Thus Spaketh Idd Salim

Na ukidedi kesho? Huh?

The human head. The casing of the cranium. The casing of the brain. The store of all we see, hear, touch, smell, imagine, know and can conjure.

But it was developed with human selfishness as its Achilles heel. We as humans only share what we WANT to.

I might know the answer, but will never share with you. Sometimes we can’t. Sometimes we shouldn’t. Sometimes we JUST WON’T.

That’s us. We won’t change.

But what if the answer is something that affects more than one person? What if the answer is the difference between LIFE and DEATH. Between lost savings vs inheritable savings. Between ‘He died with the passwords and PINs’ and ‘The NikiDedi platform continued being the virtual brain of the dead and now we have all his passwords and PINs.’ Between, ‘Dad died last year and we are still chasing the bank for his money’ and ‘we got all the money in a week’

In a world of necessitated secrets and PIN controlled lifestyles, there is a need for post-death continuity. There is need for a secure, reliable and intelligent way to pass information from the dead person, to the living beneficiaries.

I have been mulling over this concept for a while, and I now feel it is mature enough to be shared out as an actual product.

How it would work

NikiDedi would be a simple but robust repository for people to upload documents, enter memos and strings of text (PINs Passwords etc). The system would have a ‘Vault’ where the information is stored and an ‘alert list’ containing names, email addresses and phone numbers of people to whom the information would be passed over if the system detects that the person has died.

“Aiii, Salim. How would a cumputer detect that someone has died?”, you ask. Confused. But happy. U know I will demystify it for you. Read on.

Part of the death-detection algorithm will be a behavioral study. The system will keep track of a user’s ‘Aliveness’ by tracking facebook posts, twitter feeds, linked-in accounts and logins to NikiDedi. Periodical ‘Are you alive?’ emails sent to the user’s email address with a read receipt can also be used. Each ‘aliveness’ tracker will have a weighted score and system triggers will be set off based on the score.

For example, if a person has not tweeted for 3 weeks (+25 points) and has not FB’d for 6 weeks (+20) and has not responded to the last 5 ‘Are you alive’ emails (+45 points) and has not responded with his secret ‘I am alive’ code to the system SMS warning about the next trigger (Send an email to his beneficiaries with all uploaded data), then this person IS DEAD. The system will hand over his e-Loot to their next of kin.

I can’t trust NikiDedi staff with my data!

I hear you. Neither can I. That is why NikiDedi is just a vessel. Provided to you will be a suit of the most crack-safe and strongest encryption tools. No one, even the NikiDedi staff can decipher your data. You will be required to encrypt your data and generate a secret-and-one-time random decryption key offline (on your PC) BEFORE sending to the Vault. Your beneficiaries will have the secret Key, but will only get the data once your e-behavior has reached the ‘he must be dead’ threshold.

And these, boys and girls, are the things super-brains think of.

NikiDedi is a toy project I have been working on and is somewhat complete. Talk to me if you want to take part in the project.

Tafakari hayo.

Back to code.

Wazi.