Virtualization May Break Vista DRM 294
Nom du Keyboard writes "An article in Computerworld posits that the reason Microsoft has flip-flopped on allowing all versions of Vista to be run in virtual machines, is that it breaks the Vista DRM beyond detection, or repair. So is every future advance in computer security and/or usability going to be held hostage to the gods of Hollywood and Digital Restrictions Management? 'Will encouraging consumer virtualization result in a major uptick in piracy? Not anytime soon, say analysts. One of the main obstacles is the massive size of VMs. Because they include the operating system, the simulated hardware, as well as the software and/or multimedia files, VMs can easily run in the tens of gigabytes, making them hard to exchange over the Internet. But DeGroot says that problem can be partly overcome with .zip and compression tools -- some, ironically, even supplied by Microsoft itself.'"
devil's advocate (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood (Score:5, Interesting)
> and Digital Restrictions Management?
Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood. There are waiters in Hollywood who have forgotten more about movies than anyone at Microsoft will ever know. Even the accountants use Macs here in California.
Microsoft does not even make a movie player that plays the standard format. Calling Windows Media Player or Zune a movie player is like saying Microsoft Word is a Web browser because it can also display text and images. That is a very unsophisticated view that you can't sell to someone who actually knows how the Web works. Well, in Hollywood, they know how movies work. MPEG-4 was coming for many years, then it was standardized, then it became the format in iTunes+iPod, then the iPod took off. MPEG-4 is also HD DVD and Blu-Ray and AppleTV and iPhone and PSP. MPEG-4 is also the standardization of the QuickTime format which all the content creation tools are built around, even those like Avid that compete with Apple, so it arrived already having mature development tools. One day there was a QuickTime update and all of my tools could now generate MPEG-4 H.264 as if they had always known what it was. Further there is a free open source MPEG-4 streaming server that runs on every Unix and also Windows, it also has no streaming tax. Finally, most of all, MPEG-4 has no "content tax" while Microsoft's Windows Media business model depends on a content tax and everybody in both music and movie industry already knows better than that. All this happened already with sheet music and player pianos 100 years ago. Nobody is going to use an encoder that spits out a file which you can't copy or share without paying a tax to Microsoft, because everybody wants their movie or album to sell 100 million copies (even if it actually has no chance) so when Microsoft says aw it's only a penny per copy, people do the math and say no you are raping me with that, I can buy an MPEG-4 encoder for $20 and use it to make all the copies I want and not owe anybody anything why don't I just do that? And MPEG-4 just happens to already be integrated into all my tools and integrated into the hardware of consumer video playback so there was never any there there with Microsoft and movies. Even if they built a technically sound system or one that had a cost advantage, they would have to overcome the fact that nobody wants to work with the evil typewriter company.
All you are seeing here is another way that Windows sucks. Core computing functionality that customers use and want and even need to stabilize their Windows software on a real operating system is falling victim to Microsoft's lack of focus and hopeless star fucking. Why isn't Windows ready to be a good typewriter today? Because of its magic DRM.
Re:What next? (Score:2, Interesting)
BZZZT! (Score:3, Interesting)
"Content provider revolt" is a pitiful excuse that no one with a brain really buys.
Re:Said before (Score:3, Interesting)
But it's not hard to create a rig that does.
Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy,
Many audiophiles would disagree with you, and would argue that analog presents the best "true" copy. Anyway, we're talking about the grey/black market, in which quality matters much less than price.
Do you want to pirate an mpeg of some guy taping his television screen, or do you want to bittorrent the actual dvd contents?
See above points - it's not some guy with a camcorder of his TV, it's the "pro-sumer" guy who has good quality equipment that can kill DRM.
Police can make it difficult to commit crimes (and not get caught), but they'll never make it impossible. Therefore we police are futile. When will they learn?"
You are completely missing the point. For 200 years, merely PRINTING "Copyright NNNN - all rights reserved" has resulted in a reasonable protection for copyright holders. So why is it that all of a sudden, new technology is needed to enforce what is, at its core, a human problem?
Look at copyright laws circa 1975, when the Xerox copier was really starting to take hold for an EXCELLENT parallel.
No argument. We should be thankful that they have as difficult a time picking a DRM standard as they do. Fragmentation impedes their progress in locking everything down: CDs versus DVDs for instance.
