Microsoft Answers Vista DRM Critics' Claims 627
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.'"
Comparing with Gutmann: mostly spot on (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
What About Hardware? (Score:5, Interesting)
Pay with DRM Money (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Not buying it won't help (Score:3, Interesting)
Hollywood wants to control your computer (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, this is all necessary so you can "enjoy" all of the great "premium content." This is not normal 'content' mind you, this is Gee-Whiz Shazzamo "PREMIUM" awesome content that just requires all of this new DRM-out-the-wazoo hardware.
And here I thought it was the same crap they have been peddling for years in slightly higher resolution... Guess what, my computer can ALREADY play 1920x1080 AVI's perfectly fine (Elephant's Dream [blender.org]). And I don't have any of that DRM crap on MY system...
Re:Knaves and Crackers (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Should we trust the medical system vendors? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:every OS needs HDCP (Score:1, Interesting)
And because of this, I will work to break those keys in the name of fair use and not having vendor lock-in. Viva la revolution!
Re:Reports of Vista's suicide have been exaggerate (Score:5, Interesting)
I keep a Windows machine purely to run Flight Simulator and other games. Anything else can run in Parallels, or has a Mac equivalent.
Re:Windows Vista CP - Twenty Fears (Un-Answered) (Score:2, Interesting)
Constrain *this* (Score:2, Interesting)
Vista is DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I don't understand this downgrading stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
So you've some time to "upgrade." Yes it blows that you might have to change your hardware (in that this is even a possibility) but really if AACS isn't definitively cracked by then - and Muslix64 seems to have taken the first steps already - then you may actually have something to whine about.
Really what everyone ought to worry about is not small fry like HDCP but Palladium or Trusted Computing or whatever they are calling it these days.
IMHO, the real reason MS implements HDCP (even though I played devils advocate and said the content producers made them in another post) is because its in their best interests. MS wants to be the middle man controlling the delivery of media to you in the 21st century. Thats the point of the Xbox 360 and the Zune and Vista's implementation of HDCP. Apple is already doing this with music and its a great business model. Once Apple has a complete monopoly, they will be able to dictate terms to the recording industry. And to you dear customer. I cringe when Apple fanboys talk about how easy it is to circumvent FairPlay by burning to CD. Sure FairPlay is not onerous now but they've updated to your detriment at least twice and you can be damn sure they will again and it won't be as "benign" as reducing the number of times you can copy a playlist. The yoke is easy and the burden light... when you first put it on. The same goes for MS. They will implement HDCP, and later even more control with the TPM. The Blockbusters and Tower Records are dead. MS and Apple are implementing content protection simply to safeguard their own business interests.
If you've survived my tin foil hat this long... eventually companies will move to replace PCs with dedicated devices that cannot run anything but the companies own software - lockdown ala Tivo. That gives them so many more "revenue streams" and much tighter control. Watch as it slowly happens with Xboxes and iPhones all the in the name of simplicity and ease of use.
Its not really tinfoil. If it was my company and my goal was to maximize profits, given that I had a monopoly, I'd do it too.
Pretty neat trick for a hardware driver (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how they do the mixed content when the degradation is done at the hardware driver level. It must make for a pretty complicated driver to degrade only part of a screen. Maybe the driver is able to do video overlays and degrade just one overlay.
Audio must have the same multipath drivers, one for each application. The phone will work fine while the online subscription radio station is disabled due to the lack of a fully secure audio path to the speakers.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
Almost nobody in the houses of congress has shown any public sign of personally hating any RIAA spokesman since a few criticized Jack Valetti 20 years ago, while according to beltway insiders there are some congressmen who have publicly expressed great dissapointment that Microsoft didn't get more penalties from the justice dept., and a few that will still publicly say that the company should flat have been busted up.
Notice that that cartel members make much less per year than the hardware manufacturers collectively do (by some estimates, the hardware companies are about 8x-10x as big as all the commercial media conglomerates put together), but their representitive group seems to be strong arming the hardware makers just fine. Notice too that Sony, for just one example, makes a lot more money on hardware than media, but the media division has steered the company into several stupid decisions in a row and still seems to have plenty of clout, at least internally.
