Microsoft Answers Vista DRM Critics' Claims

skepsis writes "Recently there have been some stories on Slashdot claiming that Vista would downgrade the quality of audio and video for every application in a machine where protected content was running. One of the stories painted a scary scenario where a 'medical IT worker who's using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer' would have his medical images 'deliberately degraded.' A post has been put up on the Vista team blog explaining exactly how the content protection works, and it turns out the medical IT staff and audio pros can relax. From the post: 'It's important to emphasize that while Windows Vista has the necessary infrastructure to support commercial content scenarios, this infrastructure is designed to minimize impact on other types of content and other activities on the same PC. For example, if a user were viewing medical imagery concurrently with playback of video which required image constraint, only the commercial video would be constrained -- not the medical image or other things on the user's desktop.'"

Comments

Comparing with Gutmann: mostly spot on

[melikamp]

a

Will the Windows Vista content protection board robustness recommendations increase the cost of graphics cards and reduce the number of build options?

Everything was moving to be integrated on the one chip anyway and this is independent of content protection recommendations. Given that cost (particularly chip cost) is most heavily influenced by volume, it is actually better to avoid making things optional through the use of external chips. It is a happy side effect that this technology trend also reduces the number of vulnerable tracks on the board.

Am I hearing a resounding yes?

Will Windows Vista content protection features increase CPU resource consumption?

Yes. However, the use of additional CPU cycles is inevitable, as the PC provides consumers with additional functionality. [...]

Yes, we know that what we call DRM they call "an additional functionality".

Will the 'tilt bit' mechanism cause problems even when the driver is not under attack from a hacker, e.g., when there are voltage spikes?

It is pure speculation to say that things like voltage fluctuations might cause a driver to think it is under attack from a hacker. It is up to a graphics IHV to determine what they regard as an attack.

How can one say "yes" that will sound mostly like "no"? See above.

All in all, the article is a great read. There are useful details about the bricking mechanism (it's actually more forgiving than was suspected), and a general consensus with the costs identified by Gutmann.

What About Hardware?

[ctwxman]

To me, the scarier implication of the original posting is, Vista forces manufacturers to lock down hardware and drivers - making them, in essence, impenetrable black boxes. As I read it, once hardware is designed to operate in a Vista environment, it will never be usable in Linux or other open source situations. Can someone expand on this, please?

Pay with DRM Money

[bratwiz]

I think people should just pay Microsoft (and Apple and the others) with Money that has restrictions on it... Here, you can have this money but you can't use it to sue anybody with it, or buy a ferrari. If you do decide to sue, the lawyer will show up late and sleep through the trial, and the ferrari will have a bum paint job and break down conspicuously on the side of the highway every 15 minutes.

Vista is DRM

[JRHelgeson]

Vista is NOTHING but a DRM platform that also happens to run Windows applications.
I am currently running Vista Ultimate on my laptop, a closed system with an integrated nvidia video card running Microsoft Certified drivers... I cannot play videos that *I* have created of screen recordings at full screen, I have to play them back in a window. Running full screen in Windows Media Player causes the playback to simply pause. I also cannot play videos that I have created from scratch and integrated into newly created powerpoint 2007 slides. When playing back on my laptop screen, the video plays fine, but when feeding the signal to the projector screen through the analog video output, the video plays for 1 second then pauses for 1/4 second repeatedly.

This is not protected content.

Sure, it isn't *supposed* to be applying DRM "features" to *MY* content, but it is.

This is horseshit, horseshit, horseshit! And for any of those who don't know what I'm talking about, its the shit that comes from a horse.

You cannot build restrictions into every device, every driver and expect it not to have unintended consequences in everyday usage.

Vista is completely defective by design.