how to force windows to report a false hard disk serial number?

[JMI]

Generally true, but not necessarily as to materials which do not exist on the client machine. We are now discussing something which runs only on the server, so there is no code for the user to "debug."

As part of a registration form completion process the code could read information from the user's HHD and/or BIOS and use it as part of the hash code for the security authentication. The issue here, I believe, is whether the user can see or get access to the part of the registration form which collects that information.

I certainly do not pretend to be well versed in the details of these issues, but I have read about and seen code which claims that it can prevent the end user from using the "view source" feature with which one can view the code behind a web page. For example, if one were to "view Code" on the Yahoo registration form or login page in their browser, you would find a GPL license md5 hash code you could install in your own registration/login page, but you won't see the code behind the page which imputs the results of the pages processing into their databases.

If you couldn't "view source" you wouldn't know about the javascript running in the background. You might have various blocks running to prevent access to some of this information, but that could simply provide an error message and alert the company that your machine is blocking the effort to retrieve this information and they could decide whether they want to complete the transaction without the information to properly authenticate that user's machine.

Regards,