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Indeed. For other folks: this is a must-read. HW makers are and have been driven crazy by MS' requirements for drivers that have anything to do with multimedia. The gist of it is that they *must* work with media player only, and they must fully support "tilting" bits and the whole shebang. If not: blacklist/bankruptcy. Very, very interesting read. And we're only seeing the beginning of this mob game right now.

"No DirectX 10.x API for WinXP or Win2k"
Vista uses a completely new display driver model, WDDM, which has features that are required for DirectX 10 that XDDM doesn't support (e.g. virtualized video memory).

Well, for one thing, I don't like Vista's DRM.

Maybe that document is a bit exaggerated and it's not quite as pervasive as that, but I still don't want to support the MPAA, and especially not Microsoft after the whole Novell/Linux situation.

Here's the actual paper from which came most of the material in the article: "The Commercial Malware Industry", from the University of Auckland. More technical details.

New threats of interest:

• Some viruses now use error correcting codes so that attempts to patch them out will be repaired.
• Windows Genuine Advantage blackmail trojan. Pops up message requesting payment of money or will disable your computer. (p.39)
• Location-aware malware - used to find location for credit card number, so phony transactions can be generated from a physically nearby node. (p. 41)
• "The most popular brands of antivirus software have an 80% miss rate" - AusCERT (p. 46)
• Malware that detects and removes anti-virus and anti-rootkit tools is available. Once one of these is loaded, it runs before anti-virus software, even in Safe Mode. (p. 48)
• "eGold Siphoner" detects valid sessions connecting to eGold.com and transfers funds by hijacking the authenticated session. (p. 52)

Sure. The answer, on any drive > 15GB, is 1-Pass.

Stunning eh? I'll challenge anyone to prove that it is possible to recover anything from a modern hard disk that has been overwritten once with anything other than a magnetic microscope. And even that is questionable.

Modern drives are so dense that drive makers have a hard enough time getting data back off of them after its been written.

But you asked for documentation:

NIST Guidelines for Media Sanitization
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-88/NISTSP800-88_rev1.pdf

Storage Networking Discussion
http://storage-networking.org/Discussion/forum_posts.asp?TID=59&PN=1

Guttman's Revised Paper
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html

In an average week of work + home computing, I see maybe two or three UAC prompts the entire time, and I'm running with UAC on.

That's three times more than are necessary.

Obviously Vista has to follow certain rules in order to play HD-DVD and/or Blu-Ray content, but that's the fault of the MPAA, not Microsoft. Either you implement the secure pipeline and require hardware to match (HDMI-everything), or you don't get to play that content at full resolution.

And if Microsoft, with 90+ percent of the market, said, "No, if you want to get your movies into our market, you'll get rid of this annoying, overhead causing crap that our consumers hate."

And as for the old, debunked rumor from several years prior to Vista's release you should read this, last updated earlier this year.

I'm a Unix sysadmin. I got a new work laptop today, still on XP. I asked the IT guys if we were in any danger of Vista. They said "XP is supported for years yet!" And we all exhaled.

We have worked out that if we are ever threatened with Vista, we promptly (a) pump up the Gutmann (b) write a whole pile of in-house apps for ourselves that only work on XP. The latter already worked wonderfully for us in making an instant business case for staying on Firefox — make sure your in-house web apps are written for Firefox and SeaMonkey, and specifically break in IE. (This is easy: just write to standards).

So: to stay off Vista, stock up on in-house apps that don't work on it. Then you have the business case you need.

I think if you read this http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html/ you would know why vista suck

Peter Gutman, a Kiwi, has studied this and reported on it. Find his home page at:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/

and go down a couple of screens to the section marked "Design and Analysis of Security Systems". He gives some links to his papers and presentations.

Berke Durak wrote some software called wipe to do secure file deletions, and its documentation references Peter Gutman's paper "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory". Wipe is available in Ubuntu's universe repository, and presumably many other places. Install it and read the docs.

Regards, Non.

Sure, you can boycott DRM hardware, to a point, but at some point you have no choice. For example, DVI monitors are limited in resolution, and if you want to upgrade to HDMI, all HDMI monitors come with DRM. Also, what choice do you have, if all hardware by law must support DRM?

