12.23.06
Talk About Defective By Design – The Cost of Vista
Microsoft Windows Vista, with its content protection systems “could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history” and hardware providers are being forced to drink the proverbial kool-aid as well.
The worst thing about all of this is that there’s no escape. Hardware manufacturers will have to drink the kool-aid (and the reference to mass suicide here is deliberate [Note D]) in order to work with Vista: “There is no requirement to sign the [content-protection] license; but without a certificate, no premium content will be passed to the driver”. Of course as a device manufacturer you can choose to opt out, if you don’t mind your device only ever being able to display low-quality, fuzzy, blurry video and audio when premium content is present, while your competitors don’t have this (artificially-created) problem.
Of course, the impact of this DRM system will be felt industry-wide through higher costs associated with hardware design, software design and testing, and will eliminate open-source hardware since it requires operational details of the device be kept confidential.
Much more ominous are the impacts on actual Vista users, including Microsoft’s ability to disable drivers and hardware it deems unsafe on "your" pc, rendering them useless. The article also points out how malware writers intent on disabling a system could easily use these features against a Vista PC.
Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about Vista’s DRM are the unintentional side effects, and I feel the intentional effects are quite disquieting in and of themselves. Consider this rather plausible scenario:
Beyond the obvious playback-quality implications of deliberately degraded output, this measure can have serious repercussions in applications where high-quality reproduction of content is vital. For example the field of medical imaging either bans outright or strongly frowns on any form of lossy compression because artifacts introduced by the compression process can cause mis-diagnoses and in extreme cases even become life-threatening. Consider a medical IT worker who’s using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer (the CDROM drives installed in workplace PCs inevitably spend most of their working lives playing music or MP3 CDs to drown out workplace noise). If there’s any premium content present in there, the image will be subtly altered by Vista’s content protection, potentially creating exactly the life-threatening situation that the medical industry has worked so hard to avoid. The scary thing is that there’s no easy way around this – Vista will silently modify displayed content under certain (almost impossible-to-predict in advance) situations discernable only to Vista’s built-in content-protection subsystem.
Please read the entire paper, the scope of the impact of Vista and its DRM scheme is almost too much to imagine.
