What Does Your Dead Man's Switch Do? 310
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?"
Too Effective? (Score:5, Insightful)
What happens if you get into a severe accident and end up in the hospital without the ability to 'check in' with it? What happens if you are stranded at an airport with a snowstorm? What if you are stranded at a ski lodge in the mountains in the middle of a snow storm? etc...
If you were ever unable to check in with the switch, then you would probably regret hate mail to your boss or other nasties that you had planned to send to people you hate. It would also be an unwelcome surprise for friends and family to get 'letters from the dead' just to find out that you really aren't dead. It would definitely be a detriment to you if you had it setup to donate all of the money in your bank accounts to charities....
The Dead Man's Switch has too many if's in it. It makes more sense to just put together a will and make sure you entrust someone you deeply trust to execute it.
You have 10 minutes to reach minimum safe distance (Score:3, Insightful)
My switch nukes everything from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
Re:First things first (Score:5, Insightful)
Feed the worms (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:First things first (Score:4, Insightful)
World may be meaningless to you. You are dead. You, in effect, do not exist anymore. But the world does not stop existing simply because you expire.
You are not the center of the universe. You are merely an almost infinitesimal part of the big, grand, large, larger than life universe.
Children are naturally egoist. You are 22. What is your excuse?
Re:First things first (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, something like a will can have a significant impact on the people you love... so I definately see the benefit to helping them out, even if they don't know about it while you're alive. But cleaning up some potentially embarassing portion of your life after you die? Not seeing it.
Re:Too Effective? (Score:3, Insightful)
You could imagine hardening a system against some of the more obvious dangers. Using two severs in different countries which confer with each other before sending anything and which both contain part of the encryption key for your data would go a long way toward catching the obvious technical dangers. If you can keep them from knowing each other's address until they both trigger, all the better (eg, by having them both call out to a third server that has no record of their locations until contacted.)
But, there's still no way to distinguish between "I'm dead," "I'm in jail," and "I'm in a coma from which I'm expected to recover." Which could be rather an important distinction.
I've got one. (Score:5, Insightful)
So, I put together a quick routine using perl and chron that dispatches email to my workplace, the local legal rep contact, and some friends. The later includes directions to a hidden key and asks them to feed my cat until they hear from me. I only enable the system when I'm expecting a significant risk of arrest. Once it's started, if I don't either log into the machine or send myself an email containing a specific string once every 24 hours, the alarm goes off.
Turns out it's never actually been used (except when testing.) I did get caught up in a surprise arrest not too long ago, but since my girlfriend was going to be at home and able to take care of any problems I didn't turn on the system.
But, if you ask me, trusting life-changing information to a php script is a really, really scary idea. Even my trivial "please feed my cat" letters included disclaimers explaining that they may have been falsely triggered.
Now, on the other hand, the possibility of spoofing dead man's letters from other people *does* sound promising.
Re:First things first (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't subscribe to any religious beliefs. I believe that when I die I decompose slowly due to food preservatives in my body but decompose none the less. But still I care about what kind of a world I leave for my children.
I care enough for the people around me that I try to do the right thing. So that when I die the world will be a better place for the almost infinitesimal part that I have influence over. We would still probably be hunter/gatherers if we were all egoists.
It's not about consequences to me I'm worried about after I die. I'm worried about the consequences to others. As a thanks to previous generations I pay it forward.
Have some children. They will really shift your world view. And everything else in the process.
How sad is it... (Score:1, Insightful)
Sad.
Re:What happens when you forget? (Score:4, Insightful)
I dont like to study History. In fact, in primary, secondary and high school I was *really* bad at History (I can not just learn things by the book, I need to find some kind of reasoning).
Having said that, I am completely aware of the value of history, which , if known by the current people(for example) would prevent lots of deaths and war.
Now, what does your dead grandpa has to do with history?, well, history is not only what history books tell you. The history you read written on those books is what the WINNER of those events want you to believe.
As a simple example, take the Mexican revolution (I am aware, as I am Mexican). Every Setpember, 16 Mexicans have a great party celebrating the revolution of Mexico but the fact is, that the revolution was not complete. And that, is one of the reasons why Mexicans are always in the middle of nothing, where nothing happens. It is a bit more complex than that but if you like, you could read this book review [jstor.org] to know more about that.
Re:Feed the worms (Score:2, Insightful)
The trouble with such a "dead man's switch" is, being sure it will work... Difficulty testing it. How do you know it's going to work? Such things need to be handled by the living, either by hiring some service, or having some friends, maybe one with the .EXE file, and two others with passwords required to actuate it.
A missing semicolon in a perl script, mistyped e-mail address or other parameter in the cron script, e-mail failure, ISP mail server changes, or the system losing power could cause some problems.
The cause of death could be some natural disaster that also destroys the machine with the switch is on, or at least knocks out the power and network (will anyone ever reconnect it to a network, or just sell what's left of your old machine?).
How can a program know you're dead if you don't check in? There are other possibilities such as alive but temporarily unable to use a computer. In the hospital, temporary amnesia, broken arms, etc.
To be sure, I think your switch would need a human to certify you're dead, or you need to subscribe to some service that allows your computer system to search death records/death certificates, and activate the switch only after your name also appears in the database.
