[TeMPOraL]

I'm not sure if I agree with the tone of his conclusion - don't worry, that we always evolve defenses. It doesn't matter we evolve defenses. They're always in lock-step with new attack vectors. Which means the only thing that changes is the players. Yesterday it was Zynga and Upworthy, today it's Cambridge Analytica, tomorrow it will be something else. Bad new for individual attackers, yes, but it's also bad news for all of us too - because we don't know and can't predict what the next attack will be and where will it come from.

Basically, the defense can't outpace offense, and we're doomed to forever be pwnd by manipulative people.

[Bartweiss]

> Basically, the defense can't outpace offense, and we're doomed to forever be pwnd by manipulative people.

This might be a decent summary of where we are now, but I don't think it's inherent to the problem. To stretch a metaphor, antibodies to viruses are reactive, but white blood cells are proactive against new diseases.

I run a stack of privacy and attention defenses on my browser. Sometimes new attacks come out and I lose ground, as with browser fingerprinting. But sometimes new attacks come out and run aground on the protections I already have - the various cryptocurrency mining scripts, for instance, were all stopped because I disabled Javascript for unrelated reasons.

Blocking the intrusion of the day is a Red Queen situation, agreed. But it's possible to make the game asymmetric, to raise the cost of future attacks and so do better with each round of the pattern.