A U.S. federal judge ordered EchoStar Communications on Thursday to disable its digital video recorders (DVRs) that infringe on a patent held by TiVo.

Judge David Folsom of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas granted an injunction mandating that all but 192,708 DVRs violating a TiVo patent should be shut off within 30 days.

In addition to the injunction, Folsom added $5.6 million in interest and $10.3 million in supplemental damages for infringement, bringing the total judgment close to $90 million.

... Holy Shit! I feel like I dodged a bullet.

I came **extremely** close to working for Echostar right out of Tech. I was offered a position in their hardware dev team to write software for the set top boxes, possibly their DVRs. They really liked my (now incorrect) article about hacking XM radio because I already know about the security issues involved with one to many broadcast systems.

SPI Dynamics got their offer letter to me a few days before Echostar did. I took a day or so, did more research on how cool web app security was, and decided I really didn't want to work for a big company.

I suppose if I had gone to work for Echostar, I'd be lecturing on destroying the Intarweb using DSLAMs instead of JavaScript...