You could just get it now, knowing it'll be cracked later and you won't have to worry about finding one that hasn't been sold or patched with the inevitable "security update" that will follow. The problem is when you buy something with some ridiculous restriction on it intending to remove the restriction yourself, they don't know. They just see one more sale, and the more sales they get, the more it looks like people are just fine with what they're doing.

Even if you can buy a restricted product and remove its restrictions, you're still supporting them. The best method is to not buy it, i.e. vote with your wallet. They won't know if x% of their customers are buying them and hacking them, but they'll certainly notice an x% drop in sales.

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Well, PROM works by having an array of small fuses, which can be blown during the write sequence, changing their binary value to zero. The same could be used here, where a program would verify the number on the card and then blow the fuse.

Today's processors are getting almost scarily complex though and I wouldn't be surprised if it had some flash memory inside and a little more sophistication than that. Still, if it's not trivially vulnerable to a replay attack (or at most something involving its own serial number) I'll be surprised.

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