Security Through Obscurity? It’s Not All Bad

“Security-through-obscurity is rightfully derided under most
circumstances. My favorite examples are silly copy-protection
schemes that are trivially foiled:

1. “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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