I was thinking about how if you did this today, and you set up some kind of script that required you to log into a certain system / enter a secret password/code/phrase/etc. every so often, the greatest risk for most people by far would be that you simply forget to do it (or forget the password) while still very much alive.
For the record, I don’t actually need to do this, as I don’t have anything important enough that I’d want to disseminate just in case I mysteriously disappeared one day. But we’ve all seen this premise in movies: usually it revolves around having some sort of vital information where the person fears for their life simply by possessing it. In the event of your disappearance/death, you need to send out a blast email, upload a video, whatever, to ensure that your super-secret knowledge is shared with the world.
So say you’re a generally forgetful type, and can’t necessarily trust yourself to remember to keep up with such a thing unless it’s right in your face. What would be the best way to set that up logistically so that it has the lowest chance of accidentally “detonating” while you’re still alive?
ETA: Also, assume you can’t trust any other living soul with your information. You can only entrust it to a machine, until you go missing or dead.
Tough problem. You need a machine process to recognize when you’re dead but not when you’re “sleeping” by being forgetful.
If you don’t need your info to hit the world before your body has cooled you can rig some spycams in your house linked to apps on external servers. When they haven’t seen you (using facial recognition) moving around at home for a week or two (or however long is your longest vacation) they pull the trigger and blab the secret to the world.
Likewise they pull the trigger if they’re cut off from seeing into the house at all after a longer interval, e.g. 1 month. During which they send coded emails and such to you reminding you to fix the problem soon or else the secret gets blabbed.
Best actually if the monitoring system sends you a daily reminder that it is still awake and still watching and still ticking. Just hit [reply] with the secret code to delay the blab.
You really need to guard against three different failures: 1) The machine blabs when it thinks you’re dead but it’s wrong about that. 2) The machine doesn’t blab because you’re dead but it didn’t notice. 3) The machine has failed and isn’t guarding your back and is unable to blab if/when needed.
You need to know about all of those failure modes so you can correct them (well two of them) before it’s too late. You can add functional redundancy and health monitors of the death monitors. But that only reduces, it does not eliminate, the problem. And each addition piece of equipement or logic introduces another item to possibly fail.
I think you nailed it right there! Have a satellite communication enabled chip imbedded in your core. The chip will contain a temp sensor plus enough storage for your message and an upload app. When core temp=ambient temp it fires off the message to your intended distribution via satellite.
Then avoid places where the ambient temp is greater than, say, 85 degrees F.
You can buy any number of fitness trackers these days which monitor your heart rate. I’m sure some of them have APIs where you could have some sort of script receive the heart rate data and if it stops coming, automatically email out the data or whatever.
If it’s not essential that the data release happens immediately on your death, you could maybe set a day’s delay or something so you can take the tracker off for a bit, and if you lose it or it breaks you have time to abort the data dump.
If you live alone, a low-rent equivalent to this would be to have a Nest thermostat installed. They detect movement in the house and base the heating schedules on whether they think anyone is home.
There’s a free service called If This Then That which takes triggers from online services and can initiate actions on other online services. So you could set up an IFTTT “recipe” which says "if the Nest drops into Away Mode (i.e no movement detected) then send an pre-written email with the following attachments… and then program the Nest to go to Away mode only after a certain amount of time has passed.
The big question for all of this is how reliable the OP needs it to be. Both in the sense of firing when appropriate and in the sense of not firing when inappropriate.
Especially linked with the OP’s demand that he be allowed to be an especially unreliable part of the system
Google has this built in. If you don’t log in for three months (and you’ve set it up), it will email the person of your choice with a message and a link to get your data.
So you could set this up easily using that. As long as you’re logging on to Google regularly (e.g., it’s your main email), nothing will happen (though you’ll get reminders that it exists every few months to remind you that this exists).