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Google's BeyondCorp paper introduced zero trust to enterprise security in 2014. The same framework — identity over location, authentication as perimeter, least privilege, assume breach — ports directly to personal life and produces a better result than the ad-hoc alternative.

Microsoft's STRIDE framework was built for application security. It works just as well on personal OPSEC and estate planning — spoofing your identity, tampering with beneficiary designations, denial of service on your own life. A walk-through.

The check-in window on a deadman switch is a probability trade-off between false positives (firing while you're alive) and false negatives (not firing when you should). The honest math, and why the right cadence depends on more than just the slider in the settings.

A plain-English walkthrough of Shamir's Secret Sharing — the polynomial trick, where it works in production, and the brutal failure modes that make it the wrong tool for most family inheritance plans.

From Westinghouse's 1872 train brake to the Soviet Dead Hand system to WikiLeaks insurance files to modern crypto inheritance — the long, strange history of the switch that fires when you stop showing up.

If you've ever designed a distributed system, you already know how to do digital estate planning. The vocabulary is the same — single point of failure, failover, RTO, audit log — and the question is the same: what happens to a critical node when it goes down? You just haven't applied the framework to yourself yet.

Every account you own is only as secure as its recovery flow. "Forgot password" is, by design, a feature that lets someone who isn't you take over your account if they can convince the system they're you. A look at why recovery is the real security perimeter — and what better recovery would look like.

The threat model, the wrapped master key architecture, the per-file content keys, the per-share keys, and the trigger pipeline — a transparent walkthrough of how a deadman switch can deliver your most sensitive files without anyone, including the service itself, ever being able to read them.