A statement which largely undermines the rest of your post. Are you arguing that DRM is effective? Are you arguing that it's effective but bad? Are you arguing that it's good? Your point suddenly becomes unclear.
I simply argue that it's ineffective. Some DRM can be useful to discourage blatant piracy, but relying on it excessively is just dumb.
Re:I hope *IAA keeps wasting thier money on DRM (Score:2, Interesting)
Did I say interesting? I meant scary.
AH HAH! More hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
"What could MSFT do next to require me to once again throw out my computer and buy the latest and greatest hardware in 2008 or 2009?"
Virtualization. MSFT Vista 4.0 or 3.51 or 95/98 or 2009... Would require:
Min of 1GB of RAM.
1TB HD (supplied by FibreChannel disk).
Quad Core CPU
Dual Core GPU.
All I wanted was to be able to surf the web and play Civ. I now require the computational power of an IBM p590.
Re:Not the whole story (Score:2, Interesting)
* use OS X and need Windows
* use Linux/laptop and need Windows
* need or desire to partition an entire OS so that during a presentation, if casually called away from laptop, fewer worries about "innocent" snooping
Business guys adopt tomorrow what the propellerheads did yesterday. Last time I had trouble w/ a net connection for Windows in a hotel in the Bay Area and the drogue started to give me dos-window instructions, I sighed - and got the immediate response: "My apologies. From your reaction you're obviously running VMWare - may I ask if you're on Linux or some other 'nix?"
I think that VM is coming in a big way. ymmv
Ridiculously annoying, and sometimes impossible (Score:5, Interesting)
Being a generous IT worker, when an employee's machine goes bad I'll sometimes give them my own machine if they need something fast. Last time I did this, a copy of Vista which I purchased directly from Microsoft's website suddenly became "not genuine". Not wanting to fuss with it, hoping I'd be able to get my machine back and make my copy of Vista genuine again, I ended up passing the time frame (30 days?) allotted for using the OS, then was locked out with a red screen saying "this copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Business is not genuine". This statement was clearly a lie if taken literally, but discussing vocabulary destruction through marketing would be quite a digression.
So, I went back to using my dual-boot linux partition and another spare PC for my day-to-day work.
Fast forward a few weeks...
Last Friday I got my laptop back, put the hard disk back in, and what's this? Vista still said it was not genuine. I tried to re-activate online but it said I couldn't do that because that key had already been activated. (Gee, you think? Maybe when I bought it?) So, taking the only course left, I called Microsoft on the phone and entered a series of numbers about 30 digits long. When the computer couldn't validate my install it forwarded me to some Indian call center, a place I'm familiar with because I've had to do this process more than a few times.
But this time was different... (Don't get your hopes up, it wasn't different in a good way. I was on the phone with a Microsoft offshore call center, remember?) Not only was my personal system down, but apparently their whole call center system was down. They were unable to validate my install and told me I'd need to call back later after they got their system back up and running. Apparently there was no other backup call center online, I simply had to hang up and call back another time when their system was back up.
Back to my trusty dual-boot Linux partition with its `sudo bash -c 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && reboot'`, or my Mac with its `sudo bash -c 'softwareupdate -i -a && reboot'`
Oh, and Jim Allchin can kiss my ass. "It's rock solid and we're ready to ship." Rock solid as in paper weight. What good is a stable OS that won't let you use it?
Re:Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood (Score:3, Interesting)
What I find most interesting about the analogy though, is how much more accessible a typewriter was. I could go to the library and for a few quarters type a paper. Ray Bradbury say he wrote a book on the library typewriter. Now, you can go to the library and use a computer for free, for a limited amount of time, if you find one that is not being used to download cat pictures, but where is the typewriter? If the machine is so useful, why can't we have dedicated computers that can be used for $1 an hour, for the purpose of real research and writing. Where is todays creative person going to get their start. Surely video cameras and the like are more accessible than ever, but are we going to be doomed to a world full of reality shows and cookie cutter books because no one will know how to write?
Re:What are they even pirating? (Score:3, Interesting)
It sounds like there is a lot of confusion, and admittedly, I'm not going to read the article, because it seems to come from there.
