News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by memco on Monday June 28, 2021 @07:55PM (#27669866)
Apple is introducing a mechanism to allow access to certain data after passing: https://www.cultofmac.com/744814/apple-digital-legacy/. It would be great to see more tools and services provide ways to pass on digital information so we don’t have too many haunted digital graveyards not too much digital treasure lying in waste.
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by rawtxapp on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:14PM (#27670000)
Google also has a "dead man's switch": https://www.google.com/settings/account/inactive for the interested.
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by adanto6840 on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:19PM (#27670041)
Probably due to Google Suite -- perhaps they have something similar available at the administrator level -- but that link shows me: "The setting you are looking for is not available for your account."
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by dheera on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:12PM (#27669985)
As much as I hope nothing happens to me, I've always thought about writing a "dead man switch" piece of code that sends all my keys and passwords to a couple of trusted people if multiple signals all suggest that the unfortunate has happened.

For example, all of the following must be true:

* Zero Github commits in a week

* Zero Facebook or Instagram posts in a week

* Zero e-mail outbox messages in a week

* Zero smart devices switched on/off in a week

* Zero outgoing phone calls in a week

etc

Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by gurchik on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:30PM (#27670154)
I've thought about dead man's switches as well, but with two differences:

One, I think a week is too short, as another person has already said. I'm planning a week vacation soon and want to be unplugged the entire time. Also, while rare, I can imagine a natural disaster could last longer than a week and the last thing I want to worry about is making sure I send a few emails.

Second, I'm curious why you want so many conditions to be true before the trigger? I've seen services (and I've thought of setting up a simple self-hosted option) that simply email you a link on a predefined cadence and all you have to do is click the link. In order to protect against some weird spam filtering, I'm thinking a text message or Discord message could also be sent. The odds of both breaking for a month I think is rare. Why might I also want Github commits and phone calls to be checked?

Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by dheera on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:37PM (#27670205)
I might forget to click a link periodically, especially if I get busy, or take a vacation. But it's highly unlikely that I will be absent from an entire set of services like the above.

If I would forget to click a link, it's either because I'm super busy with work, in which there will be multiple Github commits per day, OR it's because I'm enjoying a vacation, in which my social media might be more active.

I have been away from technology but not for more than 2 weeks at a time. I suppose just s/week/month/ or whatever.

Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by hsbauauvhabzb on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:19PM (#27670050)
A week is a short amount of time if you ever take full blown technology holidays. Additionally, zero XXX could be easily broken by some arbitrary function (a Facebook app for instance).

I’d be careful to multi factor data decryption, the encrypted data must be released and some party you trust who isn’t likely to die with you holds a decryption code

Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by bradleyjg on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:24PM (#27670095)
Use Shamir’s secret sharing algorithm. If 5 out of 7 trusted people want to decrypt you data there’s probably a good reason.
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by sneak on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:17PM (#27670022)
You can just give private keys to a bunch of people, and give a cyphertext encrypted to all of them to your attorney, to be distributed upon your death.

Then you don't need complex technical triggers.

Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by dheera on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:19PM (#27670038)
I suppose. But that means I must find an attorney first. What do they cost, like $900 an hour? ... I think that's part of what I'm trying to replace by technical means.
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by sneak on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:21PM (#27670068)
If you have enough cryptocurrency to worry about distributing upon your death, you have enough money to hire an attorney. (PS: they aren't $900/hour.)
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by dheera on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:27PM (#27670131)
Okay, I suppose I don't have that much crypto to worry about. I was thinking more along the lines of releasing controls to my websites I control, private repos, notebooks full of ideas, AWS keys, etc.
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by sneak on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:52PM (#27670325)
This may sound harsh, but after you're dead, it's unlikely that anyone else will care about any of those things.
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by Alex3917 on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:25PM (#27670103)
> I think that's part of what I'm trying to replace by technical means.

Just use something like Dashlane. People can report you dead, and then you have up until your specified waiting period to mark yourself as not actually dead. If Dashlane goes out of business you'd need a new provider, but as long as you don't die within a month or so of your password manager then you're set. Much better than writing your own.

Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by sneak on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:51PM (#27670319)
This means Dashlane themselves (or anyone who hacks them) can read all of your data, too.

Also, you're almost certainly going to outlive Dashlane.

Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by booleandilemma on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:50PM (#27670308)
I've thought about this but I just don't trust myself enough to not mess it up and send an alarming and embarrassing email to my loved ones. I'm reminded of the accidental HBO email that got sent out a couple weeks ago.
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by ipaddr on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:22PM (#27670074)
You are one power outage away from that email.
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by xkjkls on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:24PM (#27670090)
What if you go on vacation for a week and your email server goes down?
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by dheera on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:34PM (#27670189)
okay well s/week/month/ or s/week/quarter/ Adjust it to something reasonable.
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by xkjkls on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:50PM (#27670306)
Still seems kind of risky in a lot of ways. Like, you get in a car accident, and are out for some period of time. I don't want to publish my obituary too early.
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by bewuethr on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:16PM (#27670019)
GitHub does that, too: you can designate a "successor". https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-yo...
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by cirrus3 on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:19PM (#27670045)
I really like the idea of that upcoming service. But, not exactly where you want to store a piece of information worth $2B. A good old fashioned safety deposit box in a Swiss bank or something and several layers of trustees would be more applicable in this case.
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by zucker42 on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:23PM (#27670081)
I would use Shamir's Secret Sharing and split it up over multiple different physical and/or digital locations.
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by paxys on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:30PM (#27670148)
It isn't that much different from adding a beneficiary for your online brokerage account.
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by elondaits on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:14PM (#27669999)
LastPass has a “dead man switch” where my wife (authorized by me) can request access to my account and if I don’t respond for a month she gets it.
Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by sneak on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:16PM (#27670015)
That means that LastPass themselves can access your account contents at any time, too.

That's an accident waiting to happen.

Re:One of the largest owners of Bitcoin, reportedly held ove... by tolbish on Monday June 28, 2021 @08:43PM (#27670246)
Not really. LastPass doesn't need a copy of the key for this to be secure. Only the person you have authorized needs a copy.