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What Does Your Dead Man's Switch Do?

Posted by Cliff on from the in-the-event-of-doom dept.

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?"

1 of 310 comments (clear)

  1. False alerts by iMaple · · Score: 3, Informative

    I havn't had any false alerts thanks to another semi dead man's safety, which sends me an email 15 days before my actual switch turns on.

    I basically have 7 emails to ppl really close to me. One of my password go in one of those emails and that has access to all my email/personal passwords. I havnt put any banking data since I dont think thats going to be too difficult to get, if I am legally dead.

    My deadmans switch is a simple cron job and I need to reset it once every 3 months.