It seems companies such as Amazon aren’t the only ones keeping tight control over their products after purchase.  Their mass deletion of Orwell books from Kindles was just a small taste of the things to come.

Indeed, it seems car dealerships have also entered this arena.  Eager to ensure that their customers keep up with their auto payments, Texas Auto Center installed some of their cars with GPS-enabled immobilizer devices.  If a customer stops paying, their car will stop working.  It seems that many of Texas Auto Center’s employees had access to the web-based system by which cars could be immobilized.

Enter Omar Ramos-Lopez, 20 years old and a former employee at Texas Auto Center.  Allegedly, he was unhappy when laid off by the dealership, and thus a month later sought revenge.  Predictably, this alleged revenge came in the form of over 100 disabled cars, some of which honked their horns uncontrollably.

Horn Honking?

You may be wondering, like I did, why a car dealership would want to honk a car’s horn remotely.  Is it some sort of weird power trip?  Do they have a strange sense of humor?

Well, unfortunately not.  If a customer hasn’t kept up with their payments, the dealership recovers the car.  They use GPS to find the car’s approximate location, and the horn honking to pinpoint its exact location.

A Hacker?

It is also interesting how the press is calling Omar Ramos-Lopez a hacker, even though it seems his alleged feat required little computer expertise. It seems he simply used another employee’s username and password to login to a web-based system, allowing him to cause him the mayhem.

It isn’t much different than the supposed “hacking” of Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! e-mail account, which was done by a student who successfully researched the answers to her password-recovery questions.

A Sign Of Things To Come?

I suspect this won’t be the last remotely-caused-mayhem story we’re going to hear.  100 disabled cars is a drop in the ocean compared to the potential chaos that could be caused, if an employee of a bigger company gets particularly annoyed.  For some reason, I can imagine a big-brand cellphone being the victim.

Austin police have filed computer-intrusion charges against Omar Ramos-Lopez.  If convicted, Ramos-Lopez faces at least four whole months in state prison.