Vista apparently requires an authenticated path from the digital media all the way through the audio and video output devices to play a DRM data file. The kernel and system drivers are configured so as to prevent hooks form intercepting the data once it has been decrypted, making it difficult to get around the DRM on a Vista-installed system, short of a brute-force key cracking (all of this is theoretical, of course -- knowing MS the system is probably filled with more holes than swiss cheese, but I'll ignore that for a moment).
In a VM environment, however, the OS doesn't have direct access to the hardware -- th software VM environment emulates all of the hardware including the display and audio hardware. If you run Vista inside a VM on an OS that doesn't restrict digital data capturing (like say Linux or Mac OS X), you can easily capture the data Vista is decoding within th host OS layer.
I'll give you an example. On my MacBook I'm running VMware Fusion beta 4.1, with a 64-bit Windows Vista Business Edition virtual machine (an an Ubuntu, Debian, and Solaris VMs -- I'm a bit of a VM junkie). Under Vista, I can play Microsoft DRM'ed audio files without an problems -- they go through MS's protected media player and the protected Vista kernel, through the properly signed audio driver, to VMware's virtualized audio device (I believe it emulates one of the Sound Blaster series cards), which simply outputs the audio through Mac OS X's audio subsystem.
OS X's audio subsystem can be easily hijacked using third-party tools, which simply grab the digital audio stream from the specified application, optionally cruns it through a user-specified codec, and writes it to disk. Presto -- I can take MS DRM'd audio files and strip them of their DRM quickly and painlessly, in full digital quality.
The same can conceptually be done for video, although with certain added complexity (as I'd need to capture just a region of the display, and not the entire display itself. I'm not sure if the hardware could handle both decoding and re-encoding a digital video stream simultaneously in real-time, along with the audio that accompanies it -- but that's something easily solved by either storing everything temporarily in uncompressed form (if the HDD can keep up), or by waiting a few years for faster/more parallelized hardware which can do these task simultaneously).
Of course, if MS had any backbone they'd stand up for their end-users and say no to the media conglomerates, and remove DRM limitations from their products, but the likelihood of that happening appears to be virtually zilch. But that's no skin off my nose, and just gives Linux yet another way to gain a foothold into the enterprise.
Yaz.
Re:Nesting VMs (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:devil's advocate (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Said before (Score:5, Interesting)
At the rate technology is progressing, somebody with a HD projector, a HD camcorder and a few extra lenses and filters will be able to do an analog capture that easily satisfies the average guy with a 50" LCD display.
It sure helps that even today all of the satellite HD signals are highly degraded, often re-encoding from 1920x1080 to 1280x1080 and the vast majority of the viewers don't give a damn. Even the broadcast networks do shitty job, Fox is bitrate starved for no good reason, running their stuff at roughly 10Mbps when the available bandwidth over the air is just under 20Mbps. NBC and ABC are only a little bit better. Only CBS seems to give a crap about the quality of their broadcasts.
So, either consumer standards are going to have get a LOT higher or pricing on DRM'd products is going to have get a LOT cheaper if they want to compete with the quality level available via "free."
All that assumes that no bored grad students ever take an electron-tunneling microscope to the "tamper-proof" chips in these DRM systems and extracts the keys necessary to do the decrypt at the digital level. Nowadays that's not particularly expensive to do.
Re:Said before (Score:3, Interesting)
A programme I attended at a Canadian east coast university had high international enrollment. One of the guys was from Chechnya. We had a pretty good instructional technology setup in one of the lecture spaces, so we could snag a movie off the Internet and take a break at two in the morning to watch said movie while scarfing popcorn and pop.
We had End of Days* up on the screen one early morning when the Chechnyan Dude comes in and exclaims that 'this is like going to the theatre back home!'. The movie was, of course, a handheld cam-cord copy.He said this was par for the course everywhere east of Romania, at the time (obviously my sample is a little small here, but let's just say that he had no reason to be b/s'ing us on the matter).
So while I do understand and appreciate your point, if quality rips become scarce enough, entire countries will start watching hand held copies. So, the question is, were copies legally available (i.e for lease/purchase/rental, etc.) and if so, why did theatres go for the pirate version over the quality version?
* This just goes to show that there are entirely different lengths to which people will go when quality is in short supply.
Re:You want irony? (Score:2, Interesting)
On the same computer, it's just a matter of time before the output sound is automatically removed from the input sound. This will be sold as "echo-cancellation", or some equally useful term.
(Alternatively, they might just disable the line-in socket all together while DRMed content is playing.)