What follows boggles the mind.
As you may or may not know, the enterprise edition of the new version of Microsoft Windows, Vista, five years in the making and 2 years late, came out last month. The consumer versions are due out in the coming weeks.
It turns out that Vista is built from the ground up to inhibit the playing of any multimedia content (audio, video) through hardware that doesn’t have a built-in copy protection mechanism that encrypts the data as it goes in and out of your PC. Worse, if Vista detects any such attempt, whether deliberate or accidental (because of a bug for instance), it shuts down the subsystem (video card, sound card, software driver) responsible for the potential « illegal copying attempt ». Worse still, this shutdown doesn’t just affect your PC. Vista reports the breach to Microsoft, and the criminal subsystem is shutdown on all of the PC’s that run that particular hardware or software! You’ll just have to wait for the vendor to release new firmware or drivers.
If you are a pirate, and if you can hack in to trigger one of these shutdowns, you’ve singlehandedly disabled millions of computers in the world. Cool!
But I’m not a pirate you say? I just want to play the MP3’s I ripped from my legally-bought audio CD’s through my soundcard. Well unless your soundcard uses a technology that encrypts the audio signal on its way out of your PC to your speakers, you can’t. What about playing legitimate, copy-protected content? Well, the anti-copying technology in Vista requires so much processing overhead, that even on the most powerful PC’s available today, playback is crappy, your audio skips, your videos drop frames. In fact, the overhead is such, that Vista doesn’t even try to process the content with the PC’s processor. It offloads the processing to the processors on the video and audio cards. It’s up to the makers of such cards to tackle the burden. They must also implement copy-protection technology in their products, sacrificing precious performance cycles to encrypt the data being processed.
Even weirder. If you are playing protected audio in a non-approved manner, the system also degrades the quality of the video output as part of its ruthless crackdown on your criminal behavior.
And how about this? If you bought a PC with an HDCP connector (a standard that encrypts the video signal), to play HD-quality video on the expensive high-definition HDCP-enabled monitor you also bought, for now, you’re out of luck. Apparently, these connectors aren’t really up to spec and so Vista degrades the HD video quality, or simply blocks the video signal.
And finally, who, you might wonder, decides if a system is secure enough? Microsoft? Wrong. Such anti-copying security technologies must be approved, in writing, by at least 3 major Hollywood content providers (you know, computer security experts such as Disney, MGM, etc.)
You think none of this can possibly be true? Computer-security expert Peter Gutmann lays it all out and backs it all up in A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. It’s a long and techy read, but I encourage you to read it anyway (just skip the technical gobbledygook). I’ll just quote one sentence from his article:
Executive Executive Summary
The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.
Respected tech pundit Robert X. Cringely doesn’t take issue with the facts presented in this article, and agrees that the consumer is the big loser, but argues that it is a smart move from Microsoft’s perspective, and not a suicidal strategy. Read his article if the original article is too off-putting.
Windows Vista will soon come pre-installed on every PC, so there’s no real escape. So unless you want to be treated like a criminal, experience crappy music and video performance, even when you’ve bought legitimate content, you’d better stick with Windows XP and/or start planning your move to Linux or to the Mac platform. But even that may not be a solution, because chip makers and card vendors might not bother to make products that don’t conform to Vista’s requirements.
The only hope is that all this digital rights management folly will be circumvented. In fact, it always has been in the past, and it already has been partially cracked in this case. So thanks to hackers and pirates, we’ll hopefully be able to continue to enjoy the content we already legally own. Otherwise, we’ll just have to download uncrippled content from pirate sites, that we’ll be able to run on cheap Chinese DVD players or something.
Hopefully, consumers (that’s you!) won’t stand for this shit, and sanity will prevail. That’s what one specialist, Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing fame, says in his answer to this year’s Edge World Question, « What are you optimistic about? »
After all, as he rightly notes « copying is what bits are for ».