[Taniwha]

You can go to this effort to get it to make the right magic number .... or just find the place where it gets tested and replace the conditional branch with a unconditional branch (or a no-op)

Having said that I once wrote 68k code that was an executable copyright message, and other code that if it discovered it wasn't running on an authorised machine logged to a known port, sent an email, unlinked the binary, queued "sudo reboot", killed the parent process and then exited (all the authorised machines were mine, running a bespoke kernel)

[stevekemp]

All the way I was thinking the same.

Why patch the binary to get the correct "system identity" value, to match the license/serial-key you've got? Instead patch the serial-check out of the software entirely.

[userbinator]

For crackers, keygenning is more fun.