They are integrated to make it easier to implement Hollywood and Vista's DRM requirements. Note how TFA refers to DVI and HDMI with HDCP support. In case you missed it, here is the excellent writeup about it http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html#hardware
That section is talking about the practice of producing a generic graphics card design and adding or removing 'external' components to produce high-end or mid-end versions, but it is just as applicable to motherboards with integrated components now.

I think this is at least partly because of Comcast. Bram wants his company's protocol to be obviously distinct from the sort of p2p used by pirates, so that Comcast et al. can block one but not the other. (For many reasons, this is a difficult problem, but software companies are often more than willing to jump through hoops to satisfy the content industry.)

For those that haven't yet seen the reason why changing hardware hoses your Vista and are interested in the details, I highly recommend this:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

It's all about the DRM.

Oh? Now I KNOW you haven't bothered to read it! For heaven's sake, do I have to spoon feed you? Here it is again, with the link embedded that you couldn't be bothered to look for in Gutmann's paper, RIGHT where I told you to look:

An excellent analysis from one of the hardware vendors involved in this comes from ATI, in the form of Digital Media Content Protection from WinHEC. This points out (in the form of PowerPoint bullet-points) the manifold problems associated with Vista's content-protection measures, with repeated mention of increased development costs, degraded performance and the phrase "increased costs passed on to consumers" pervading the entire presentation like a mantra.

First, I'll let Gutmann comment on his use of various OSes:

This is just Microsoft-bashing.

It's bad-technology bashing. If this had been done by Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs, Alan Cox, or Theo de Raadt, I'd have said the same thing about it. As far as I'm concerned computers are tools to get a job done and not a platform for religious wars, and if something's bad I'll say so regardless of who's doing it. In fact Vista overall has some really nice new technology and features built into it, it's just this one aspect of Vista that's troublesome. And just for the record I run various versions of Windows on ... [counting] ... seven of my machines (the rest are a mixture of Linux, FreeBSD, and occasionally Solaris and QNX), so I'd be a rather unlikely Microsoft detractor if I have their software all over my machines.

As far as George Ou and Ed Bott are concerned, again I'll let Gutmann himself address this. Key quotes below:

It all started with an email from George Ou, who decided, without ever hearing my talk on content-protection issues or seeing the slides for the talk, that what I'd said in the slides was wrong. I offered to send them to him, but by then he'd gone ahead and posted his conclusions anyway, still without ever actually having seen the slides that he's commenting on. Later he changed his story to claim quite emphatically that he wasn't attacking the slides at all, which seems a bit contradictory since the material wasn't present anywhere but the slides.

...

He even went so far as to lodge a formal complaint about me with the University, although since I'd been trying quite hard to ignore him (both he and Ed even mentioned this in their blogs), I'm not really sure what he complained about (details of complaints are treated as confidential). Maybe it was the fact that I wasn't paying any attention to him.

...

Ed's tactics were slightly different. He posted his initial comments on a blog whose existence I wasn't even aware of (and therefore had no way of responding to) and then summarily declared victory in a later blog posting based on the fact that I didn't reply.

...

In this entire time, neither George nor Ed ever tried to obtain the slides from me ("I never asked for his slides" - George Ou), the actual material that started this whole thing. I've sent out copies of the slides to *every single person who asked for them*, but neither Ed nor George ever bothered contacting me to get my side of the story, or to get the slides that they were attacking. Indeed, all I got from Ed was a long sermon on professionalism.

...

Avoiding asking me for the current slides so that he can attack a ~9-month- old copy of the writeup

...

In all this mass of trivia there's one major thing missing that would justify the title that he's chosen to use: Any attempt at all to address the central thesis of the content protection analysis, that trying to seal shut (portions of) the historically open PC architecture in the name of DRM is technically a really bad idea, and one that's bound to fail. As Bruce Schneier put it, "Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet".

...

Appendix: Short response to Ed's article

"Because Gutmann has no hands-on experience with this technology"

Actually I do have direct, hands-on implementation experience, which I could have told you if you'd ever contacted me about any of this.

...

