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Send Emails After Your Death
Roland Piquepaille writes "As you all know, the two things in life you can't avoid are taxes and death. But if you will no longer have to pay taxes after your death, you will be able to send email thanks to a new service, Mylastemail.com. The Los Angeles Times (free registration needed) says this service will cost you $9.99 for a three-year subscription. The company says you can update your farewell messages from anywhere in the world, including cybercafes or airports." If it's not a hoax, it's a pretty cool service.
I already have a list of people to send email to about my death in my will. It will be executed for free.
So this officially depricates going to confront the bad-guy and sending a sealed envelope to someone with instructions like "if I'm not back by midnight, open this letter". We can just use email instead. I can see it now: "I've got the source to your virus Mr. Badguy. If I'm not back to my office in 24 hours, my automated service will email the source to the FBI."
SCO.com uses Linux
in the case of an untimely death i can email subscription cancellations to all my shell services and porn sites. i wonder if they will ever be able to do a last post, if that day ever comes watch out ./
The problem with dead-man-switches is that it takes enormous foresight to avoid accidental activation and ensure activation when you really meet your maker. You don't take your computer with you on vaction, I suppose, so the 72 hours rule needs an exception. Also, what happens when you leave the computer on when you leave the house and get run over by a bus? It seems this service company hasn't solved these problems and simply relies on someone finding you dead and informing them, so they can start sending your last emails.
This is awesome! Now I don't have to go through all the rigamoral of finding a friend to hold snailmail evidence when I blackmail someone. Now I can just say "and if you kill me, the information will automatically be emailed to the New York Times".
The cake is a pie
I have little to no contact with my family. I hate writing home. Including e-mails.
Sometimes when I travel I think about my death - I have little social life. My girlfriend doesn't know shit about my family and background.
Several times I've thought of setting up a cron job so if I don't deactivate it in a couple of days, it would notify my direct relatives about my death. Not the best thing to think about when you're about to enter a plane.
Why is it that Roland Piquepaille is the submitter of at least one front page story per day? Can someone please elaborate whether or not Roland Piquepaille has a relationship with Slashdot, or OSDN, or VA, or one of the editors?
This is a genuine and very serious question. I am curious as to why I see the name Roland Piquepaille on Slashdot's front page daily. No one can have a "submissions to accepted" ratio so perfect without something weird going on...
Quite the useful concept, especially if the server is remote and doesn't belong to you personally. You could get disappeared to Gitmo, for example, and have an automatic email sent to your close contacts indicating that something is going on. Even if the Bushstapo confiscated or destroyed your own computers, assuming the job was setup on a rented machine, it would still fire.
Spammers will start harvesting on-line obits, take all the names in the obit message of family, friends, pall-bearers and check if they have names similar in their databases and use this to try to get under SPAM filters.
Uhh... I need to take some time off, I'm starting to think like some sick spammer.
I think it is a bit optimistic .. lets face it .. its a .com biz plan that is trying to charge $10 for an email.. it will be around in 3 years? not a chance.
In three years, no one you know will still be at the same email addresses, so it's a good time to update those addresses anyway!
The trouble is making sure the server is still running after your death. Personal boxen will likely be turned off. Scheduling such a process on a work server might be frowned upon. Asking a friend to host it for you doesn't cover all the bases. (what if they die at the same time?)
Then you've got the problem of clock glitches. What if the server boots up, thinks it's 2005, notices the elapsed time, and sends your emails before getting an NTP update?
What's needed is a distributed method of tracking keepalive messages (ha! I kill me!) and then taking action if they stop coming. The system should run on several machines, and they should vote together, to ensure that one misconfiguration doesn't screw up the works. Another trick is keeping the last-message private until it's sent.
When it's all taken into consideration, it's usually easier to let humans make the determination of your death. But don't leave it up to ONE human. Suppose someone found your envelope with the mylastemail document in it, and mailed it in as a prank?
Cryptographers have protocols for dealing with this, it turns out. Assume you have 10 trusted friends, and you want to set it up so that any 6 of them can decrypt your message. Consider "forward error correction" protocols, which allow data to be reconstructed even if some blocks are missing. Simply encrypt your message and then FEC-encode it into 10 blocks, so that a minimum of 6 blocks are required to make the original.
Give each block to one of your friends, with strict instructions not to let any of the others see it until after your death. Ask them to make really sure you're gone before revealing their parts of the key. The last thing you need is for a somewhat exaggerated report of your death to trigger the doomsday emails!