The **AAs have whole groups of the most charismatic spokesmen possible willing to speak for them, and that greatly amplifies the effects of their campaign contributions. One appearance by the right movie star endorsing a particular candidate can be worth millions in an election year, while few voters would change their minds simply because Gates or Balmer endorsed anyone. (In other words, Microsoft has to do just about everything with money, while big media has other tools that sometimes work better).
Re:Security and Quality (Score:2, Interesting)
This is probably one of the truest statements made in the article. Why? Because Microsoft doesn't want to have Vista blacklisted by movie providers. So, they're certainly going to go out of their way to implement such protections properly and if any exploit is found to fix it as promptly as possible. Recall how quickly the previous DRM exploit was patched?
Obviously, "better driver quality control" != "better drivers" nor "more stable", so it's really more spin than answering the real issue. But I guess if you assume that Windows drivers are generally crap, then simply implementing the function of the driver properly with less exploits means by definition such will be stabler and better. I'm not sure if that's what they were trying to imply.
Re:Knaves and Crackers (Score:3, Interesting)
It sound far stretched but the move to DRM could be the defense of, "we knew the user were doing it and we were proactive in stoping it. It isn't our fault that the content owners didn't use the protections." i'm not a microsoft fan by any means but that could explain the reason for the push into DRM. More likley they just saw an opertunity to make money and keep a vendor lockin.
Re:My dl speeds using Vista are 3x faster than XP (Score:4, Interesting)
I have Vista installed as my primary OS at home (dual-booting with my previous installation of XP SP2.) I was quite shocked when I first fired up my usenet newsreader and discovered that I could download at sustained speeds of *24 MBit/sec* over my *8 MBit/sec* Comcast cable modem connection.
After happily shouting "Holy crap! What the hell?" I verified this download speed on several speed test sites on the web. In addition, my wife's XP computer on the same network seems to be unaffected; she can surf the web with no slowdown, as if I'm not even downloading at all. When I used XP, my download speed would affect her download speed considerably, so that I had to throttle my downloads whenever she was at her computer. I tested my speed by booting back into XP, and my speeds top out at 8 Mbit/sec, as expected.
I have no explanation as to how Vista accomplishes this "magic" speed boost that exceeds the rated speeds of my cable modem line by three times. Something about IPv6? Does Comcast have a separate IPv6 network built for future use that I'm tapping into? I don't know enough about networking to know. I can download a GB of data in about 5 minutes, so I'm definitely not complaining.
Don't discount the new tcp/ip stack in Vista so quickly without trying it yourself. It's the best feature in the OS. I don't like everything about Vista, in fact there's a lot NOT to like about it, but the enhanced tcp/ip performance is reason enough for me to keep it. I do a lot of downloading that would probably not be condoned by the RIAA/MPAA, but so far Vista hasn't stopped me from playing anything, the way I want to play it...including HD video. I don't intend to use HD-DVD or Blu-Ray any time soon...neither my HD-resolution monitor nor my video card have HDCP anyway. But who needs that when you can download DRM-free HD video TODAY?
I'm just waiting for Comcast to discover this "bug" and throttle my connection, as soon as new Vista-preinstalled computers start to appear at the the end of the month, and Comcast sees their bandwidth usage triple. I've been downloading daily, almost 24/7, at 24 MBit/Sec, for over a month now, and have yet to receive a letter from Comcast informing me I'm using too much bandwidth. (However, since I download at 24 MBit/sec, I don't NEED to download 24/7, my downloads finish so quickly!) It might be the fact that I live in a fairly poor area of my community (the poor side of Hillsboro, OR), where the computer and broadband penetration is probably not that great...so I'm not likely impacting many others' cable performance with my downloads.
I'd like to hear from other Vista users, to see if I'm just an anomaly, or if others have experienced the same download speedups. I could find nothing on google to explain this, except the following link, an in-depth interview with the Microsoft team that wrote the new Vista network stack:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=116
Quite a long video (40 minutes), but very interesting. They say at one point in the video that they were able to realize drastic speedups using a Vista computer on some of their data lines...with no change on the server side, the only change being using a Vista computer as a client.