"Here's the information on this exact monitor"

So this is where his strategy of going for a nine-month-old writ

In order to prevent active attacks, device drivers are required to poll the underlying hardware every 30ms for digital outputs and every 150 ms for analog ones to ensure that everything appears kosher. This means that even with nothing else happening in the system, a mass of assorted drivers has to wake up thirty times a second just to ensure that... nothing continues to happen

This species (C. moneduloides) doesn't just "use twigs". They make and use a number of tools. For one, they tear off a strip of Pandanus leaf which is barbed on one side and use the hooks to fish grubs out of logs. To do this, they have to cut it out in a fairly precise pattern which has a number of steps on one side to taper it down to a point (maximises flexibility, minimises weight).

Another type of tool involves them chopping a j-shaped twig off a branch and shaping the j into a fish-hook like tool. You can see it in this video by a friend of mine, Gavin Hunt.

This is generally far more impressive than what chimps can do - they're known to use sticks, but they don't *really* shape tools beyond one level of change.

You can see some of the research onto them here.

--Simon

The reason for these cameras is to film the New Caledonian Crow. People are very interested in it, because it makes a number of fairly complex tools from twigs/plants to extract grubs from logs. This type of tool use is actually more impressive than what chimps can do, and appear to be showing some form of cumulative cultural evolution.

You can see some more info at the Auckland Crow Group webpage, and I wrote a blog post on some recently published work showing the crows successfully doing a meta-tool task (i.e. using a tool, to get a tool, to get food) here.

So, the whole point of this arse-cam, is so that we can watch them make tools, use them, and see what else they get up to.

Disclaimer: I work in the same lab with a number of the Auckland crow group and am very good friends with them.

In conventional terms, when a one is written to disk the media records a one, and when a zero is written the media records a zero. However the actual effect is closer to obtaining a 0.95 when a zero is overwritten with a one, and a 1.05 when a one is overwritten with a one. Normal disk circuitry is set up so that both these values are read as ones, but using specialised circuitry it is possible to work out what previous "layers" contained. The recovery of at least one or two layers of overwritten data isn't too hard to perform by reading the signal from the analog head electronics with a high-quality digital sampling oscilloscope, downloading the sampled waveform to a PC, and analysing it in software to recover the previously recorded signal.

I would just like to thank you for actually posting a reasonable, non-inflammatory reply to the point that I brought up. It's nice to see that there's still a few visitors on Slashdot capable of having a mature and insightful conversation.

That being said, however, Microsoft's solution to a number of issues seems to be to cripple their own operating system in one fashion or another. For example, a number of bots that exploited flaws in Windows XP to install themselves remotely were then used to launch attacks against other sites using spoofed packets. Microsoft's solution? Cripple the TCP/IP stack in XP Pro so that it's no longer able to -create- spoofed packets. Seems reasonable, right? Well, not really. There's a lot of load testing tools, port scanners, and other network tools that require both "raw" read and write access to the information being carried by the network card. By eliminating a capability from their operating system they've effectively made it more difficult for network admins to do their job in a Windows-based environment.

Similarly with the sound issue. Again, as I stated in my first post, I -did- read the article (it seems that a Slashdotter losing an argument typically pulls out the "you just didn't read the article" line first). You state that their reasoning behind this engineering masterpiece/failure (depending on your own views) was to improve the experience of the end user. What end user would this be, exactly? The home user? Let's be realistic...the brunt of most home user's media is DOWNLOADED FROM THE INTERNET. Bittorrent, for example -- high bandwidth usage. In the end, they're forced to choose between whether they want to get the fastest speed on their download, or play a movie that isn't choppy and cripple their download. Is that really looking out for the consumer, or is that just a colossal error in software engineering? What about business users, who are largely avoiding Vista like the plague (I work in IT tech support at a local university, so I can only speak about my own experiences). For them thoroughput may very well be more important than media playback, but Microsoft made the choice for them -- if you're playing media your connection slows down, period. Not exactly an ideal in an office scenario.

Not one version of Windows since 95 has had this issue. I enjoyed using XP Pro quite a bit, and Server 2003 is my current favourite -- neither of these operating systems have an issue with maxed out bandwidth and media access. I've run several canned Linux distributions, a number of the BSD's, Solaris...all which I previously stated. And on the very same machine, not one of those operating systems had a -single- issue similar to the above. That obviously raises the question of why Vista does? It's not as if Microsoft doesn't have skilled programmers under their roof in Redmond. I'm willing to concede that my point about DRM was groundless -- I have no proof or evidence that this crippling of the TCP/IP stack of Vista was done in an attempt to pacify the media companies. However, I think you would have to agree that Microsoft has made many, MANY concessions to the media conglomerates in the U.S. If you would permit me to provide a few examples:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html

I think that if you read through some of the issues described on this page, you might find that the idea that Microsoft and the U.S. media industry are working hand and hand isn't so crazy after all. You can't tell me that the RIAA and MPAA didn't have at least some hand in "Vista Content Protection," and the various means by which it disables functionality of the operating system, degrades the quality of high definition content and so on.

