buzz,
you may be remembering the time that DirecTV killed the plethora of illegal cards that were around in the late 90s. This was designed by one Christopher Tarnovsky:
Among the countermeasures he says he created was one known among pirates as the "Black Sunday" kill -- an elaborate scheme that destroyed tens of thousands of pirate DirecTV cards a week before Super Bowl Sunday in 2001.
That's an excerpt from this article that retells the story. It's at
[Link: blog.codinghorror.com], "Recalling the Black Sunday Hack." This is the intro:
One of the most impressive hacks I've ever read about has to be the Black Sunday kill. Since the original 2001 Slashdot article I read on this is 99.9% quote, I'm going to do the same. I can see why they quoted so extensively; it'd be difficult to improve on the unusually succinct, well written summary provided by Pat from Belch:
And the story is repeated below that. It was pure genius curing a programming oversight in the original cards.
