Why we need reverse engineering, and why new copyright laws are dangerous to
us all:
Many of the privacy risks we face today such as the unique computer identification numbers in Microsoft Office documents, the sneaky collection of data by Real Jukebox, or the use of Web bugs and cookies to track users were only discovered by opening up the hood and seeing how things really work. Companies do not publish this kind of information publicly.
CueCat ... added a trivial encoding scheme, which they call encryption, so that their bar code scanner was protected against reverse engineering by the DMCA. We can expect to see many more companies do this.