In a lot of movies people often say if I don’t type a password in then “the” files will be emailed, emails sent to journalists, or the site will go online, etc. exposing whoever it is they are in danger from or blackmailing.

I always thought it was a cool concept, and it probably isn’t hard for someone who knows what they’re doing to set up some script for that, but I was wondering if there was a self hosted app that you could set up that let you set timers, say for a day, and if a password isn’t entered to cancel it, it sends files to an email (maybe configured to hit all news outlets/journalists), deploys a website at a domain thats preconfigured/setup, tweets something, etc.

  • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    You don’t really need a self hosted app, you can write a script to do the following:

    1. Check if file X exists.
    2. If file X does exist, delete it
    3. If file X doesn’t exist, delete directory Y

    Then create a new scheduled task to run the script every week.

    The result is that you have a deadman switch with a weeks delay

    Unless you recreate file X every week, directory Y will be deleted.

    This is a very simplistic example, but it would be decently difficult to figure out.