Fun with Hex Editing.

For one of the missions on a site I head over to whilst bored, I was to find out the cd-key of the program, to register it. I was thinking it would be a little more difficult than it was, but to my dismay, it was rather easy. First, I grabbed the first hex editor I could find, and opened the app that was given to break. After a quick ascii search for "cd-key" I found it. Yay! Took longer to grab the hex editor than it did to find the cdkey :( Hex editing can be used in multiple ways:
According to Hex Editor Wikipedia:
"By using a hex editor, a user can see or edit the raw and exact contents of a file as opposed to the interpretation of the same content that other, higher level application software may associate with the file format. For example, this could be raw image data, in contrast to the way image editing software would interpret the same file.

In most hex editor applications the data of the computer file is represented as hexadecimal values grouped in two groups of 8 bytes and one group of 16 ASCII characters, nonprintable characters normally represented by a dot,(".") in the ASCII part.

The standard Unix shell command used to display (though not edit) a file in hexadecimal and octal is od."

So, by using a hex editor you can change just about anything you want. For example, back in the day, I used to use a hex editor to change spawn points on maps for a game I played. I won't dig into the things the 'bad' guys can do with it ^ cdkeys*cough* so we shall end it with this :D