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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

Set up a legal trust, transfer (if transferable) your accounts to family members. If you know this is not supported, put your login info and MFA devices in a lock-box for them to inherit. Prepay your accounts, as your CC will get suspended. Those with full power of attorney should be able to legally access your accounts. Executors and primary beneficiaries named to have your accounts. Double check with an attorney in your location as some places have silly laws. I am not a lawyer, thankfully.

I have cron jobs set up on pre-paid servers so that should something happen to me, my friends will get emails from me as I don't entirely trust the trusties to do what they are obligated to do.

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> I have cron jobs set up on pre-paid servers so that should something happen to me...

That's interesting, effectively a "dead man's switch" as a script. I think that would be extremely useful thing to do if you're going camping, mountain climbing, or visiting dangerous places etc.

But if you're just talking about "natural causes" most accounts have a way for a designated person to take control upon death. Octogenarians, I expect, are not apt to be facile with cron jobs, strong passwords and MFA devices. At that point, power of attorney papers become the most important thing (POA's don't have to be family members).

> login info and MFA devices in a lock-box for them to inherit.

This seems wise, but won't work unless the software allows multiple MFA devices. I need my MFA device & phones on me to access my accounts several times a day. My bank logs me out after a few minutes and requires MFA to get back in

Most MFA have backup codes that you can download during first setup. This is typical for the MFA using QR codes. For things like banks where they email/text you your temporary code, many already have processes in place for when someone passes away (ie typically someone needs to contact the bank with proof that xyz passed away).

You can just save and print out the QR code onto paper and put that in your lockbox. Then your bequeathed can just scan those with their MFA device. Be sure to label them ;)

I know at one point apple would not let you do this even with a spouse's account. Once they knew you were deceased they closed the account. I was wondering if this was still the case.

What do these cron jobs check for?

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).

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.

Couldn’t that be exploited by holding the person hostage, making their dead-man’s-switches fire while they’re alive?

It can and that is part of the plan. If I am compromised, regardless of by whom, I want others to know.

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.

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.

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.

Its complicated but people were guessing the right thing. In effect, if something isn't updated that should be, I am assumed compromised and things start to happen. This isn't specific to a will or mortality. I just don't want people to wait until I have been missing for weeks before someone lifts a finger. :-)

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