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One thing I’ve never thought about regarding “defense in depth”: Say we have defense measures A, B, and C. If A does its job, B and C aren’t used. You don’t really know how useful they are until A doesn’t work, and in fact a politician can say B and C “don’t do anything” which is technically correct. It’s only when we steamroll Chesterton’s fence that the value of B and C become apparent.

You could get rid of the fire department and it would take some time to realize their value.

One of those defense in depth components here would have been not having extremely weird privacy defaults on Venmo. Because when we say “people don’t care about privacy” sometimes those people gain access to really important info.



As a general observation, I'm waiting with great interest for a time when people who are dismantling privacy all around the world, and especially fuckers in EU, will be targeted themselves through the very backdoors they have demanded from others. Now that would be a pleasant failure.




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