I'm pretty sure the Apple dev who was tasked with securing the older hardware "tally lamps" is on HN somewhere -- I seem to remember him posting about it. (is it you?)

I used to know a guy, about 15 years ago, who made his money exclusively through buying up laptops and hacking the tally lamp code (to stop it activating) one-by-one and selling the code directly to 3LAs. It was really good money.