If you enjoy puzzle games and programming I would strongly urge you to look into learning to crack. I'm not very good at it (it usually takes me a couple days to break into lightly-protected Mac software) but it's way more fun and challenging than any other puzzle I know.

Just don't release what you crack. I either delete the cracked one or pay for it after I'm done; cracking things is more fun than using them to me.

I've previously had interactions with CrackZ. He's an incredibly sharp individual.

He runs a reverse engineering forum called woodmann and he has some great essays here: http://www.woodmann.com/crackz/index.html

Definitely worth reading if you're into reverse engineering.

If you want to learn more about cracking, the woodmann pages are probably amongst the best (the guy being interviewed is involved in woodman)[1].

If you want to learn more about reversing in general (which in many respects is a lot more wholesome and for some, interesting than cracking) try BIW[2] as the woodmann library is easy to get lost in.

[1] - http://www.woodmann.com/forum/index.php

[2] - http://www.reversing.be/

I'm all for cracking. In this age of multi-TB drives, it severely pisses me off when I can't rip a DVD/CD to disk or must have the CD/DVD in the drive to play a game. As an admin, mention of "flexlm" gets my blood boiling.

As illustrated by the zillions of man-hours wasted on the cat-and-mouse game of protection/cracking, as opposed to productive furthering of the software or other coding pursuits, protection is a waste of everyone's time, especially of the end-user who must put up with it.

A few software authors have ‘crack catcher pages’ for the search engines that say things like “I work 60hrs per day on my software, please support me if you want me to continue adding features” etc.

Sounds like it would also be a good idea to include some comments / code in there for crackers to stumble across and guilt them into stopping.

Why does a cracker use a Hotmail account?

I had a job making replacement chips for toner cartridges so they could be refilled. It was legit -- went to the supreme court (Lexmark). I hated that job -- humilating being a reverse engineer instead of an engineer. A idiotic fluke of capitalism found me undoing work instead of doing work -- worse than busywork.

Crazy boss expected me to reverse the secure hash algorithm. I'm like, "I think there would be some bigger uses... this is nuts!" What the hell is this job?

Some were just mildly special EEPROMs.

Ohhh, that kind of cracker. I thought it was just going to be an interview with a white guy.