Hacker News Reader

Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

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!

View on HN

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.

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 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com