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?"

What happens when you forget?

[monkeypoo]

What happens when five years from now, after the thrill of having something like this setup, you forget to check back in? Now you've got passwords and emails going around saying you've passed on? I'm sure grandma will love that email. Why not just use a system that isn't triggered until your death certificate becomes available. Set it and forget it.

Re:First things first

[Garridan]

Why? If it's illegal, you won't get caught once you're dead. Unless, of course, you believe in heaven & hell -- and from what I hear, God already knows, so hiding it won't do you any good.

It behaves in a very unprofessional manner

[dbIII]

Usually the entire point is to run stuff so you can get hit by the proverbial bus and someone else can take over - or so that you can theoretically take an extended holiday at some point. A dead man's switch sounds extremely unprofessional and probably should get you fired no matter how unethical the rest of the workplace looks (unless it is emailing documentation of actual criminal activity to the relevant authorities - but you should be doing that in person anyway).

I helped out for a few months in a place where the sysadmins and most of management had to be marched out the door by security for various expensive reasons. The place seemed full of dead man's switches but it reality was probably just a finicky cobbled together collection of systems that required intervention when cron jobs/scheduled tasks could have done it (and later did).

Currently the stuff that is being trialed would stop and someone would have to look at the tape schedule - but I thought the whole idea of working as a sysadmin was to set stuff up so everything else goes smoothly while you are sorting out the problem of the day, trying out new stuff, or reading slashdot.

Re:What happens when you forget?

[Bazman]

"Why not just use a system that isn't triggered until your death certificate becomes available."

Such as? Maybe you can leave a sealed note with whoever has your will, saying 'in the event of my death please visit this web page', then give a URL, username, and password, the visiting of which causes a server-side script to run and delete all your pr0n, hate-mail your boss, put your low-numbered slashdot account up on ebay for the benefit of your next of kin, and so on.

Of course you'd have to make sure that URL was secured....

Re:What happens when you forget?

[daeg]

Agreed. There is a much better dead man's switch available, and it's called a living will and a lawyer who has the legal authority to open your safe deposit box in the bank once you pass on. It even has generations of legal precedent to help defend against greedy family members.

You can even set it up with your lawyer to have him mail things out once you're dead -- including your encryption keys, letters to family, etc.

And yes, I have been the recipient of such a letter. Many such letters, in fact. My great grandparents both wrote letters to the family describing our family history going back to roughly 1550-1600. Instead of sending them to us and us inevitably losing them, they wrote them to their estate lawyer, who held them until they both passed on. They are great reading and have been far more valuable tracing family history than the Internet or any books or libraries have gotten us.

Re:Too Effective?

[Technician]

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...

Mine simply locks the encrypted filesystem if the power is interupted. A raid on my premisis while I'm gone locks things up tight. Forcing the door drops power. When I'm back, I can enter the encryption key and restore normal operation.

Internet dating

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok it sounds paranoid but on several occasions I've met up with someone from the internet.

I usually have a few details about them but given I'm into the alternative scene (and I don't mean music) you don't usually just pass these details to a friend.

Never the less, meeting up with someone like this for these kind of activities is down right dangerous, taking a few precautions is always sensible.

I usually put together a zip file filled with every piece of contact information I have for this person and use a cron job to email this in 48 hours if I dont stop it.

I also send a text message to myself prior to entering anyones house that I am meeting like this - the uk mobile phone companies will store location information for up to 3 years.

Ok its paranoid but I know several people (though usually women) that have been raped meeting like this - worse things could possibly happen as you are taking your life in your hands doing though. I'll admit that being a guy I am probably less vulnrable - but its better to be on the safe side and atleast give yourself some backup.

Its never gone off before... but its nice to know its set up - just in case.

Re:First things first

[sumdumass]

Logicly thinking, it is more deeper then that. But lets not forget the reasons for a deadmans switch could be for more then death. Imagine your arested because of a fling that started in an internet chat room and turned out to be some cop posing as a 13 year old girl except that that was never discused in the chatroom and the cop is just saying that because they want the glory of catching a child preditor.

But imagine that you somehow discover something that will save mankind from it's inevitable demise. Lets suppose this breakthru in whatever is so wild it has to work and it will end all war, famine, discrimination, global warming, whatever. Now lets say some drunk driver hits you and you die right after releasing this information to the public. Then they go back to find out more information and find volumes of porn, plots to over throw the government, conspiracy therories about 9/11 being an inside job and so on. They now decide your a nutcase and never consider your discovery.

Now lets make things even worse by adding that you don't know it will save mankind and only the person taking over your job, settling your estate, looking after your kids, whatever, discovers it and see the relevence but after weeding thru the rest of the BS determins it to be some nutjob stuff that would never be feasable.

