I thought Reddit had a page with a bunch of canaries (pictures of canaries) on it, and their idea was to remove one at a time. Can't find that now so it must have been some other service.
I think an elegant way for rsync to handle this would be to just move the page from ".../canary.txt" to ".../canary-2.txt".
Sends the message that the first canary is dead, but leaves a second one up for the next warrant.
I wish every account had its own warrant canary.