A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection — Probably one of the most amazing documents on the Internet. It’s incredibly long and detailed. I suggest printing it out and reading it over a few days.
Executive Summary
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. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it’s not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista’s content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.
This document is laced with material like this:
Similarly, component (YPbPr) video will be disabled by Vista’s content protection, so the same applies to a high-end video setup fed from component video. But what if you’re lucky enough to have bought a video card that supports HDMI digital video with HDCP content-protection? There’s a good chance that you’ll have to go out and buy another video card that really does support HDCP, because until quite recently no video card on the market actually supported it even if the vendor’s advertising claimed that it did. As the site that first broke the story in their article The Great HDCP Fiasco puts it:
“None of the AGP or PCI-E graphics cards that you can buy today support HDCP [...] If you’ve just spent $1000 on a pair of Radeon X1900 XT graphics cards expecting to be able to playback HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies at 1920×1080 resolution in the future, you’ve just wasted your money [...] If you just spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs expecting to be able to play 1920×1080 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies in the future, you’ve just wasted your money”.
(The two devices mentioned above are the premium supposedly-HDCP-enabled cards made by the two major graphics chipset manufacturers ATI and nVidia). ATI was later subject to a class-action lawsuit by its customers over this deception. As late as August of 2006, when Sony announced its Blu-Ray drive for PCs, it had to face the embarrassing fact that its Blu-Ray drive couldn’t actually play Blu-Ray disks in HD format.
found by Lou Solomon
Check DU on 12/28/2006, it has been linked before. “The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history”
Good info anyways, worth a repeat.
Vista is nothing more then a proctologist’s view of Bill Gate’s anus. The same view the media companies got just before Bill let them shove it in.
M$ had the clout to stop this, but they just rolled over and played nice.
You’re late on this one, John.
Your fellow TWiTs, Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson, having invited Peter Gutmann onto their show, are already backing off.
http://www.grc.com/sn/SN-077.htm
FWIW, I think Peter is quite right. There are some very ugly and nasty implications here. It’ll be a hard job for the Enderles and Thurrotts to reassure anyone who’s actually read Mr. Gutmann’s piece and really thought about it.
I also think Gutmann is right in thinking that it is not just Hollywood and the record labels behind this: it’s clear Microsoft wants the DRM there. Eventually, it would give them another stranglehold in a whole new area–aren’t they always seeking that?
Wouldn’t it be funny if, Gates having had all this stuff baked into Vista, the industry abandons it? Jobs would love that:
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/
What better way to stick it to Bill Gates?
http://daringfireball.net/2007/02/reading_between_the_lines
Jobs doesn’t really care about iTunes DRM. No DRM, no content; so he goes along with it. But Apple, unlike the labels, makes only pennies off it. What Jobs wants is to sell iPods and the iTMS is merely another help to that.
I think the record labels may crack and start to drop DRM fairly soon: I don’t know about Hollywood. I don’t think DRM is really in the content providers’ interest any more than it is in anyone else’s, but I think the record labels are much closer to that realization than Hollywood is.
Why bash Bill so much? He’s an IT guy, for features for the end-user, not against it. He had very little say & power on Vista.
He’s just a shareholder and a spokesperson, not the decision maker anymore. His rug was pulled from him.
Had a chat with him (not alone, as a group) in Toronto three years ago, when he went on the Dot Net bandwagon (Breakfast With Bill).
One of his subjects was the new OS replacing XP, and how Dot Net, Live Services, Content Management, was going to be a big hit with the average and power users.
He also announced that he no longer had any influence in the policies of the new OS, he had just been consulted on basic ideas, and the features dear to him, for Longhorn, were not being included.
Like the improved NTFS filesystem – it’s done and tested – but not included.
Three years later, it’s ironic to know that many Dot Net programs will need re-engineering to work properly within Live Services and Vista.
As in rewrites of entire sections.
So bash Bill for his past that you don’t agree on, but not on things he didn’t do.
Steve Ballmer is the one to fully blame for all things Vista – the business side, making business decisions and forcing the programmers to change perfectly running programs into this latest build.
The Ugly: What’s new about this?
The Bad: It’s out again, maybe someone else will start listening and wise up about vista? I doubt it, but worth a try.
The good: …
He writes, “Furthermore, the malware authors, who are taking advantage of “content-protection” features, could claim protection under the DMCA against any attempts to reverse-engineer or disable the content-protection “features” that they’re abusing.
Going beyond deliberate denial-of-service attacks, it’s possible to imagine all sorts of scenarios in which the tilt bits end up biting users.”
That sounds like a security nightmare. Malware based on protected code helps nobody. Drivers should be open sourced to allow for inspection.
I like the idea that hardware certificates can be revoked by Micro$oft. Just wait’ll the proverbial 15 year old Finnish coder figures out how to revoke the certicate for Intel motherboard chipsets…worldwide.
“Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance,”
It can’t incur that huge a penalty, in that Vista is reported to be about 80% as fast as XP, which is not bad for an unpatched MSFT release. The component video thing is a complet outrage– deliberately crippling hardware!!! Another excellent reason to upgrade to Mac.
Yet another reason why I’m switching to Linux, and never installing Vista on my personal machine.
Might be an excellent Mac sales tool for Apple, as Tom B suggests.
the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it’s not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server)
I don’t get how Ballmer & Co DRM can impact Linux and Mac users. Can someone explain? Also, if they do, why wouldn’t someone else with very deep pockets, like Steve Jobs or the U.S. Misgovernment, haul them into court over it?
If hacked versions of Vista were available in china the same day Vista was sold, what makes M$ think that there will be no patch to disable this content protection scheme?
To celebrate the Vista launch I purchased for $10 Red Hat’s fedora 6 on some preloaded CD’s from the Internet and removed Windoz XP and loaded it on my Dell… It was painless. it works great and I’[m happy. So what am I missing here? I’m typing this wirelessly on it right now..
$10.00 ! actually it was $9.00, something…
#4 — Talk to anyone at Microsoft and they will tell you that your entire assertion is total bullshit. Gates is very much still hands on. He will continue to be until 2009 or whenever he said he was supposedly leaving.
Harsh words from the man himself. Twice today I think.
Record?
John, Bill told me/group himself, and last summer some Microsofties at a big IT conference have said pretty much the same.
Hands on, yes, but not in Longhorn.
…..wait a sec….I’ve been misled?????
You’ve been on the road to hell for months now Mr. Derail
Well, I can certainly learn from my mistakes.
To think I got out of Unix programming in 1999 because I thought it was a dead-end career after working with it for ten years.