From: "Robert A. Rosenberg" <hal9001@panix.com>
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 14:06:15 +0800
To: "Douglas R. Floyd" <dfloyd@io.com>
Subject: Re: forget photographing license plates!
In-Reply-To: <19960818051206140.AAC174@IO-ONLINE.COM>
Message-ID: <v03007801ae42dbed6452@[166.84.220.80]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 3:19 -0500 8/18/96, Douglas R. Floyd wrote:


>>
>> I'm just waiting for them to integrate with TRW. Then, with people
>> they've determined can afford a new one, they can trigger the car to have
>> mysterious engine failures...
>
>Or the minute one falls behind on their bill, the engine doesn't start.
>
>This is legal, IIRC (I am not sure of the exact court case, but one
>company had a software vendor disable their sales software by remote for
>not paying their bill, and the court upheld the software vendor.  I don't
>remember the specifics on this.)

Neither do I (exactly) but it was one of those cases where the program was
leased for a period of time and was not to be used after this unless the
new lease was paid. Normally, these types of programs start printing
Count-Down warnings as the expiration date nears and the customer is
supposed to enter a code (supplied by the vendor after paying for the
extension of the lease) into the program to keep it running. I do not
remember if the program was issuing this type of warning or not. I think
that the court case was due to the way that the vendor crippled it for
non-payment not the fact that it was done (since the Time Bomb code was
standard industry practice and they just logged into the program to cripple
it instead of just having it refuse to run after the trigger date).