What a great article on Vista. I, for one, didn't realize how bad things were in the HDCP sector. Thanks for that! http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html

This laptop I am working on now ($5k USD class laptop) came delivered with Vista. Let me give a few exmaples of what I had to deal with to make the issues clear.

A quick example of this would be how I needed to copy high-bitrate media-files (HDTV, 20mbps) locally before I could play them in Vista. On GigE freakin' LAN.

Copying 4GB+ virtual machines, again on GigE LAN could take better parts of a day. Checking the performance monitor, I could see that I had 10mbps actual data-transfer. I'm not kidding here. IO was beyond piss poor.

This is something I've never had issues with in any other OS. I'm not calling it unacceptable. I'm saying it's fucking crap.

In short: There were a few improvements I honestly liked in Vista (apart from the eyecandy), and those were really nice improvements, but honestly...

All the issues I had in Vista which I assumed any modern OS has tackled years ago, with regards to performance, usability and all that were simply too much for me to handle. I'm back at XP SP2 and I feel like that's the biggest hardware upgrade I have ever done.

For those interested in the technical aspects of this, I would wrote a simple, hypothetical article on the aspects of OS complexity and performance from a developers point of view on the tight Kernel-DRM coupling some time back.

That, however, is nothing compared to what this guy did.

Reading these it's pretty obvious why Vista has exactly the issues it has, and why MS sucking up to the entertainment industry probably is the worst business move they have ever made.

"In certain circumstances Windows Vista will trade off network performance in order to improve multimedia playback. This is by design."

I know we've been over this before. But for whom are we 'improv[ing] multimedia playback'? Is it really an issue in 2007, to perform a network transfer and play an MP3? Or is it Vista's "secure audio path" that is responsible for this? Remember, this is the same Vista that polls your hardware every few ms to check if you're playing 'premium content'.

I know not everything bad Microsoft does is done with forethought and malice (..) but really now. After reading the 'cost analysis of Vista content protection', can you not understand the apprehension? If some "multimedia" (albeit not 'premium content', but who's counting) is played, other parts of the system deliberately go into a 'limited' state? After reading that, does it sound like a bug to you?

"But as you know, the drivers involved in both activities run at extremely high priority. As a result, the network driver can cause media playback to degrade. This shows up to the user as things like popping and crackling during audio playback."

I call shenanigans.

Even if this is a legitimate "bug", i.e. the Vista testers were actually experiencing crackling audio while performing high bandwidth network transfers, who made the conscious decision to throttle the *network* instead of fixing the audio path and audio drivers? Windows XP had no problems performing high-bandwidth transfers and using the sound simultaneously. Besides normal operating system scheduling there was no 'throttling' of any device A when any device B activates. This is Vista content protection backfiring, plain and simple.

Peter Gutmann wrote an article that I believe explains what is happening here. It can be found at http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html HTH

He quotes one user,

While playing an MP3 file in WMP, I ended the "mfpmp.exe" process, and then sound stopped, but WMP still worked. I then pressed stop in WMP and then Play again and the MP3 file started playing, but this time through wmplayer.exe itself. It probably detected something wrong with the "mfpmp.exe" and fell back to another playback path I think. Can't be sure. A few seconds later, "mfpmp.exe" did appear again, but with 0 CPU usage as the file was playing through WMP. I had to restart WMP in order for the MP3 to play again through "mfpmp.exe"

db

For more info on Vista's idiotic approach to DRM, I heartily recommend this writeup. Anyone who hasn't yet read it is doing themselves a grave disservice.

I see this sort of comment [Vista using more resources due to DRM] flying around on here, unchallenged. As much as I love MS bashing, does anybody have any links to articles that verify this?

Doesn't the DRM only come in to play when you want to watch HD-DVD or Blu Ray movies (or some Windows Media format)?