There are many examples of how we (or the person doing it) had no clue about how important thier life was to some cause until years after their death. Would you want to be the person that could have made a difference in whatever you were pasionate about in life but discounted because of what was left for people to see?

Re:Feed the worms

[smchris]

You run with what you've got. If you're lucky some archaeologist will analyze how you were pickeled or swab your sinuses to see what was giving you hayfever in the day.

I guess in this case one is leaving a remnant for some paleopsychologist to analyze how 21st century man was so screwed up.

Plenty of people have left writings with the stipulation that they only be released some time after death. This is just an extension that allows do-it-yourself world interaction after your self is gone.

This is true...

[Anonymous Coward]

About six years ago I had the misfortune of working for a company where our lead developer was a complete fruitcake. He wore all black every day, put his cigarettes out on his keyboard, you name it. He was one of those die-hard, born-in-the-soup hackers who started out configuring the household appliances to kill his family.

A genuine genius, and impossible to work with.

Well, one week he had happened to catch some variant on the face-melting death. I'm talking about the kind of influenza which turns your various facial orifices into creeping faucets of mucus. His wife assured me of a fever which would kill a lesser being. Sweat sheeted off his face like a rainstorm on a greenhouse roof. Needless to say he took some time off.

I get a call on Friday afternoon and it's him. The sounds coming from his end of the call were like the elephant throwing up and trying to talk into the little voice scrambling doohickey from the movie Scream. "You have to come get me," he says. "Why?" I reply. "Because I'm in no shape to drive, and I need to login to my computer there." Empathetically, I told him to stay there if he was sick. "You don't understand," he barfed, "If I don't login once a week..."

Yes. He had a DMS on our key development machines. One which he explained would lock up everything tighter than [gratuitous image deleted].

I was unthrilled to say the least, and refrained from chewing him out as he brought his barely clothed mass of plague into my beautiful car, coughed plumes of virii and bacteria into our office, made my boss practically bust a vein in his forehead as I led his nearly-blind ass to his computer-- all because he refused to share his password with us to access and protect company property --then finally have the nerve to croak a child-like plea for McDonald's from my back seat on the way home.

Once he was fully recovered we had the intervention and asked the usual questions, Why do you think this is necessary? What are you hiding from us? How screwed would we actually be if he actually died? Etc. In his paranoid, seen-the-Matrix-too-many-times universe, there was nothing wrong with installing some 'basic security'.

I did mention this guy was a genius, right?

The boss caved completely, and to be honest, we all knew there was no way in heck we could find whatever weird little bombs he'd hidden in our own system let alone the machine he'd practically joined to at the spine 12 hours a day. I quit the company that June, Mr. Maniac is still writing all their code and the company is quite successful.

So, yeah, DMS... Why send email to the unworthy after you're claimed in the Lord's rapture, when you can just grab your entire company by the nuts and twist?

(Posted as AC because I'm at work.)

Re:First things first

[LordEd]

The trick to the whole heaven & hell thing is acquiring people's souls. Go to a bar and you could probably convince somebody to see you one for a beer. I always state that my terms for a small loan of whatever is their eternal soul as collateral.

Basically, if it turns out religion is right, you now have some negotiable material to barter with should you wind up going the wrong direction. If religion turns out to be wrong and you just fade to dust, then you aren't in a position to worry about it anymore either.

Because we're all a bit similar.

[Grendel Drago]

Because we're all somewhat similar, and things would suck mightily if nobody gave a thought to the world after their death. I suppose caring what people think of you is just a reflection of that. It's kind of like the Prisoner's Dilemma; sure, it may profit you to be a dick, but if everyone did it, we'd be in serious trouble.

A Better Dead Man's Switch

[rdmiller3]

I hadn't really thought about this until the question came up, but it sounded like a fun mental challenge so I came up with a few ideas for improving the concept:

Multiple Activation Stages

The first thing that came to my mind was a DMS to warn you that your main DMS will be triggered soon if you don't "check in". A second stage would send a similar warning to a few other people, encouraging them to find you and to personally warn you about the DMS themselves. You might want to disguise that one as a "request for critical maintenance" from a system which sounds important.

Secure Check-In Protocol

Have your DMS send you a unique check-in ID which you must use in your response. Or if a first-stage DMS has already been triggered, require a special password for deactivation of the continuing DMS sequence.

Multiple Triggers

More than one trigger input, in combination and/or in sequence, to more robustly define the conditions for activation. For example, if you haven't checked in recently AND several check-in reminder messages have bounced.

Ultimately though, if it's something important then I think a human being should be part of the process. A person would be a good sanity check. Nobody writes bug-free software, and I'm guessing that it could be pretty difficult to test a complicated DMS.