I wrote this Go project to implement a dead man’s switch that didn’t rely on cron jobs, timers, databases, etc on the infra it runs on. Deadcheck integrates to PagerDuty and keeps a long running incident snoozed until expected check-in times where it’ll alert unless a check-in occurs. |
Your own README links to this definition: "A dead man's switch is a switch that is designed to be activated or deactivated if the human operator becomes incapacitated".
This is a watchdog timer / monitor / heartbeat, setting off an alert if a timer elapses.
I've often wondered about how to reliably take software actions after my death or dishonor. After all, you can't really rely on me being able to pay my bills. I'm not looking to do something expensive, more like delete my accounts and send some messages.
This is actually fairly simple and well understood: leave instructions in your will.
"Notify <Provider> to delete my account" is a perfectly valid instruction to leave for an executor.
You could leave behind a password cache with a master password left in your will, but I suspect much of this still runs on trust. I'd imagine (I haven't tried), that "X has died, please take action Y" is a fairly reliable social engineering vector if you have a convincing "proof" that X has died.
It's worth noting that the executor isn't hard forced to carry out your wishes, the legal recourse for them not doing so comes from other beneficiaries ability to take legal action against the executor. If those other beneficiaries don't care much for enforcement, then you might prefer technical methods such as the submission.
I also suppose you would have to also roll in some kind of automated patching and etc into it which would be rather difficult and break a lot of thing if went bad but some kind of "self healing" bot could perhaps also look after this part to fix anything should it break.
Also kinda opens up an entirely new attack vector. Threat actors could scan for these notices and go "hey this person is dead. lets hack their stuffs".
Bit that's exact trigger you wat.
Make something that keeps running while you pay bills and stops running after you no longer pay them. Pay those bills from your current account.
Make another something that periodically checks the status of the first system to be operational. After sufficiently long periode of failures activatie the cleanup crew.
Pay for the second system from a savings account, trust, llc or some other way that is not deactivated once you die
honest question: why do you care?
Not that it happens often, but that the incidents are so memorable.
Normally deadmans switches can be compromised by disrupting the deadman switch hardware. This removes that attack vector and pushes it further up the chain (which may or may not help you).
It's certainly very clever.
Notice from the config file, this doesn't actually do checks, only has passive listeners with a remote switch to toggle. That makes this a dead man's switch, not a watchdog / angel / monitor / heartbeat check.
This doesn't do anything except sit there watching a clock not knowing if you're dead.
The service you want monitored, the service you want to be sure the heart is beating, has to ping this to demonstrate aliveness.
If this doesn't get a ping in time, it then acts by telling pagerduty to alert.
If your service (man) is dead (or your service otherwise can't reach this to check in in time), this switches PD to alert mode.
So, dead man's switch does seem a fair characterization.
Deadcheck also doesn’t rely on your infra to alert.
Depending on where you live, and if it matters, give it to an attorney.
Maybe use this to trigger the notification to your attorney, with instructions on how to double check things before doing things.
Wouldn’t it be better to do this as part of a Terraform script or something? Not to take away from the project, it sure looks neat—just wondering if I really want to deploy yet another, independent IaC tool.
Doesn’t require a start command and your infra can completely fail and you’ll still get alerted.
[0] https://betterstack.com/docs/uptime/cron-and-heartbeat-monit...
They should've sent one welcome&upsell email, not several. And not abused contact info that was intended to reach me reliably and promptly.
For my immediate very simple need, Uptrends didn't spam me, and so far they've reliably and promptly notified me whenever my site is down even briefly (e.g., rebooting for kernel update), so they'll be getting money from me as I grow. https://www.uptrends.com/
Anyway, tl;dr is I never had an issue that resulted in not getting alerted about something that I needed to be alerted about, which, above all else, is the point of their offering.
https://developers.checklyhq.com/reference/postv1checksheart...
I don't think OP is saying that an attorney *can't* get these things done, but that it would make them feel more comfortable knowing that a technically competent person and/or service will be performing the actual actions.
I do think there's a place for an attorney here, in the sense that they could be the trusted individual responsible for notifying DeadManService, Inc. that a particular person has, indeed, passed on and wishes DeadManService to run their instructions.
We called it a dead man's switch but it was really just a way to monitor alertmanager.
We had to implement a “heartbeat” and “succession” in our blockchain-based solutions for organizations to control things together.
