Vista's DRM "protects" users from high definition media

VISTA'S DRACONIAN "content protection" features often degrade its users' video and audio quality and have led to design hurdles and higher costs for PC components, a speaker told the USENIX Symposium in Boston last week.

Peter Gutmann, a researcher at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, implied that the design of Vista makes the user the enemy. In an earlier paper, he had called the DRM rules built into Vista "the longest suicide note in history."

Shamelessly pandering to the Big Media copyright holders, Vista automatically degrades so-called "premium" content such as high definition movies and audio tracks when they are output to less than bleeding-edge new devices that don't happen to support Intel's High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) DRM scheme. It apparently does this even if the media files being played are not copyright protected commercial media but the users' own home movies or music they've recorded in high-definition format, Gutmann said.

He said that Vista's DRM features have also been frustrating to PC component manufacturers, because the new content protection functions in Vista make it harder to develop new drivers. When ATI finally shipped new video drivers for Vista, they crashed the OS, forcing both Dell and Gateway to delay shipping Vista compatible computers, Gutmann reported. He also said that PC hardware costs have increased because component vendors have had to get written approval of their designs from Hollywood studios before they can begin production.

Big Media content protection measures also incorporate encryption that drives higher CPU and GPU loads, according to Gutmann. This results in higher electricity usage and heat output and can degrade the graphics performance of some high-end video cards, he said.

Gutmann surmised that the Vole made new DRM features its highest priority in developing Vista, speculating that it gained approval and money from Hollywood for doing so. In his opinion, Microsoft should rather have focused its efforts on developing security features to protect users.

Thus we find in the DRM features of Vista the actualisation of the darkening, dystopian future that Richard Stallman warned us about several years ago when he renamed the Vole's Trusted Computing as Treacherous Computing. µ

L'INQ
PC World