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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.'"
Recently have been some recent 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'.
Slashdot posting anti-MS stories with only speculation to their correctness? Say it isn't so!
such as newly released HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs, can be enjoyed on Windows Vista PCs.
Arrrr. I despise the use of 'enjoy' in that way. When you see the word used that way, you know the writer is selling something.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
At best, this will prevent point and click piracy. With HD-DVD already compromised and Blu Ray on its way, I hate the idea of losing CPU cycles for a copy protection scheme that doesn't even work. If it comes to a point that everyone and their grandmother can pirate high defintion content with the click of an icon, can Microsoft make a Windows Update that removes this "feature".
a
Am I hearing a resounding yes?
Yes, we know that what we call DRM they call "an additional functionality".
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.
t means they've abandoned elegance for ad hoc-ery; transparence for evasion; and trust for tyranny.
In order to abandon something, you have to have it in the first place. I can't recall MS ever being in possession of elegance, transparancy and particularly trust.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
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?
It means it proactively leverages the synergies of blue sky entertainment by thinking outside the box and innovating front-end methodologies for consumer satisfaction. It also empowers cross-platform deliverables by maximizing mission critical schemas.
and plays teh new moviez!
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beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
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.
I think a more accurate question would be: Why would someone doing medical imaging play music/videos on the same computer? Let alone at the same time?
"Hey guys, I know this computer is only supposed to be used to control the MRI machine, but let's throw our MP3 collections on it! ROCK OUT WITH YOUR COCK OUT!"
...deliberate sabotage, any way you slice it, designed on purpose to perpetuate a business model developed when duplicating content was hugely more expensive than it is now from a strictly technological viewpoint. It is (very generally speaking of course) the work of those already rich and powerful to stay that way, and to seek to lock away technological advances only to themselves as much as possible, through obvious and unchecked wide scale cartel market manipulation actions and also through extensive lobbying to make the laws reflect the profiteer's paranoid-and elitist- neoluddism.
It's Ok for the rich and powerful to have any advances and advantages from modern technology-but don't let those slavering "masses" folk have the same, even when it becomes technically and economically possible. Cuts into that "bottom line" thing, or at least that is their paranoid theory.
Enforcing artificial scarcity combined with the broken-windows economic model is the height of their intellectual business acumen.
No one disputes this is immensely profitable for them, given our current social and economic infrastructure. It remains to be seen if this will always be the case.
We left the caves a long time ago, seems like maybe it might be nice to leave the medieval period some time soon. But I guess the aristocracy isn't quite willing to give that up yet.
As Guttman was claiming that this content protection would de-stabilize your computer even if you never played protected content, this seems to have been refuted.
i.e.
Driver revocation, tilt bits, image constricting and encrypting the PCIe bus only happen when you play premium content, and can only affect the content being played. If you're worried about all this don't play HD-DVD's on your PC, play them on your 50 USD Chinese HD-DVD player.
Ideas that your graphics card can be turned off remotely by Redmond, or that accidentally playing a web page with 'protected' content in the background will cause medical images to be degraded are plain incorrect.
Concerns about Audio and Video editing in Vista are unfounded as their content is unprotected and will not go through the protected video path. And if AAC is properly cracked then HDDecrypter.exe is unlikely to use a protected video path / HDCP montior is it?
Points about this open source graphics drivers are a bit more ambiguous, but it seemed graphics drivers were moving towards a closed source model anyway. And there is nothing stopping graphics manufacturers from producing non-HD-capable cards for the business market so it isn't going to drive up all hardware prices.
Having said this, *if* you want to play protected content legally then I think there will be pain.
People will be frustrated by the graphics card and monitor compatibility, and there is every chance that the 'Protected Video Path' will not work as smoothly as intended. Even now HDCP is causing problems with standalone players. And even if it all works concerns that you are no longer trusted on your own computer are valid.
However you can quite happily use Vista and not be affected by the 'content protection' at all.
If you thought Microsoft was going to be able to stop the draconian restrictions on HD-DVD then the think again - their biggest market is in standalone players rather than people playing the movies on their PCs so they could do without Microsoft if they desired. I don't believe Apple will be immune, although they'll probably roll it out on new iMac's and rely on its physical design to
In conclusion, there are issues with the DRM in Vista but if you never play protected content you will never experience them.
OK, so Vista gives content providers a way to lock-down and restrict their products. Microsoft has "added value" to a product for a segment of people that are not their customers.
So as a paying customer (I buy operating systems for personal use, and oh...by the way, I am responsible for IT purchasing for my ENTIRE company), what does Vista give me and my users, that should make me cut a check?
From what I understand, Vista works pretty much like XP, and now thanks to Volume Activation 2.0 Vista corporate copies will now all REQUIRE activation.....every time we re-image a machine. Activation now requires me to either run a key management server (and baby-sit all my roaming users making sure they connect to my network twice per year) OR use multiple activation keys....that means phone calls to Microsoft when eventually the keys stop working.
So microsoft, tell me, why should I fork over my (or my company's) cash?
-ted
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.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
A pyrrhic victory would require some sort of substantial loss. I doubt many would call the loss of Microsoft's newest OS a loss.
Your post seems to imply that Microsoft is blameless for leading the DRM charge. DRM and bad copyright legislation are things that we need to fix but that doesn't mean we should ignore the villains who advocate them.
You never saw Microsoft attacking a filesharing program but Microsoft was first in line to implement DRM. Microsoft volunteered to implement DRM measures and led the technological way in the DRM arena. Some companies resisted but caved, some caved without a fight but microsoft is the only company I know of that actually volunteered before any content provider could even think about demanding.