How can it be sitting there chewing cycles at any other time?

In order to prevent active attacks, device drivers are required to poll the underlying hardware every 30ms for digital outputs and every 150 ms for analog ones to ensure that everything appears kosher. This means that even with nothing else happening in the system, a mass of assorted drivers has to wake up thirty times a second

For those of you running Windows Vista, start Windows Media Player and play a random [unprotected, obviously] MP3 audio file. Go into Task Manager and look for a process called "mfpmp.exe" with description "Media Foundation Protected Pipeline EXE." Notice how much CPU it uses. On my machine it fluctuates between 10% and 20% CPU time.

I see this sort of comment [Vista using more resources due to DRM] flying around on here, unchallenged. As much as I love MS bashing, does anybody have any links to articles that verify this?

Doesn't the DRM only come in to play when you want to watch HD-DVD or Blu Ray movies (or some Windows Media format)?

How can it be sitting there chewing cycles at any other time?

In order to prevent active attacks, device drivers are required to poll the underlying hardware every 30ms for digital outputs and every 150 ms for analog ones to ensure that everything appears kosher. This means that even with nothing else happening in the system, a mass of assorted drivers has to wake up thirty times a second

For those of you running Windows Vista, start Windows Media Player and play a random [unprotected, obviously] MP3 audio file. Go into Task Manager and look for a process called "mfpmp.exe" with description "Media Foundation Protected Pipeline EXE." Notice how much CPU it uses. On my machine it fluctuates between 10% and 20% CPU time.

I see this sort of comment flying around on here, unchallenged. As much as I love MS bashing, does anybody have any links to articles that verify this?

Well, the famous one is A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection by Peter Guttman; which goes into great detail.

Its not really the DRM, so much, as it is all the "features" (cough cough) that supports the DRM, especially how Vista encrypts alot of traffic crossing the system busses...and how Vista checks the "tilt bits" many many many times per second. All this needless "housekeeping" slows the system down.

You should see how long Vista takes to boot up and run on a Sempron 3100+ with 512mb of ram...

Ye Gods, it's so damned sloooowwwww...

Heres a link to his article,he even says he doesn't use vista yet. He is a true FUD spreader http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html#questions George Ou also did an article debunking his finding http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=673

stop stealing shit and your lives will become much easier.

In practice, if you do the standard wipe, which is usually some variant of all-nulls, all ones, 3 times random, there is -zip- chance that anyone will be able to get at the data that was once on the platter.

I'm not sure.. I think it might be possible to get to information that has been overwritten that many times. There's a famous paper on the subject. What you can recover from a multiple erasure are the probabilities that each original bit was 1, which is nowhere near as useful as knowing the values for certain, but might still be of interest. As you say, you can't use the disk to store N times its capacity using this! But a determined attacker could recover some information.

I think the only way to be secure is to use full disk encryption. That way, you can even RMA your failed hard disks without worrying that your data may be copied. Or destroy your disks when they fail, and hope they don't get stolen before then.

Vista Retarded is here
Sung by the V.C.P.s
[voiceover] The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

Vista "Retarded", is here...

And content not playin' playin', not playin' playin',not playin' playin',not playin' playin', not
playin' playin', not playin' playin',not playin' playin',not playin' playin', not...

In this context,Vista disrespects, so when I click to play, the display disconnects.
We got find methods for us to reconnect to new codecs by the network effect.
Bout to lose your fair use. Microsoft's institution. Infect your computer with D.R.M. pollution.
Cause when we click on, the sound is gonna be down. You won't believe how we ow shout out.
Burn can't cause we locked out, Sample can't cause we locked out, act up from north,west, east south.

[Chorus:]
Everybody (ye-a!), everybody (ye-a!), let's get into it (Yea!).
Get stoopid (click on!).
Vista retarded (click on!), Vista retarded (click on!), get retarded.
Vista retarded (ha), Vista retarded is here.
Vista retarded (ha), Vista retarded is here.
Vista retarded (ha), Vista retarded is here.
Yeah.

Lose control, of privacy and goals.
Won't run too fast cause, bloat makes it slow.
Won't get away, your locked into it.
Y'all hear about it, Gutmann'll do it.
Get Vista, be stoopid.
Don't worry 'bout it, Ballmer'll walk you though it,
Step by step, you'll be restricted
Patch by patch with the new solution.
Transmit bits, with D.R.M. pollution
Claim the contents irresistible and that's how they move it.

