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Vista Security The 'Longest Suicide Note in History'?
rar42 writes "The Inquirer is reporting on an analysis of Vista by Peter Gutmann — a medical imaging specialist. This isn't the usual anti-Microsoft story — just a professional looking at what is going to happen to his computer if it is upgraded to Microsoft Vista. From the article: 'Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost,' says Gutmann."
Same story at http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/22/172 7245
For the kinds of purposes I'm interested in (research, science) this will make workers question the priorities of the operating system they are using. Is the priority to have maximum flexibility, performance, compatibility and extensibility (*nix) or to have maximum convenience for consumers (Windows).
Without a doubt, Windows is still the most convenient platform for consumers. But the priority behind the design is not purely performance and flexibility, but protecting content and other commercial interests.
We sure know the priority isn't security either
Here's a link to the actual paper referenced in the article.
I would post the entire paper, but it's too large. Here are some notable excerpts:
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Peter is a security guy. He's written widely used crypto software. He is not a medical imaging specialist. Where did /. get the idea that he's a medical imaging specialist???
Unfortunately there's very little choice. The systems that run medical scanners tend to run some form of UNIX, and you can buy a workstation for a couple hundred thousand that will do the same thing, or you can use the hospital's PACS web front end... which in most cases works pretty much exclusively with IE.
You realize the original poster confused the original computer science guy with some one commenting on his article right?
c ost.txt
BTW the link to the paper is here.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_
Thalasar
Could someone please like, read....something before they post a summary? I found no indication that Gutmann is a medical imaging specialist from his web page or report. He's a computer scientist who specializes in compression and encryption, which actually makes him a little bit qualified to perform a professional review of the new operating system.
The only thing remotely medicine related here is a quote from 'Brad Steffler MD.', a surgeon who claims that Microsoft's restrictive DRM methodologies make it more difficult for him to do his job.
If you're watching BBC programmes in the UK then there is no such legal circumvention. The law is very comprehensive in that area and has covered computer viewing for years.
If you're watching BBC programmes in the UK then there is no such legal circumvention. The law is very comprehensive in that area and has covered computer viewing for years.
You're wrong. The TV licence covers the receiving and recording of broadcasts as they are being broadcast. I've got the documentation on my lap right now. The website clarifies this here. This does not cover the shows that are available for viewing on BBC sites such as BBC Two's Watch Now. (IANAL though)I don't much care for the TV licence.
I find it odd that the main thing that inspired this is not linked from the Slashdot summary. Truly a scathing article.
It makes Vista sound like a disaster. All this really shows how far MS will go to satisfy the RIAA/MPAA crowd's insanity. They are truly mad.
No one will like this. Not hardware vendors, not consumers, not anyone. Surely they're not going through with this?
First China isn't really communist. Secondly, no free lunch only applies in Pareto optimal economies, which capitalism is not due to price externalities. Thirdly artists do not receive a lot of compensation for their work in the current system. Fourth, artists do it because they like it, not for the money. Look at George Cloony. Recently he did a period peice because he wanted to. He could have made a lot more money on a mainstream production but decided not to. Fifth, west Germany was a lot more socialist then the US. Sixth, having a large population that is largely shut out of the wealth is a great way to get a Roman political system where huge mobs get raised by rival politicians. It also increases crime. So while your point is good, it needs to be toned down as you overextended with your argument.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
You're assuming that this is all to prevent piracy. The real truth is that the media companies simply hate us.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Warfare is endemic in Humanity.
From the Book of Joshua (abbreviated)...
Chapter 6 -
1. NOW Jericho was straitly shut up because of the children of Israel: none went out and none came in.
21 - And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
24 - And they burnt the city with fire and all that was therein.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? This is almost pre-historic siege warfare and what could be described as ethnic cleansing. I'm not picking on the Jewish Nation, it's just that they were kind enough to record their deeds where so many others did not. The archaeological record shows many examples of pre-historic walled cities that were destroyed in sieges, so from the earliest days of 'civilisation' we have fought each other.
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
This is part of the subtext both of the original article, and of this most recent post, so I thought I'd share what I know about it. FWIW, I'm a radiologist--that is, an MD who interprets the results of imaging studies--and an informatics geek.
Images are created on whatever imaging device--CT scanner, MR scanner, ultrasound machine, digital X-ray machine--and manipulated by the device's controlling system to do simple annotations, reformatting, etc. This is typically a Unix-based system running custom software designed and maintained by the device's vendor. The images are not usually interpreted on these systems.
From there, the images are sent to the PACS (Picutre Archiving and Communication System), which is just a gigantic central image database. These also tend to be Unix-based systems.
There tend to be two front-ends for looking at images in the PACS database. The first is the radiologist's interface, which is a high-end video workstation dedicated to showing medical images with the greatest possible fidelity. Most systems I've seen are Windows-based (Windows 2000, in our case) and run software which was built by the the imaging system vendors in the late 1990's. Much is made of the "lossless" nature of the images which are displayed; for example, when you log into such a machine, you're warned about how "This is a medical device" and that you shouldn't mess with it. Much is also made of "diagnostic-quality monitors" and high-end video cards to drive the monitors. This is an artifact from the early days of digital imaging interpretation in radiology, when there was a great deal of concern about whether the quality of the digital images would be adequate for us to figure out what was going on in Grandma's chest X-ray if we weren't looking at a piece of acetate. Most of these concerns have died away, as the differences in resolution and dynamic range turned out to be relatively minor and the added conveniences of being able to manipulate the images digitally turned out to be huge. For example, the new LCDs I seen being put on PACS workstations are off-the-shelf Dell 22-inchers, as far as I can tell.
