What Does Your Dead Man's Switch Do?

LqdEngineer asks: "How many of you use or have used a Dead Man's Switch designed to perform some action if you don't check in for a certain amount of time? Recently, I decided to put one together using MySQL and some cron jobs, but I wanted to see what others have their switches set up to do in the event you fail to check in. E-mails to loved ones? Send encryption keys to friends/family? Hate mail to your boss? Has anyone ever been on the receiving end of the results of such a system?"

False alerts

[iMaple]

I havn't had any false alerts thanks to another semi dead man's safety, which sends me an email 15 days before my actual switch turns on.

I basically have 7 emails to ppl really close to me. One of my password go in one of those emails and that has access to all my email/personal passwords. I havnt put any banking data since I dont think thats going to be too difficult to get, if I am legally dead.

My deadmans switch is a simple cron job and I need to reset it once every 3 months.

Re:First things first

[qwijibo]

It's much more likely that someone will discover a way to wipe out humanity than save it. In that case, do you really want someone to continue the work?

Anyway, with such an elaborate conspiracy theory, I'm disappointed that you haven't considered that the person was deliberately whacked. Anyone who finds an end to war, famine, etc would put millions of people out of work. Of course, there are the evil overlords who would like to see the guy whacked to maintain the status quo, but there are many more people who would do it because they don't want to see their entire town go through the loss of a major industry, like happened with Detroit. There's nothing more dangerous than people who have nothing to lose.

If the person who settles your estate doesn't recognize the value of your work and you haven't bothered to share it with those who do, then you're planning for the information to be lost at some point. A plan has to have more than one good idea - it has to have momentum to get going, and someone who keeps it all to themselves lacks that.

Re:Too Effective?

[zebs]

Nice.

No use in the UK though. If you don't hand over your encryption keys you can go to jail.

Good thing too. I am now safe from Terrorism

Re:What happens when you forget?

[raluxs]

Of course you don't like to study history.
You should know that September 16th is DIA DE LA INDEPENDENCIA, Revolution day is November 20th.

'Pa verguenzas ajenas no gana uno, chin.....

Re:Why not have some fun?

[AJWM]

You're talking about the Heechee Saga, of which "Gateway" was the first book. They're by Frederik Pohl, not Poul Anderson.

(You got it half right, phonetically at least ;-)

Good stories.

Re:Halo.

[edward2020]

Whoa! Dude, I think you need a comma before your third quotation mark. Furthermore, depending on the style you're using (I like to use APA for Slashdot) the fourth quotation needs to include the period. :)