for at least 5 years.

~~~
m3ntat
Nice find, no SMS or voice though.

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cookingrobot
Cool service. A suggestion: let folks sign up with an email address (instead
of just the google/facebook/twitter options you included).

It's super easy to add email accounts with this: <https://www.dailycred.com>
(I'm a co-founder)

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laconian
"This site is currently running on free quota--that means that things can and
will turn off as people play with it."

Sounds like a suboptimal configuration for a dead man's switch. If you're
unavailable, you aren't around for contingencies.

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rapcal
Genius! Loved the idea :) And it would certainly have been useful to Aron
Ralston [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aron_Ralston>]

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m3ntat
If you have ideas, comments or suggestions let me know!

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timo614
I really love the idea.

Personally I would never use a service like this for anything that needs to be
secure. That's nothing against you more my own paranoia and honestly if it was
some password to decrypt my files I'd just give it in a letter to the person I
trust not surprise her with an email after I die which she'd probably cry over
for days.

I'd probably consider using it to just tell the people I love that I'd miss
them and what impact they had on my life.

I really don't get the draw about sending passwords, life insurance policies,
and other secure data when you're dead. Would my family and loved ones care
about any of that if I was gone? Probably not and if the information I stored
was useful to them I'd have given them a way to access it offline in the event
something happened.

Not against the service I think it's a great idea just think for the non-
developers out there they'd probably prefer something closer to the heart to
be sent.

Note: I know you didn't really suggest people send super secret things on the
site just saying it in response to what everyone else is posting.

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jimbobob
Just curious... what do you see as the use cases for this service?

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m3ntat
Well. If you happen to be going into a high-profile meeting with a mob boss
and you happen to have incriminating documents about him, upload them to
Deadman and hopefully you will get out alive. :)

More seriously, I think the core technology would be useful for elderly,
people going on hikes into remote areas, etc.

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pavel_lishin
But for that use case, I have to tell the mob boss that I uploaded a secret to
deadman.io. At which point he takes out his rubber hose collection, and gently
persuades me to log in and delete the secret.

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ricardobeat
You don't need to tell _where_ , and you can use a one-off generated password
that you really didn't memorize.

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duaneb
A) The idea is that the "rubber hose collection" leads to you revealing where
it is, and B) if it's a generated password, how will you stop the deadman's
switch in the event of getting away?

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ricardobeat
You ping the service by email/phone/SMS, not by logging in. But you have a
point, you'd have to keep pinging it for the rest of your life and it would
fire anyway when you die :)

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mothore
From LSRC Hackathon. I liked it

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huhtenberg
I'm sure Jesse Lovelace (of the WhoIs record) will be happy to be on a
receiving end of all inquires pertaining to enforcements of "your insurance
policy."

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m3ntat
Geez--no need to hate. This is a "cool demo" not a real service that I'm
selling.

~~~
huhtenberg
No hate whatsoever. It's a genuine concern, someone will end up using it
without realizing it's a "cool demo".

