I'd use Buddy to write an encrypted string to an ini file. If the ini file is missing, or the encrypted string isn't what you expect it to be, bail.
Which didn't answer the question! Have another read, I'm sure you'll have ideas about the real question too.
Indirectly your suggestion might be to delete the ini file, but that could leave a genuine user who managed three successive thpos, I mean tupos, no trpos (something like that...), completely confused. A way around that would be to have an alert (triggered by lack of deleted ini file) that says "you failure, reinstall and try typing more carefully next time". Would that stop a hacker though? They would just reinstall and try again.
How about having it e-mail the manager if someone fails three times? That would be a more fun solution.
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Not only that but any hacker worth their weight wouldn't need to, you could reverse engineer, you could copy the files that change/get removed after 3 successive failures and put read only locks onto them, you could back them up and copy them instead of having to reinstall.
At the end of the day it's an annoyance that would deter genuine customers rather than hackers/crackers or whoever you're trying to protect yourself from. We've had countless security methods tried and I've found the better the protection the more annoyance to the customer the more likely-hood they'll send the product back and say it's way to complicated to use and they want their money back.
Maybe you could give us some background as to why you're implementing this, is it to protect the data in the program, is it a method of copy protection?
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