Security Through Obscurity? It's Not All Bad Jun 1, 2007, 03 :00 UTC (4 Talkback[s]) (7638 reads) (Other stories by Carla Schroder)
"Security-through-obscurity is rightfully derided under most circumstances. My favorite examples are silly copy-protection schemes that are trivially foiled:
"The seekrit write-protect tab on 3.5" diskettes. Y'all youngsters may not remember these at all, but back in the last millennium, commercial software was distributed on diskettes. These had a little plastic tab that you could open when you wanted to write-protect the diskette. This was a useful way to protect us from our own mistakes. Modern SD camera cards have a switch that is similar to these, and I think that is a nice thing. But the vendors who thought that shipping their software with the write-tab open gave them meaningful copy-protection were thinking very strangely, because you could still copy the diskette. Some of them went as far as removing the tab entirely. So the remedy was sticking a piece of tape over the hole. (I am not making this up! I was there...!)"
