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A comment on What happens to your emails after you die. Parent comment

Re:What happens to your emails after you die by Alupis on Thursday March 12, 2020 @01:08PM (#22559023)
It's probably one of those "dead-man-switches", where if OP doesn't do some action before the timer goes off, then it fires off those notifications to his friends (in this case).

So OP has to regularly do some action until they can't (either aren't able to, or are dead in this case).

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Re:What happens to your emails after you die by me_me_me on Thursday March 12, 2020 @01:20PM (#22559212)
The easiest thing i can think of is:

Touch a file on login.

Cron checks if file is X days/months/years old. Also I would add two offset. First triggers earlier with reminder to self (taking extra long holidays while forgetting about cronjob), second is actual dead-man-switch when you are probably incapacitated or dead.

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Re:What happens to your emails after you die by Razengan on Thursday March 12, 2020 @01:53PM (#22559638)
Couldn’t that be exploited by holding the person hostage, making their dead-man’s-switches fire while they’re alive?
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Re:What happens to your emails after you die by nkrisc on Thursday March 12, 2020 @03:10PM (#22560575)
Yeah, sure, if they know about it at all. Also consider your threat model: are you worried your family will kidnap you to get access to your accounts? If you think they would, maybe you need a different plan. I mean otherwise, if they've got you kidnapped anyway, they could just beat the password out of you.
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Re:What happens to your emails after you die by bryanrasmussen on Thursday March 12, 2020 @03:31PM (#22560792)
If they beat the password out of you, you give the bad password that causes email to be sent to police telling them who is holding you hostage.
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Re:What happens to your emails after you die by LinuxBender on Thursday March 12, 2020 @02:06PM (#22559792)
It can and that is part of the plan. If I am compromised, regardless of by whom, I want others to know.
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Re:What happens to your emails after you die by me_me_me on Friday March 13, 2020 @06:34AM (#22566186)
I think the use case for this system was getting hit by the bus.

And in that ensuring that all your legal matters will be easy on your family.

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