Don't log in and punch in a password within a certain period of time? Your payload goes public, with copies sent to all the parties you defined when you signed up in the first place. You can't withdraw or put a lid on that data, either -- if you're not dead and just forgot to fire up Tor that week, you've got a maximum of about 15 minutes to get your act together before all your stuff starts hitting inboxes. To be clear though, DMZ doesn't actually store any of your files (as far as they're concerned, that just makes them another target). Instead, you zip, encrypt and store your stuff online - the link to the file and the credentials needed to open it are what DMZ is really interested in.

There's just one potential hitch, here: the people you actually give your information to. The beauty of a literal dead man's switch is that when your body heaves a final time, there's a sort of physical immediacy to the switch being triggered -- there's no intermediary. To use Dead Man Zero is to trust the faceless people who put it together, to take them at their word that the system works as it should and that your hard work and findings don't just disappear along with you. When you're onto something big, trusting someone (especially some faceless randos on the dark web) ain't an easy thing to swing. That hasn't stopped users from taking a shot on the service, though: The system currently plays host to some 411 archives are just one bad day away from being released into the wild.