[Chorus:]
Everybody (ye-a!), everybody (ye-a!), let's get into it (Yea!).
Get stoopid (click on!).
Vista retarded (click on!), Vista retarded (click on!), get retarded.
Vista retarded (ha), Vista retarded is here.
Vista retarded (ha), Vista retarded is here.
Vista retarded (ha), Vista retarded is here.
Yeah.

Playin' playin', not playin' playin',not playin' playin',not playin' playin', not...

C'mon y'all, let's get Do-do! (uh huh)-- Let's get Do-do! (in here)
Right now get Do-do! (uh huh)-- Let's get Do-do! (in here)
Right now get Do-do! (uh huh)-- Let's get Do-do! (in here) Ow, ow, ow!
Ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya...

Let's get ill, that's the deal
At the gate, Microsoft restricts your will. (Just)
Lose your mind this is the time,
Y'all test this will, Just and download still. (Just)
Rob the resolution, from your monitor or to your speakers.
Get pixel-ated and suck.
Yo' movies past slow-mo' in another head trip.(So)
Locked in now cannot correct it, so be ig'nant and left apoplectic .

[Chorus:]
(yeah)Everybody, (yeah) everybody, (yeah) get locked into it.
(yeah) Get stupid.
(click on) Get retarded,(click on) get retarded (yeah), get retarded.
Vista retarded (ha), Vista retarded is here.
Vista retarded (ha), Vista retarded is here.
Vista retarded (ha), Vista retarded is here.
Vista retarded (ha), Vista retarded is here.
Whoaoa
Yeah.

You Cukoo! (A-ha!) -- It's Po-Po! (is here)
Be a Fool! (A-ha!)-- M.S. Tool! (be their)
Like Voodoo! (A-ha!) --You cukoo! (out here)
Ow, ow! -- Ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya...

Playin' playin', not playin' playin',not playin' playin',not playin' playin'
[fade]

... to confront a Churchill speech.

And here is the original Churchillian speech:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html

"Not specific to Microsoft" -- something that's repeated continually like a mantra in the MSMVPS link -- is a the "answer" of a weasel. Microsoft is the only operating system distributor that builds this kind of crap into the OS.

Gutmann dealt with the response of the weasels very effectively here:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html#response

... to confront a Churchill speech.

And here is the original Churchillian speech:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html

"Not specific to Microsoft" -- something that's repeated continually like a mantra in the MSMVPS link -- is a the "answer" of a weasel. Microsoft is the only operating system distributor that builds this kind of crap into the OS.

Gutmann dealt with the response of the weasels very effectively here:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html#response

Better known by it's the Executive Executive Summary:
The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history [Note A].
This should be required reading for people wanting to use Windows Vista for their media center

"A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection":

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html

LOL the "Executive Executive Summary"

This reminds me of a clever optical sorting algorithm I ran across a paper on in recent years (see http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS//researchrepor ts/244dominik.html). Again, a clever thought experiment - not sure how feasible it will be anytime soon to actually use though.

Ten years ago, this would be a really exciting development. Too bad that now, when MS talks about "security", they mean "DRM"... I don't care if I was "let down" with XP, I'm sticking with it into the forseeable future, because at least I know that XP isn't wasting CPU cycles to cripple my content on my computer.

Fuck Vista.

Today, cars are still fairly open. Enough information is available for someone who buys a car to change things (i.e. specs). Historically the PC was open, and specs were made available to program the hardware. But before PCs became ingrained in the market well enough, Microsoft came along and created a black box that sits between your software and your hardware. Eventually that black box was called windows. Because Microsoft got into PCs very early, everybody got their software through them and to play along, you had to conform to their black box methods. With video cards, it's called Direct3D. So up to the late nineties, video cards were traditionally open. So the market has become accustomed to the Microsoft product, and it's a closed product. To get support for other systems, even open support, has been pretty much impossible as of lately.

So if a car manufacturer released a closed car, it would have a hard time selling because that's not what the market expects. On the other hand in the computer industry, a closed video card is what the market has come to expect so that it gets Microsoft support.

