wild guess: there was some sort of registration or copy protection that generated a unique machine id or cryptographic key by applying some simple transformatio

wild guess: there was some sort of registration or copy protection that generated a unique machine id or cryptographic key by applying some simple transformations to the mac address. it was trivially defeated because it was easy to find where this was calculated because of the naming of a mutex that enclosed it. after defeat and remediation, this was added as a grumble. for background: it wasn't uncommon in the old dark days of proprietary windows software to have an installer generate a machine id that would then be used to compute a machine specific install or registration key. i don't want to use the word sign, because that was probably more advanced than what actually went on, but the registration key was often a function of the machine id.