Re:Too Effective? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What happens when you forget? (Score:4, Insightful)
There is only one possible recommendation to be said here: "Do not".
First, your knowledge and capability are the best "dead" man switch you can have. If you need more than that you have failed in your professional objectives. Get real, sit down and get better at what you do.
Second, what goes around, comes around. You never know whom are you going to meet in your next job. Even if you meant it to be a real "dead man switch", you never know whom are your descendants, students or friends going to meet in their next job.
Third, if you leave a reasonable amount of time between the last check and firing the targets are likely to change, which will make the payload of the dead man switch misfire. You would either overdo it or fail to do it fully and leave traces. Either case is not in your favour. What may have been a harmless prank can become a crime which will be traced to you.
So the recommendations are do not, do not and do not. Your will deposited with your bank or insurance company is a good enough dead man switch and you will be surely dead when it gets invoked.
Re:What happens when you forget? (Score:2, Insightful)
Evidently you don't like to study history. If you did, you might have been familiar with a man named Thucydides. He was an Athenian general during the Peloponnesian War, who wrote the definitive account of that conflict. What's unique about his work, History of the Peloponnesian War [wikipedia.org] , is that though it was written by an Athenian general, it was in fact the Spartans who were victorious. This means that the scholarly historical account we have of that war, which is one of the earliest works in the study of history, was written by the loser.
The tripe about history always being written by the victors has been the rally cry of historical revisionists but has little truth to it. History has been and continues to be a much more scholarly endeavor than people think.
Re:First things first (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:First things first (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:First things first (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that consequences of your death can't concern you when you're dead, in no way means that reasonably foreseeable post-mortem consequences should not concern you now.
That's why even people who don't believe in any sort of "afterlife" still buy life insurance to take care of their kids.
You don't need any sort of supernatural belief to end up with behavior that most people would call "moral", just some compassion and a reasonable ability to foresee the consequences of your actions.
Which takes me off on a bit of a tangent...
Foreseeing the effects of our actions is of obvious use; if you can't do that to at least some degree, you'll quickly end up dead or institutionalized.
But compassion? What's in it for me, you wonder.
Cultivating compassion expands the self. We're pretty darn sure that the human body known as "Lukas Beeler" is eventually going to stop functioning and in some way dissolve (rot in the ground, be burned up, eaten by squirrels, whatever). If you completely identify "yourself" as "Lukas Beeler", well, then, that's it for you. Maybe you can tickle the pleasure centers of that lump of meat a little bit before it dissolves, but that seems an unsatisfactory goal.
But is identifying "yourself" as "Lukas Beeler" the only option? Throughout history, some people - people who seem to derive a great deal more contentment from life than the average Joe - have suggested that transpersonalization provides a more satisfactory experience. This means identifying "yourself" as more than "Lukas Beeler".
By "more than", I do not mean anything supernatural, I am not speaking of a "soul" or anything metaphysical like that. But what if, for example, you were to invest a portion of your own concept of identity into your family? Unless all your relatives are childless, your family will outlast your body, so that "you" might have a larger and longer existence than the body of "Lukas Beeler".
What if you were to invest your identity into your community, your city or your nation? That's an even larger and longer existence. Perhaps we have here a sensible argument for patriotism. But why stop there, when by identifying "yourself" with the whole human race, "you" get even bigger and longer-lived?
Now, hold on there, you ask. How in world am I supposed to accomplish this "investment of identity" that you're going on about? Well, it means to think of yourself as these other people. It's an exercise of imagination, to see things through their eyes, to feel what they feel. With that exercise, eventually it can be seen that the ordinary idea of "self" is just a mental construct, just an idea, not an immutable reality.
In other words, compassion is the tool and the method to get You out of you, the "big You" of consciousness out of the "small you" of flesh.
Indeed, if you get good at it, you may find that you can see "yourself" not just in other humans, but in other animals; in the trees; in the whole biosphere. Expanding "yourself" until not much identity is left connected with the body known as "Lukas Beeler".
And maybe you can keep going. Eventually you might find yourself worrying about the heat death of the observable Universe, billions of years in the future, as your end, instead of the dissolution of "Lukas Beeler" in a few decades. That's a pretty massive trade-up. And if you get that far, it's comforting to consider that cosmology seems more and more to be considering some sort of "multi-verse" scheme in which our observable Universe is only a part; there's still more to become.
"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the re
Re:What happens when you forget? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm still not entirely sure I would set up such a system rather than simply writing a proper will and leaving the information with a trusted individual, however it is certainly not an insurmountable problem, and there could be benefits to such a system, if nothing else, some of the paperwork that people would need to settle my estate is on my computer, and I'd rather they don't spend a bunch of time cursing me for not having easy access to it while trying to both deal with the legal obligations and grieve at the same time...
Re:Feed the worms (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Data Security and illegal activity (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice idea, but that is not near as much of a problem as my tax returns, all my bank and credit card details including passphrases, pins, account numbers, contact numbers, etc.
If I am gone and the home alarm goes off, it drops power to the SOHO server locking the filesystem. Home burglaries do happen. Having someone get your porn collection is not a big deal. Having someoone steal your identity is a big deal.
The alarm interface is simple. The alarm output operates a relay between the SOHO server and the UPS.
don't assume data security equals illegal activity
I pratice prudent data security.