Vista only makes things worse:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html

I have an opinion on Bestiality. It's bad. I've never tried it, though. You don't need to use something to have an opinion on it. Just read some of the reviews and it'll become clear that you don't need to test it to see if it's "good". Simple answer is that it's not.

* Video drivers, I'm still waiting on a 7900gtx nvidia driver that works properly. I'm not at all happy with Vista's performance and driver compatabilities. I spent over $300 on that card FOR VISTA. Why the hell ain't it working properly on my games which aren't even DX10 games. This is more of an Nvidia problem but it just adds another reason for me to not like Vista.

I assume those 8 movies are all small so they all fit in memory and don't let the hard drive become the bottleneck, and low-resolution so they don't engage the tilt bits? Vista may be a bit faster than XP, but that doesn't make it a useful operating system for people who want to go where they want to today, rather than go to whichever sandbox Microsoft has approved today.

That being said, I've had multiple HD resolution videos running on my Linux laptop and desktop, flawlessly, on multiple Beryl cube sides. Vista isn't faster than Linux in any meaningful measure, and is slower in many instances because of it's insistence on DRM and encryption over INTERNAL BUSES.

Even if Microsoft never implements this advertising idea, Vista has already been made to serve other people's interests and profits at your expense. Vista is primarily a DRM platform, with vestigal operating system functionality left over from previous versions of Windows. Every time the needs of the DRM conflict with sound OS design principles or the user's best interests, the DRM wins.

The proof is here:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html

I'm sorry you had a bad experience before with attitudes in the Linux community. I don't know what happened before, but I can offer these general tips as a rule of thumb: Read whatever documentation you can find, try to figure things out for yourself, and then if still necessary ask intelligent, clear, organized, informative questions. Most Linux people will bend over backwards to help you if they respect the efforts you've made to help yourself and if you help them to help you.

Welcome back to Linux.

No you wont see DRM but it will be constantly running in the background.

A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection - Article detailing the extremes that Microsoft DRM is headed towards.

It may not crash every 5 minutes, but regardless it is slower OUT OF THE BOX than XP ever was. All because of the eye candy to distract the customer from the nasty DRM surprises that hide behind the veil of ignorance.

As one understanding man once said 'The last act of any democracy is to elect a dictatorship'. We as IT and Computer professionals stand on the edge of such a choice. To choose Microsoft in the future is the figurative electing a dictatorship. One which we may very well not get a chance to change without a fight either politically, socially or revolutionary. I would love to think that one person alone can win this fight, but that is impossible. It is only when the masses rise up and say 'We wont take it anymore' is when things change. We have the opportunity to do that at this moment when a company cannot and from all appearances will not accept Vista as the failure it is. We can collectively force Microsoft not to become Hollywood's bitch (MAFIAA). The question is do we have the resolve to do such and reject Vista like the scourge it is.

So Vista *is* an improvement, and not "the longest suicide note in history"?

There's a very strong argument to be made that, aside from some eye candy to hook the users, Vista is an OS designed on behalf of Big Content, to the detriment of the users.

Of course, your only evidence of "improvement" is that Microsoft has solved some of the stability issues that plagued the last decade's incarnations of Windows. Since I almost never hear strong criticisms of Windows' stability anymore, I think you're the one beating the dead horse. Though, Peter Gutmann's article does point out that Vista's security specs seem to demand that hardware manufacturers sacrifice stability in favor of compliance with their DRM (scan the article for "tilt bits").

>The HDCP spec DOES NOT include the capability to permanently disable a device, period.

Yes, but Vista will only use HDCP hardware with "tilt bits". When the tilt bits get set, Vista refuses to use the hardware. Think of it like HDCP+. :D

Well, the DRMing isn't the most noticeable feature in the OS, but here's a general overview of the issues. It stretches further than plain DRMing, to be sure, but I'll highlight the DRM problems. First of all, if you're not using the appropriate hardware which obfuscates signals to (the monitor and speakers for example), you get horribly downgraded quality of playback for music and videos (images are also affected by this if they aren't created on your system I think). Next, huge new protections were put in place to make sure you can't just "copy and paste" files, especially multimedia.

Of course, if your music files aren't DRMed this isn't really a problem. But most of the new CDs and DVDs which come out are DRMed and this is why such protection made by Microsoft in line with Hollywood and the MAFIAA annoys me.