Speaking of the QoS on Vista...while I was watching that video, Vista automatically throttled the bandwidth allotted to my newsreader, allowing that high-bandwidth streaming video to play without a hitch. As soon as the video completed, my newsreader's full data bandwidth was restored. No, I have no complaints about the new network stack in Vista.
Re:Security and Quality (Score:4, Interesting)
"If the policies required protections that Windows Vista couldn't support, then the content would not be able to play at all on Windows Vista PCs."
No, the PCs would display a message along the lines of, 'This media cannot be played by Windows Vista because of the overly-restrictive policies of content providers with millions of dollars, mainly based in Hollywood. If you don't like this, please contact your local senator/representative and tell them you'd like to see this sort of content being released without silly anti-fair use restrictions.' See how much that would sting.
"In fact, much of the functionality discussed in the paper has been part of previous versions of Windows, and hasn't resulted in significant consumer problems"
The existing 'functionality' for restriction of content playback is chickenfeed compared to the 'encryption-all-the-way' attitude taken by Vista's premium content protection mechanism.
"In the case of HD optical media formats such as HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the constraint requirement is 520K pixels per frame (i.e., roughly 960x540), which is still higher than the native resolution of content distributed in the DVD-Video format. We feel that this is still yields a great user experience, even when using a high definition screen."
So, pirated content will still deliver a 'great user experience'! Just not-quite-as-great as HD. I think people who are pirating stuff will generally be happy with that, especially given that ultra-high quality content would require way larger files to download.
"Will the Windows Vista content protection board robustness recommendations increase the cost of graphics cards and reduce the number of build options?
Everything was moving to be integrated on the one chip anyway"
Whose ass was this assertion pulled out of?
"Will Windows Vista content protection features increase CPU resource consumption?
Yes."
Teh sux.
"However, the use of additional CPU cycles is inevitable, as the PC provides consumers with additional functionality."
This isn't additional functionality, it's reduced functionality against the user's wishes.
"In this case, additional complexity is added to the graphics driver, but that complexity comes with the direct consumer benefit of new scenarios such as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback."
Wouldn't be needed if HD-DVD/Blu-Ray content weren't laden with unnecessary DRM. Should've tried to force (or preferably, break) Hollywood's hand.
Re:TFA, unspun (Score:3, Interesting)
What happens when the content owner is also the owner of the machine. Can this person actually set DRM controls on the video of his kids birthday party, the sex he had video tapped with his wife, etc?
Re:No way! (Score:3, Interesting)
We have enough problem with the lusers having the resolution of the TFTs set wrong. This is a no-brainer - we cannot afford the risks of a doctor missing a fracture because someone has viewed something on a computer and the output has been downgraded to VGA.
Interestingly, apple seems to be doing very well in the medical imaging market, courtesy of OSIRIX. Maybe this will tip the balance.
Re:My dl speeds using Vista are 3x faster than XP (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.dslreports.com/im/22307322/3521.png [dslreports.com]
I'm big enough to admit I was wrong...sorta.
It seems like it's pretty obvious now that both Vista and Knoppix are exploiting Comcast's speed boost somehow. Because I don't pay for a 20 Mbit connection, I pay for 8 Mbit, and 8 Mbit is all I was getting in XP...with the occasional boost up to 12 Mbit. When I was doing sustained downloading in XP using NewsBin, I would get a constant 8 Mbit/sec. But in Vista, I can sustain 20-24 Mbit/sec, for days at a time, while downloading from newsgroups. Don't know if I would be able to do the same from Linux...maybe, maybe not. I can't really test it since I'm using a live cd, and I don't think NewsBin is compatible with Linux...although I understand it runs fine under Wine.
I'd still like to hear from any other Vista users. Anyone else's internet speeds dramatically increase while using Vista? Or is it just me? (And thanks to those that responded to my posts. It was educational.