“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…!)”
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