> but does involve a hex editor Oh, your comment reminded me of one of my proudest moments as a high school student! Norton Utilities was a must for any MS-DO

> but does involve a hex editor Oh, your comment reminded me of one of my proudest moments as a high school student! Norton Utilities was a must for any MS-DOS user, and so, poor students pirated it when they could. The problem was once installed, it asked for a password, and subsequent runs would demand it. My friend got ahold of a diskette with a complete but password-locked copy, and while he knew the password, he found it annoying and wanted to bypass it. By trial and error, we found a location where the binary stored the password, but it was encrypted. Studying the "encryption", it turned out it was an XOR of the password padded with spaces until I think 20 characters, so you could change that location to XORed spaces to enter the password with a single Enter, or change it to zeros so it behaved like a new install. I don't know what my friend did with his copy, I just remember the high of beating the copy protection of the legendary Peter Norton.