Not too much to tell really. I run a couple of hobby websites that get 10’s to 100’s of visitors per month. I have an unnecessary postgres server that keeps a bunch of datasets I’ve built up over the years for the rare instances where I want to query. I have a couple VMs that just run my web scraping scripts.

In general - they are easier for me to rent and setup than teardown!

When I learned about repl.it bounties my fantasy was something like “Do programming problems get VM credits” and it seemed ideal - but underwhelming in reality.

It’s a shame - cause it seems like it could be a neat system. Plus, I would like a way to reduce the cost of all my virtual machines.

I suppose that must be what’s happening. I wonder about how good the output is from these jobs. I’m almost curious enough to post something there myself just to see what the other side is like.

One concept I would add is that the machine hosting the dead man’s switch should have a booby trap.

Suppose your enemies know about the dead man’s switch. (And they probably should know as it would encourage them not to murder you.) They want to disable it, so they abduct and torture you for the details. You must be able to give them details that will plausibly allow them to disable the DMS - so that they stop torturing you, while secretly triggering your backup.

I imagine this as the VM running the DMS has a process that runs on login. The process silently runs, sleeps for an hour, and then sends a message to a second VM, configured from a totally different account. That second VM will wait a month (long enough for your enemies to stop torturing you and assume they’ve won - or for you to disable in the case of an accidental trigger) and then post your information on various socials. When you login to the DMS machine you have an hour to kill the process or a month to kill the second machine if you forgot to do so.

I would also say that you can pay for your VMs in advance using bitcoin or monero (njalla accepts both!). Pay in advance for 10 years from separate wallets, configure your DMS and backup, and let them go!