It’s part of our “application suite for organizations” where each one is sort of this general-purpose LEGO block that could be used to build a custom solution.
In each case, you’d enter some parameters and create an instance from a Factory. We made it simple and secure for any organization to use this.
In this specific one, ControlFactory is used to create ControlContract instance that can be used to control an address together (to sign off things collectively, like transfer tokens or call an arbitrary method on a different address)
We had to handle what happens if the M of N people don’t show up for a while. And we said they have to call a heartbeat() method every so often. If they fail to call it then control temporarily passes to the next group in succession, until the OGs can finally call the heartbeat() method again.
Here is more info on the why: https://community.intercoin.app/t/intercoin-applications-con...
And here are the rest of the blockchain apps for organizations: https://community.intercoin.app/t/applications-of-intercoin-...
You can go ahead and use it, the factory it’s been deployed on many EVM blockchains, at the same address.
PS: fun fact, you can configure a ControlContract to also manage calling methods on itself, thereby creating custom “policies” for organizations when it comes to granting/recoving rights of other people to the quorum.
If you're going to have to write a scheduled check-in anyways, why not use something like cronitor and reduce the complexity? (they host the check-in endpoint)
I have https://github.com/adamdecaf/deadcheck/issues/12 tracking additional vendors
Edit: I'm open to a PR if you're willing. Curious, but would you use their delayed notification config to implement?
https://apidocs.squadcast.com/?version=latest#7742a9af-29fe-...
Pre-Paying a cloud service pennies per month to do all that for you will likely be more reliable and much simpler.
If you don’t want to use a service like Cronitor, you can self-host this without the usual fear that an outage will also take down your monitoring.
Specifically, the Social Security Death Index. Some months after you die your Social Security number gets listed. It's meant to prevent impersonating a dead person but could be used to shut down accounts etc.
I did the math years ago and even then FB has a large percentage of it's user base dying daily.
I think there were one of the first to properly allow an account to be "memorialized" and moderated by loved ones.
I did know a guy who worked at a major corporation explain his dead man switch like it was the most normal thing in the world, though. Extremely cursed.
Especially if there’s some complex onerous task that needs to happen and you get no credit for doing it well. Leave, and let them find out what it’s like being one of the other characters in It’s a Wonderful Life in the worst timeline.
I had a friend pass and his fiance was in need of money but he didn't leave the password to access the crypto, so it's lost forever. If I die unexpectedly, I'd at least want it to not be lost forever.
So if I die in debt up to my eyeballs, and if I am sole signatory on those debts, I have only hurt my creditors, not my family.
caveats-- if my family was counting on the house and I have an unaffordable mortgage, then yes I have caused them harm. Likewise other irresponsible debts.
-- at the end of the chain, creditors are also people. It is their job to loan money at risk, so their loss is their problem, but this assumes I was dealing in good faith when I took the loan.
Obviously, with some "it depends" nuance - but if the difference between this and your world view would make a significant difference to your loved ones, you might want to talk to an attorney.
Two experiences with this. Companies don't particularly care who pays the bill. They send a bill, they get money, they don't care if the person who paid is the person. In fact, in my recent brush with such matters the company specifically knew the person was dead when they accepted the payment.
What's hard is getting access to their money to pay debts with.
Leave a public key in your HN bio.
And leave a matching private key and validation instructions in your will.
If the keys match along with a death certificate, then: The account owner is validated as being dead.
If some law prescribes that after following a certain verification process, the operator is required to delete the account, then that legally mandated process would work, but in the absence of such a law literally no process can be sufficient, because the operators can and will choose to ignore it, no matter how reliable it is.
But maybe I don't want to leave my password behind because I'm weird that way or something, and instead I just want my account nuked.
Cryptographic proof of ownership by the dead guy + death certificate should allow for account nuking, without allowing for a third party to do something else with my account.
(Not that I'm worried about it, myself. In fact, I've found all of these dead man's switch/after-death automations pretty amusing every time I've seen them pop up in the past couple of decades.
I mean: When I'm dead, my HN/Google/whatever accounts will become idle, and I'm dead AF so I don't care if someone hacks the passwords some time later. It's a non-refundable one-way ticket for me.)
I am sure that there is no shortage of developers who hit a big payday at a FAANG or startup and then spent like it would never end.
The definition of broke could be the residual after the planned distributions to heirs. Or if no heirs, dying flat broke makes the most sense. Getting there is tricky.