I'd be more worried about this site being still operational in 20-50 years from now, when it would start having chances to actually fulfil its purpose.
Chances of that are ~0.
And still, failure would be detectable, because you'd stop getting emails. And arguably that's better than false activation.
But the point is that this is open-source. So you run your own service.
Re:Show HN: DeadManHandle
by vinceguidry on Saturday May 11, 2019 @07:51AM
(#19885721)
Yeah if it suddenly just stops sending you emails one day, are you sure you're going to notice?
That's a really good point.
Travel. I don't consistently check my E-mail while traveling. Some paid products allowed changing intervals, but that wouldn't solve that issue.
I don't have a good answer, but will consider some ideas. Perhaps allowing staged responses via different mediums is a good alternative. For me E-mail works but as I've offered this others may have different opinions.
Really appreciate the insight.
It's an interesting idea. But I'd worry about failure modes. Say it's a Gmail account that gets nuked. Or there's a long-term failure of power and Internet access. But then, I suppose that the warning could include alternatives.