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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, but potentially disastrous, depending on your email contents, if the company messes up.

For this, I'd rather have a lawyer, a safe, a bank box... Anything that would end up dealing with my friends and family if I died.

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I concur, with the following additional reasons. First, depending on what you meant by "mess up": there's a chance they're not trustworthy (would read something you don't want read), and there's also a chance they screw up (and lose what you want sent - or send it when it shouldn't be sent).

Perhaps an even bigger thing for me is that an email seems so... off-hand, informal. I think if a friend/relative/etc died and an email was automatically sent to me from them I would feel a lot less... less something, can't quite think of the word, than if I got a properly written letter. Less sentimental I guess, less appreciative of it.

I actually hadn't even considered that they might read my letters without me knowing. I simply meant that a server went bonkers, or some bad code made it live and they accidentally sent my mails early.

As for the informal, bit... I certainly wouldn't let my mother be informed this way. But friends? That's how I mainly communicate with them anyhow.

Hey guys, I read the entire frontpage and somehow missed this story: I made Dead Man's Switch, and the beta is the second iteration, hosted on GAE. I certainly didn't expect it to be HNed so early.

These are all valid concerns. This isn't meant to replace wills or lawyers, it's just something to tell your friends to maybe look for you in the mountains if you don't respond in X days.

Some people also had the idea of using it to monitor infirm/elderly people, so I wrote this second version to hopefully have more flexibility to interface with phone/sms/etc.

I'll be glad to answer any questions you may have!

Sorry for the morbid curiousity, but can you share any stories of "successes"?

Hmm, I don't have any of those (I get an email whenever someone's switch triggers, but just the username, and the emails have been deleted at that point), I suspect most are just tests, or the friends/relatives aren't too inclined to email me about it.

I do have a "success" story (used very very loosely due to the morbid nature), I'll write it up when the service is out of beta and link it here.

Have you considered setting up an api? If I used this, I'd worry that if I forget to respond to the emails or something. Letting me hook it into other events that indicate I'm alive, such as logging into my laptop, etc, would prevent this.

It'd really be a one-action api- send a post request to some url to keep me alive, with some level of authentication.

You can load any webpage on the site, and it will keep you alive. It's as simple as doing a POST on the form, but it should be trivial for me to implement a simple API, so I'll write this soon!

It will probably be something like:

    https://www.deadmansswitch.net/api/checkin/?username&password

However, GAE can't do https on that domain yet, and I don't feel very secure passing credentials like that, so I might have to issue API keys. Still, not very hard, thanks for the suggestion!

Easy. Instead of sending a username and password, generate a long key of some kind that would be unique to each user and use that instead.

Yep, that's what I meant by API key above. I could also home my Android skills by making a simple app for it.

How would that be any different, security wise?

It would not contain information used for login.

I'm not sure the elderly would respond very well to your application's (perfectly awesome!) name.

Haha, hmm, you're right there. However, that is the standard name of any device that triggers when the user loses consciousness or is otherwise incapacitated.

Sorry to spring this on you, but it looked interesting and I figured HN would dig it. Hopefully you're getting some good feedback though.

I am, thanks! Luckily everything is going fine so far, and GAE is a champ.

I have the feeling the idea is to have mails go to stuff like your projects mailing lists or online friends, more than managing your real life heritage.

Oh, I would never trust actual will-type stuff to it, that's for sure. But I certainly don't want a 'I died, sorry!' message going out to my mailing lists prematurely, either.

We're doing a similar service so we've looked into it a bit. We found that as long as it isn't contested, nearly anything counts as a will. If your will is likely to stir things up among the beneficiaries though, you should definitely get a lawyer.

That depends where you are. See, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_will

Your right. But holographic wills will simply be carried out by the survivors unless there's a reason to involve a third party like a lawyer. That's why in almost all cases, will do not need to be official.

putting a "i died, sorry!" message on any sort of automated system would be colossally stupid (unless you plan to kill yourself, i guess). just have it send out a message saying something like "this is an automated message: i have been unreachable by email for the last 52 days. maybe something is wrong - give me a call"

The email that gets sent out has a disclaimer above it anyway:

    <user email> has set up a Dead Man's Switch to notify you if
    they were unreachable, and we haven't seen them in a while,
    so we must assume the worst. If you need something, please
    email us at support@deadmansswitch.net.

The "we haven't seen them in a while, so we must assume the worst" almost sounds a bit too cavalier or insensitive to me. If someone does set this up and really does die, the email could be hitting grieving relatives / friends, etc. In addition, an email sent by that person is likely to be very disorienting.

I think I'd rather receive a more direct message about what exactly is happening. "So and so set up a Dead Man's Switch to notify you if they do not respond to us for a certain period of time. That period of time has now elapsed. If you need something..."

Good idea, when I made this I didn't think anyone would actually die, so the wording is a bit flippant. I'll change it to be more sensitive, thanks.

the "beta" in the url doesn't make this feeling any better

This is the beta rewrite that only launched two days ago or so. The main site (http://www.deadmansswitch.net) has been running since 2006, I think, with no issues.

I took care to write loads of tests for the email sending bit specifically, too, but I wouldn't want people to add their sensitive emails before it's a bit better tested in actual use, hence "beta".

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