Ah I remember TomWoozle as one of the super advanced ships in EV:N. I'm guessing a few staff members had them? They were always intimidating and very powerful, was a treat to see them as a kid.
I was a beta tester for EV Nova before I joined as a staff member. I got the character for winning a bet against Andrew Welch that I could hack the shareware mechanism of Snapz Pro (the screen capture tool). I did it by ignoring the shareware code itself, and instead patching the watermark code so the rectangle was 0x0. So you got nagged but the tool worked.
Andrew dropped an enigmatic hint once that it involved "polynomials" and when I eventually learned about these in school I spent a lot of time wondering how you could turn one into a serial number.
Maybe @khalwat can finally reveal the answer to a question I've had for at least 20 years?
The article doesn't shed a lot more light on it, but the rough understanding (between my understanding at the time and what I've lost to memory!) was that it was similar to public key cryptography, with a public key in the app that could be used to verify license codes signed with the private key.
I found a Reddit post that explains most of the algorithm, but not much to do with polynomials. https://www.reddit.com/r/evnova/comments/g3ie3x/ambrosia_and...
(P.S., I did pay my registration fee for Uplink. Thanks for porting it!)