
Show HN: DeadManHandle - phrocker
https://www.deadmanhandle.com/dmh/login/
======
nathan_f77
I should mention that this is a native feature in Gmail / Google.

I get a "Google Inactive Account Manager reminder" email about once a year to
see if I want to update my settings. They will notify me 4 months after my
last activity. After 6 months, they will set up a auto-response in Gmail, and
send an email to some trusted contacts (wife, parents.) I've also chosen to
give them access to all of my data in my Google account (including email.)

The nice thing about Google's version is that they already know if you're
active (reading emails, searching, etc.) So it's frictionless, apart from the
annual reminder to check your settings.

You can set up your inactivity settings here:
[https://myaccount.google.com/inactive](https://myaccount.google.com/inactive)

I think that sending an email every 2 weeks is far too frequent, and it's a
really bad idea to send an emergency email after only 3 days. I think 4 months
and 6 months is a far more reasonable timeframe.

~~~
nsb1
Not to sound overly pessimistic, but I no longer trust Google to keep features
beyond a couple years, let alone for time on the order of a lifespan. I
honestly believe that deadmanhandle is more likely to be around longer than
this gmail feature.

~~~
nathan_f77
Google released the Inactive Account Manager in 2013 [1], and it looks like I
signed up in 2014. They do discontinue a lot of products [2], but I can't
think of any reason for why they would remove this feature. So I would be
willing to take that bet!

[1] [https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-set-up-googles-
inactive-a...](https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-set-up-googles-inactive-
account-manager)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discontinued_products_and_services)

------
mirimir
The link points to
[https://www.deadmanhandle.com/dmh/login/](https://www.deadmanhandle.com/dmh/login/)
which is totally uninformative. It ought to point to
[https://www.deadmanhandle.com/dmh/](https://www.deadmanhandle.com/dmh/) to
show the signup page.

It's an interesting idea. But I'd worry about failure modes. Say it's a Gmail
account that gets nuked. Or there's a long-term failure of power and Internet
access. But then, I suppose that the warning could include alternatives.

~~~
eps
I'd be more worried about this site being still operational in 20-50 years
from now, when it would start having chances to actually fulfil its purpose.

~~~
mirimir
Chances of that are ~0.

And still, failure would be detectable, because you'd stop getting emails. And
arguably that's better than false activation.

But the point is that this is open-source. So you run your own service.

------
ahazred8ta
"Dead Man Handle is a kill switch that sends an E-mail when you are
incapacitated by using periodic E-mail verification, known as heartbeats. If
you don’t respond via E-mail we will send a pre-defined message to your
contacts upon your demise. We’ll send you an E-mail every two weeks. If you
don’t click the link within three days we’ll send an E-mail to your emergency
contacts. Simple as that."

~~~
booleandilemma
Why do the emails go out every 2 weeks? Why not send an email once per year,
and give people a year to respond? Maybe send a second email or a text if the
final month approaches and the person hasn’t responded yet.

And 3 days seems a little hasty. What’s the rush, after all? If someone is
dead for 3 days they’ll surely be dead for another 300.

Clicking an email link every 2 weeks for the rest of my life is going to feel
like a chore after a few months.

~~~
ulrikrasmussen
Three days is way too little time. Who here has not gone for three days
without checking their email?

------
yason
Given the pace and lifespans of current internet services I could bet a bit of
money that this service, along with other similar ones, are more likely to be
dead way before I will be.

------
jv22222
IMHO There is a big mismatch between the importance of the service and the
brand as shown here.

I can imagine there are real customers who would pay for a service like this
who are in their 40s 50s 60s and who would want something to look pretty
solid.

~~~
tantalor
You're being vague. Explain the issue?

~~~
Aeolun
It looks like it’s built for teenagers, but the market he really sees for this
is elderly people, who likely wouldn’t touch this.

~~~
mikebos
So yeah I have something like this on a VPS. I wouldn't touch this in saas
unless backed by some form of continuity guarantee, which would make it
expansive. Oh and I’m in my 40’s.

~~~
phrocker
Skimming through comments before doing some yardwork I saw this and think
that's a very prescient comment. It's of childish since I made it for myself,
but I think the feedback here is that without any guarantees. I appreciate
that type of feedback and it's why I did a show HN.

Hopefully I can resolve that in some way.

------
phrocker
I imagine most will not find this useful, but I've always wanted a service
like this. I found some similar products and even tried them out but nothing
fit what I needed. All I wanted was a kill switch. I've seen mobile apps, but
I wanted something via E-mail. If you don't respond within a certain number of
days, we'll send an E-mail to your emergency contacts.

I used the design cues from different open source and paid products and made
my own. I'll open source it pretty soon, giving attribution to those which
helped guide my design.

There are similar paid products but few allowed me to offer it as a service
and few if any were free. I even bought one but it didn't quite offer what I
needed, so I'm offering this for free to anyone who needs a similar service.

As three other products used AdminLTE I used the same to guide the design. It
was easy and quick. Let me know if you find any issues as you try it. Thanks!

~~~
RyJones
What is it?