Finally, there are "non-diagnostic" interfaces to the PACS images, which do tend to be web-based. These are so non-radiologist doctors can look at the images, too. Some are IE-based, and use an ActiveX control to display the images, and some use a Java applet. These are displayed with lossy compression (since someone might want to look at them from off-site via a VPN), and officially are not allowed to be used for interpretation. And in fact, I wouldn't want to; it's a lot harder to see subtle things on them than on a full-blown PACS workstation. Part of that is just the interface (it's hard to use those stupid ActiveX/applet things) and part of it is crummy/mis-configured monitors, but I suppose compression artifacts could also play a role.
So, to review: you go see your doctor, Dr. Smith, in her office, and she orders a chest X-ray for you because you're coughing and have a fever. You come to the hospital, and the nice technologist takes frontal and lateral view of your chest on the digital X-ray machine. He then goes back to the X-ray control room, and sees that the images are pretty good, and so he sticks your name on them, and a marker of the date/time and his name, and so on, and then sends them to the hospital's PACS system. I (the radiologist) am working at my PACS workstation, going through the long list of all of the CT scans, MR scans, and X-rays taken in the hospital. I get to your chest X-ray and look at it; I don't seen any sign of pneumonia, so I write a report (the subject of a whole different set of informatics) that basically says "Clear lungs" and that gets entered into your electronic medical record. Then, Dr. Smith back in her office can see your X-ray via her Web-based interface. If she wonders about something she sees, she can call me up and say, "What's that stuff at the left ape
Happy Premise #3: Even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won't.
No, he's correct. It says in layman's terms that:
So, if you write something, you own the copyright. You may notice in the article you linked to that Courtney specifically mentions print authors owning copyrights for their works. You can do what you want with the copyright, however, and that's where the confusion lies.
If you read the article, you'd know that the band owns none of its work, because it sold the copyright for its work to a record company in return for distribution, promotion, and royalties. That's the beauty of copyright. As an author, you can do what you want with your property. You do NOT have to sell it to a record company, and they can't TAKE it from you. You can, however, sign a recording contract wherein you stipulate that you relinquish certain rights in return for the record company's services. Note that many musicians *do* own the copyrights for the music they created. You may give up your copyright in two ways:
You can create a work for hire:
You can transfer the copyright:
In Courtney's case, she transferred her property by signing a recording contract.It's only striking, because you misunderstand the Constitution. The Constitution provides for copyright, but more importantly, doesn't stipulate what you can or cannot do with your property. Thus, the laws regarding transfer and works for hire fit perfectly within the bounds of the Constitution. There is no disagreement or hypocrisy.
Source: U.S. Copyright Office
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Some of what he says is actually correct. While I won't respond to everything you've posted I'll try to answer some of it so that you can at least get a sense of where the guy is coming from. Note that I'm not saying I agree or diagree with his position but I've been forced to research VISTA a good bit for work so I'm not completly clueless as to what's in store for us :-(
:-)
1) Laws of physics. Yes actually he's right. You see DRM is supposed to prevent us from being able to copy signals that are in the end analog. In order for it to actually work 100% we would have to have our ears replaced with digital jacks. Obviously not going to happen so in order for this to work Microsoft must have found a way to prevent you from using a microphone to record the audio (for instance). This is why folks says that for DRM to work it must break the laws of physics - this isn't just Peter saying this. I'll also note that some cmopanies have claimed to have the ability to close this "analog hole" buit to date nothing has materialized that actually does it.
2) Driver signing - in 64BIT VISTA Microsoft says all drivers must be signed. In 32BIT it's optional but encouraged and we'll get the usual pop-ups. If a driver is found to be vulnerable yeah they probably WILL kill it's certificate. Why? Because they are bending over to the media companies like CableCard and will not wish to lose that certification. An example of how far companies will go to get these certifications can be found with the TIVO S3 where they threw out significant functionality (Tivo2Go) in order to become "certified" and in their addition of DRM to retain their Macrovision license. Microsoft has now made themselves subject to much the same arm twisting... BTW, the MS blog I read that mentioned driver signing stated that they did this in 64BIT because there was little chance of breaking backwards functionality and that they couldn't quite do it in 32BIT but really wanted to. I do not know if 64BIT is required for the advanced media features but I'll bet that signed drivers will be required throughout for the advanced stuff to work on 32BIT.
3) Broken hardware... I will point out the HDMI video cards that turned out had an HDMI capable chipset (HDCP and all) but no hardware keys for the HDCP that sort of screwed the consumers. Yeah, they do sometimes ship "broken" hardware and when folks found out their spiffy vid cards wouldn't be compliant they were pretty pissed off!
4) Killer NIC card? I know some hardcore guys that play in tournaments considering that thing. es, a few milliseconds makes a difference to them and yes they run HIGH end video cards as a result. It makes no sense to me either but if the price were right I might consider that card too
5) Installing Blu Ray of HD DVD drives in the system doesn't matter. All of this DRM crap is in there working anyway and the addition of this hardware doesn't somehow suddenly turn it all on. This is part of his ppoint, the system could be more fragile because of these design considerations. As I understand it the DRM drivers all run at a special priv level seperate from the others - now that seems like an odd decision to make if you were trying to build an optimal system for the user doesn't it? I would also point out that there are other DRM contents out there over and above that which comes on physical media. I own a Buffalo Linktheater and it can play a TON of content. However certain DRM'd WMA files tip it right over because the damned media wants to phone home for authorization blah blah. You can get screwed by stuff like that without ever having installed goofy DRM'd hardware. Windows Media Player has been chock full of this DRM crap for awhile on XP if you've been paying attention.
On the flip side Microsoft has REALLY worked hard to make Vista more secure. Buffer overflows may have just been shot dead - memory space shuffling, NX bit for the OS, signing of code, canaries in the stack, no more users running as admin all the time, the lis
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