A little bird told me of an interesting looking challenge over at canyoucrackit.co.uk.
Basically, I've been looking at it and have a few leads already (go me!). Now I ask you, the readers, to get out there and crack it.
I love these kind of competitions, canyoucrackit reminds me of the many crackmes I have worked on in the past. For those not aware of what a crackme is, it is basically a program that is designed to be reverse engineered and cracked (the hint is in the name). Some of the ones I have worked on have been extremely challenging, using virtual machines inside virtual machines to obfuscate what is actually going on.
/Start Rant
Cracking is a controversial topic in the computer world, the terms black hat, white hat and grey hat are bandied for too much nowadays. In my opinion, it is all about the means to an end. For instance, if you legally have the right to run software on your machine, surely you should have the right to run it how and where you want, why would you have to be on the internet to run a single player game (I'm looking at you, Settlers 7! Australians are still having problems playing your game, and I have lost hours of game play as my internet connection drops and I am logged out without my progress being saved).
As long as you aren't actively enabling piracy, you should you not have the right to run your software without big-brother esque copy protection.
/End Rant
Anyway, long story short:
Show your reversing skills and crack canyoucrackit.co.uk