Chapter 19:
Misappropriation
“The best way to beat a problem is to make it work for you,” said MacGyver, right before he turned several car parts into a makeshift bazooka.* Life hacks put things to work in an unintended way: using a Pringles container to boost Wi-Fi signals;† or bending paperclips into a stand for your phone.
Misappropriation is a shortcut that puts an existing, third-party system to work for you in a way the system’s creators did not intend. Done right, this reduces your costs and confounds your adversaries.
Case study: Netflix turns the Post Office into a broadband network.
When Reed Hastings founded Netflix in 1997,1 Windows 95, the first graphical user interface, was only a few years old. There were only 70 million people ...
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