[NTLUG:Discuss] FW: motivating shady clients to payup

[Rusty Haddock]

What us "old fogies" called it was a "sunset clause" buried in the
software.  I wrote this once for some credit card terminal software
to prevent beta test versions from getting out from the test lab
and hitting the live terminals in the customer's sites.  We had had
this happen once or twice before.  If worst came to worst and we
didn't feel that the customer was going to pay their bill this sort
of thing could have gone into the production version of the
software. 

What happened would be the terminal determines it was running at a
time past an encoded date/time then all the executables in the
terminal would be deleted.  I kept the transaction data (and it
remained extractable) but made the terminal unusable.  Before
deleting all the software a nice little display would come up and
say "This software has expired.  All programs have been removed.
Have a Nice Day!!!".  This would get printed on the receipt printer
as well so the message would be seen. 

My boss, especially, liked the "Have a Nice Day!" message. :-)

Now you say, "Well, that'd be easily gotten around." Yeah, sorta,
if you knew how to work the system mode of the terminal!  The
IBtC's and the customer still wouldn't have know what hit 'em
before it was too late. 

So far, customers have been nice and I'm keeping 'em happy so I
haven't had to use my little gremlin.

>From the cheery side of the business, :-)

	-Rusty-

P.S.  In the case being discussed, the kernal could simply be removed
      at the appropriate time and rebooted.  No customer data is
      destroyed -- the machine becomes unusable as "sold".  Yes, there's
      always a boot floopy but... solving that problem is left as an
      exercise for the reader. :-)
-- 
   _____        Rusty Haddock  =  KD4WLZ  =  rusty at fe2o3.lonestar.org
|\/   o \   o
|   (  -<  O o   The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck
|/\__V__/           is the day they start making vacuum cleaners.