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DRM Hole Sets Patch Speed Record For Microsoft
puppetman writes "Wired columnist Bruce Schneier has an article up called 'Quickest Patch Ever', about a patch that was issued within three days to fix a vulnerability in Windows Digital Rights Management (DRM)." From the article: "Now, this isn't a 'vulnerability' in the normal sense of the word: digital rights management is not a feature that users want. Being able to remove copy protection is a good thing for some users, and completely irrelevant for everyone else. No user is ever going to say: 'Oh no. I can now play the music I bought for my PC on my Mac. I must install a patch so I can't do that anymore.' But to Microsoft, this vulnerability is a big deal. It affects the company's relationship with major record labels. It affects the company's product offerings. It affects the company's bottom line. Fixing this 'vulnerability' is in the company's best interest; never mind the customer."
While it may be funny to joke about it serving the customers' best interest if Microsoft were to go belly up, Microsoft is vital to our current information technology infrastructure. Windows is the de facto desktop OS standard. It is a very common server OS. And it runs most of the internet sites in the world (if you believe the press releases). It serves the customers' interests to have this OS around despite its flaws.
So if Microsoft were to leave this hole unpatched, it would seriously damage their credibility with media content providers. All devices that use the WMx formats would suddenly become vulnerable to this feature and device makers would have to drop the format altogether. It would make Windows an unviable vehicle to distribute media, in the eyes of the content publishers. You would end up with less choice as the publishers would migrate towards those operating systems that supported stronger DRM and the customers would be net losers as they would not only be still restricted by DRM but their choice of operating systems would also be restricted.