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Comment by sshine | Hacker News Reader

I call this a Horcrux.

Also, unless your arbitrary number of friends are cryptographers, it's a sure way for them to collectively lose your shit.

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Create transparencies with the text

   If you put at least 3 of these
   on top of each other, my Google
   recovery code will appear here:

   2  £ 3 > ]7   7#A    E

(each with different characters shown, of course. Ask a mathematician to make sure any 3 will show the full code, and any 2 won’t show enough to recover it)

Put them in envelopes, write “open in case John Doe dies” on them, and distribute them among friends.

If you distribute enough of them, I think there’s a reasonable chance they’ll recover your data.

As an improvement, distribute them not to your friends, but to their kids (the probability is higher they’ll be sane of mind when you die), and tell your attorney who has one.

I think that’s overkill, though. I’ve done it simpler: I wrote the full recovery codes down a few times and put them in a few places in my house.

I think that’s fine if I assume burglars won’t take them or won’t know what to do with them and I won’t die in a disaster that also destroys my house.

> I think that’s fine if I assume … I won’t die in a disaster that also destroys my house.

You might not die, but you might still end up in a pretty bad position: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/06/ive-locked-myself-out-of-my...

Incredibly unlikely, of course, but you'll certainly feel like a dick if it does happen.

As someone who _has_ had their house burn down and had to recover their digital life from backups (successfully), this is why I've not made the step to yubikeys.

I'd say a regular will, sealed at a notary is just okay.

If you are really paranoid, why not write a service that works like a dead mans switch and when you don't trigger it for n days it sends all the keys to the kingdom to those who should receive them.

Google actually provides this service: https://myaccount.google.com/inactive?pli=1

At this point I've moved almost everything off Google and basically now only use my Gmail account for logins on websites I don't want to give my real email address to and to keep Inactive Account Manager setup to send the necessary info to get into my 1Password account to my brother if I die.

I have a will setup with all my financial details and have set beneficiaries everywhere but this feels like a good backup in case I forget to update it with something or my family has trouble gaining access using other means.

That’s a helpful link! Do you know if google allows access to Gmail once inactivity is triggered? Ideally my contacts could use it to recover access to my password manager.

You have the option to allow that yes. When you add people to be contacted you're able to granularly decide what parts of your google account they get access to and can optionally add a personal message as well.

> The setting you are looking for is not available for your account.

Google Apps strikes again...

Step 1: Kidnap $target

Step 2: keep for N+1 days

Step 3: …*

Step 4: profit!

* where “…” just means “wait”

Kidnapping $target works for just about every contingency once you include $hammer.

Why bother waiting!?

https://xkcd.com/538/

Only a couple need to be into cryptography. You can setup so than N-of-M keys work, so that you're resilient to M-N losing their key

You can have 2-of-20 which encrypts an encrypted blob whose key you share in your will

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