~~~
phrocker
Greaaaat...The icon addition for mobile wasn't cached. Thanks for letting me
know. It's a kill switch that I used to contact people if I don't get around
to clicking a link in an E-mail.

The mobile version really sucks, so I will have to fix. that. I write C by
day. I promise I do that better.

------
itake
There was a website that did exactly from like 2003-2010. They shut down
unfortunately. I'd like to see a business model that can support this.

I think one day you're gonna get tired of paying the bills or maintaining it.

~~~
phrocker
Ha...when I told my wife what I was doing one evening she said, "that's a
really stupid idea."

I'll show her that this comment to prove I didn't invent the idea ( which I
said I hadn't ) and suddenly it'll become brilliant.

But in all seriousness: the non 'show HN' part of this is that my hope of
sticking this up on my github will be that people could maintain it or
continue with it if I were to 'perish or give up', which I can guarantee 100 %
that one of those will happen. My day job and side gigs are all completely
open source which is important to me.

~~~
akerl_
I’m not sure how open source would solve the continuity problem. If people
sign up for the service on your site, and then your site goes down before they
need the notifications to fire, the fact that other people have the source
code doesn’t really seem to help?

------
holbue
Just curious: What are the use-cases for such an service? Anything that can
not be covered by a sealed letter in the hand of a trusted friend/family?

~~~
wingerlang
Setting it up without their knowledge maybe, being able to update the contents
whenever you want. I am guessing.

------
gitgud
This idea seems fundamentally flawed to me. It places the burden of proof that
I'm "alive" on _me_ , by making me clicking a link every few weeks. Basically,
if I am not active on the internet, it will announce my demise to my chosen
contacts!!

With so many online services tracking your habits autonomously, it seems like
an unnecessary responsibility to place on your self to prove you're
conscious...

------
dplgk
Home page tells me nothing about the service. I have no idea what it does.

~~~
salutonmundo
The linked page isn't even the home page, you want
[https://www.deadmanhandle.com/dmh/about/](https://www.deadmanhandle.com/dmh/about/)
for info

------
derstander
A little description of the services provided would be helpful. The name
reminds me of the concept of a dead man’s switch. But it’d be cool to know a
little more about it before I sign up.

~~~
phrocker
Sorry I updated my comment above and deleted my cache to show the about icon.
It is a kill switch, just another name. I liked the name because I plan to
update it to eventually have it trigger on certain events, like an E-mail or
phone app event. Some apps already do this portion of it, but I honestly never
trusted them, hence why my goal is to make the code eventually all ALv2

------
davchana
I imagined something similar few weeks ago, a simple html form with a big
button in center; hosted on Gitlab Pages, with a xmlhttp ajax submit event to
Google Apps Script, which logs the current heartbeat to Google Sheet. A simple
Google Calender notification reminds me to click this link once every x
days/weeks. Same sheet has another time based auto run function which checks
if last heartbeat more than x days ago, sends email if true.

~~~
napsterbr
Now that's serverless!

------
idlewords
Doesn't stavrosk already have a thing like this?
[https://www.deadmansswitch.net](https://www.deadmansswitch.net)

~~~
phrocker
yeah and there were a few others but I wanted to completely open source this (
and offer for free ) and finish integrating some IFTT capabilities I've built
for my phone that perform actions and send messages in certain cases.

But yeah..by no means novel. The Show HN part of it was to get some solid
feedback before open sourcing it.

------
IIAOPSW
This does the same thing as deadmanswitch.net

BTW there is one feature that I requested from dms and they told me no. So
here is your chance to differentiate your product.

Instead of every x weeks of time, I'd like it if the are-you-alive check would
trigger on news events. For example a major industrial accident / terrorist
attack / war breaks out in the general region of the world I happen to be in.

~~~
wingerlang
Seems like it would require constant upkeep in multiple countries?

~~~
IIAOPSW
I envision some sort of news skimming bot that just looks for key words in the
article feed from a handful of major sources.

~~~
imhoguy
And who would pay for that... for life?

~~~
IIAOPSW
Plenty of people. Skimming the news for "[x] people dead" and "[city name]" is
not computationally expensive and the script only needs to run maybe twice a
day. The infrastructure costs associated with running the service should be
pocket change. All the users in the same city would be triggered by the same
event. The service per user actually gets cheaper with the number of users.

In fact nothing in the dead man switch is computationally expensive and all of
it is event driven. Its basically just a database of (email, location,
last_checked_in). Thousands of users would take up mere kilobytes of storage.
You could run the entire thing severless and it would take years before it
would even be worth billing you.

I would totally pay $1 a year for this. Maybe more but probably not much more.
With just a few hundred users, you'd be well into respectable side project
money.

------
ErikAugust
This is on to _something_ \- but this isn’t quite it, and I don’t know what
is.

------
tcmb
Maybe the women's edition of the t-shirt should have a dead woman on it...?

~~~
phrocker
+1

