A few years ago IIRC Hughes decided to stop all those with pirated cards for their satellites. Instead of downloading a program that would be caught by the pirates and circumvented, they downloaded small regular updates that included some stray code.
A final update had another bit of code in it that brought all the previous stray code bits together, forming a program that destroyed the card.
It's easy to hide stuff.
"It's easy to hide stuff."
It is, indeed. I had a friend in the shareware business who worked out a deal with a publisher to publish a different version of one of his shareware programs. He was worried, though, that the company would end up stiffing him somehow on royalties.
Naturally, the company insisted that he provide source code for the version they bought, and he complied. They looked it over carefully, too.
Well, he did have a routine in the program that was built of carefully hidden bits of code. The routine watched for an open internet connection, and sent an email message to the programmer, containing just a randomly generated number. Once it did that, it set a variable and never did it again. He hid stuff in copyright info statements, and other places, and nobody ever knew it was there.
So, he had a count of the number of products sold by the publisher. Sure enough...the publisher was stiffing him on royalties for about 50% of the products sold. He sued. He won. Clever lad, that.