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Show HN: Deadman.io - a digital dead man's switch
- m3ntat 14y agoIf you have ideas, comments or suggestions let me know!
- timo614 14y agoI 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.
- jimbobob 14y agoJust curious... what do you see as the use cases for this service?
- m3ntat 14y agoWell. 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.
- biot 14y agoBetter yet, retain a lawyer for this purpose. The difference being that the lawyer can make determinations this site cannot. For example, you might think that a one week period is sufficient however you'd be better off with a one month period just for safety reasons as you might be stuck on some mountain or locked up with some mob boss for a week and you don't want the dead man's switch to trigger. But what if you're coming home from the mountain climbing trip or the meeting with the mob boss and you get in a car accident and in order to relieve brain swelling, doctors have you in a medically-induced coma for six weeks? Oops... A lawyer can make such a judgment call without falling back to the binary decision of "has the time elapsed with no check-in?".
- pavel_lishin 14y agoBut 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.
- ricardobeat 14y agoYou don't need to tell where, and you can use a one-off generated password that you really didn't memorize.
- duaneb 14y agoA) 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?
- ricardobeat 14y agoYou 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 :)
- tbrooks 14y ago
- dominastrum 14y agoI set it up to check an old email account I tend to forget about for months at a time (which can't auto-forward mail). I could set a calendar event, but I don't want to force myself to check it at exact intervals. There's a web-hook switch which is intriguing, though I haven't come up with a good use case yet.
- rapcal 14y agoGenius! Loved the idea :) And it would certainly have been useful to Aron Ralston [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aron_Ralston http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aron_Ralston]
- alex_h 14y agoUsers 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 14y agoI 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.
- mbrock 14y ago"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?
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoYou gain a lot by building on other services. When you build on S3, you get their protections. A little more effort and it can be quite durable. But you never get 100%.
- m3ntat 14y agoYeah 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.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoSorry, 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.
- mbrock 14y agoOh, ok, I almost figured. :)
- genwin 14y agoIt (now) says 0%, not 100% secure/durable. I find it funny.
- huhtenberg 14y agoI'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."
- m3ntat 14y agoGeez--no need to hate. This is a "cool demo" not a real service that I'm selling.
- duaneb 14y agoYou might want to throw a disclaimer up that is legally clear what you're offering.
- huhtenberg 14y agoNo hate whatsoever. It's a genuine concern, someone will end up using it without realizing it's a "cool demo".
- MattRogish 14y agoYes, 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.
- m3ntat 14y agoAgreed, trust is key for a service like this. Ideally the contents need to be secure, but not so secure that you are the only one who can read them--otherwise what's the point since you're probably abducted or dead?
- MattRogish 14y agoThe point is that I don't want YOU to read this info BEFORE I'm dead. And basically there's no way to prevent that if your website contains everything needed to disclose the information.
- barryhunter 14y agoShurely you could just store the decruption key in deadman.io. The actual encrypted files stored elsewhere. Like you note with your current setup, the passphrase is useless on its own. Or store encypted file in one deadman.io switch, and the passphrase in another switch (in another account). The evil owner of said website, shouldnt be able to connect the two. (whats the chances they going to arbitarly try decoding every file they have with every passphrase they have)
- barryhunter 14y ago
- ricardobeat 14y agohttp://www.deadmansswitch.net/ http://www.deadmansswitch.net/ has been around for at least 5 years.
- m3ntat 14y agoNice find, no SMS or voice though.
- StavrosK 14y agoI made the same thing seven years or so ago: http://www.deadmansswitch.net 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.
- jonpaul 14y agoNice. 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
- StavrosK 14y agoNot 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...
- fudged71 14y agoFor a while now I've wondered if possibly your service could tie into IFTTT. That would be really cool.
- StavrosK 14y agoI'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.
- Kenan 14y agoPrevious HN discussion for those interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898994
- jefflinwood 14y agoIn 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.
- tbrooks 14y agoInterestingly enough, he never mentioned it was built on Python/GAE. Sorry to out you buddy!
- m3ntat 14y agoCat's out of the bag. :)
- jefflinwood 14y agoHah! No worries, my hack was 90% objective-c, with only a few lines of Ruby on Heroku as a backend.
- laconian 14y ago"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.
- cookingrobot 14y agoCool 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 https://www.dailycred.com (I'm a co-founder)
- dudeanon842 14y agoAlso http://justincaseidie.com/ http://justincaseidie.com/
- gadders 14y agoYou 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 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.."
- mothore 14y agoFrom LSRC Hackathon. I liked it