Windows Vista a Time Bomb
This article on the many, many, many problems with the overly-DRM'd Windows Vista is absolutely amazing. It's long, but you should really read the whole thing.
All your device drivers checking to make sure you aren't trying to copy premium content...every 30milliseconds! Real-time encryption and decryption in paged memory (slowing down your computer for no good reason)...but only DRM'd movies/music are encrypted in this way? Your credit card numbers, bank PIN, and social security numbers are stored as always in plaintext paged memory. (We see who's running the show.)
Device manufacturers have to have their circuit designs approved to make sure their device doesn't somehow allow copying of DRM'd movies/music. Who do you need approval from? Three Hollywood studios! MGM, Universal, and Disney need to make sure your video card is up to their standards, ha.
The "tilt bits" are especially scary. Any little minute irregularity can flip them such as voltage fluctuations or a device driver finding a device in a slightly different state than expected. Vista flags any small fluctuation it can find with a tilt bit, suspecting that you are hacking. System stability becomes questionable at best. These paragraphs explain it better than I can:
Content-protection "features" like tilt bits also have worrying denial-of- service (DoS) implications. It's probably a good thing that modern malware is created by programmers with the commercial interests of the phishing and spam industries in mind rather than just creating as much havoc as possible. With the number of easily-accessible grenade pins that Vista's content protection provides, any piece of malware that decides to pull a few of them will cause considerable damage. The homeland security implications of this seem quite serious, since a tiny, easily-hidden piece of malware would be enough to render a machine unusable, while the very nature of Vista's content protection would make it almost impossible to determine why the denial-of-service is occurring. Furthermore, the malware authors, who are taking advantage of "content-protection" features, would be protected by the DMCA against any attempts to reverse-engineer or disable the content-protection "features" that they're abusing. Even without deliberate abuse by malware, the homeland security implications of an external agent being empowered to turn off your IT infrastructure in response to a content leak discovered in some chipset that you coincidentally happen to be using is a serious concern for potential Vista users. Non-US governments are already nervous enough about using a US-supplied operating system without having this remote DoS capability built into the operating system. And like the medical-image-degradation issue, you won't find out about this until it's too late, turning Vista PCs into ticking time bombs if the revocation functionality is ever employed.
I wonder what Microsoft has to say about this laundry list of extremely damaging claims against Vista. I was considering a new PC with Vista in a couple months, but this just takes the cake. I'm hoping Apple will somehow end up less DRM crazy than Microsoft (though I'm not sure if Leopard will be guilty of any of this stuff too).
On the bright side, it looks like Amazon and Yahoo are planning DRM-free online music stores, according to this article.
--Sirlin
January 3rd, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Incidentally you can already get DRM-free music from eMusic, though it’s all independent labels because the majors are still dumb. The music there is also quite cheap and encoded at a higher bitrate (~192).
January 4th, 2007 at 4:17 am
Wow! That’s horrible. I wonder how all these “features” would work out in an enviroment like mine (México) where most OS and software are pirated.
January 5th, 2007 at 11:24 am
Strange as it might seem to Microsoft executives, Hollywood does not buy OSes. Consumers do.
January 5th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
“I was considering a new PC with Vista in a couple months, but this just takes the cake.”
My thoughts exactly.
January 5th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
I wonder if this will provide MS with any clout when negotiating content for their delivery system.
January 6th, 2007 at 4:18 am
I design jewellery on a CAD system and my software supplier has informed everyone not to upgrade their systems to Windows Vista. If major software companies feel the need to inform their customers not to install their software of Windows Vista, it doesn’t bode well for Microsoft PR.
The official notice I received was…
—–
“Microsoft will shortly be making Windows Vista available to users around the world. Delcam has been testing our products on Microsoft Vista for a number of months.
Testing over the last few months has identified a number of significant issues for users, particularly associated with ancillary applications such as installers and drivers. As a result of this testing we are currently advising users not to attempt to install Delcam applications on Windows Vista.
We are currently working to resolve these outstanding issues and will update you on when releases for Windows Vista become available.”
—–
Also, with all that anti-piracy processing in the background, my CPU intensive software will probably crawl. Sounds like a majority of the business world will stick with XP until there is a successor to Vista or a more expensive, “hacker friendly” version. ;-)
January 7th, 2007 at 12:47 am
So…not buying Vista.
At least for 6 months, anyway. By then MS should realize how stupid this plan was and will disable everything. Or the OS will be majorly hacked.
January 14th, 2007 at 9:52 am
Looks like the time is about ripe for a mass migration to Linux.
January 15th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Most software is just bad in it’s first public version, windows, linux, etc… they all have enough bugs to keep me up at night.
To be honest the surprise was to see so many people were going to get vista right when it came out. Waiting seems to be a good idea on almost everything, unless there’s a overly compelling reason to use the new version. For vista this won’t happen until people start taking advantage of this new tech or until the dx10 games come out (although if your following the rule, those games won’t be important until after the first patch either, giving you even more time).
Also I would like to try emusic, but in all their efforts to give us a choice in the music we buy, they forgot to give me the choice to signup without handing them a credit card to charge. Why is freedom never really free?
January 18th, 2007 at 6:40 am
Thank you for sharing your pointless insight, Spoon. We all appreciated your worthwhile reply.
This is so depressing. In an attempt to prevent piracy, Microsoft created something that would more or less control what we do. Plus DRM is a horrible concept anyway. Looks like it’s XP for me, forever.
January 18th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
At least Spoon was honest about it, captain perfect. Anyhow, less drm or less vista.
January 21st, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Day to day experience with pirated software (even of applications which may be purchased online in an identical form) and music piracy by people who don’t even know what DRM is suggests that offering a legal, DRM-free alternative to pirated content won’t solve the problem in the long run. Moreover, any solution must be as invasive as Vista’s (since at some point you have to have the unencrypted content sitting on your drive). There are definitly scores of problems with Vista, but rejecting the concept of DRM entirely and telling publishers that they should trust the public to pay them on the honor system doesn’t seem like a tenable position.
January 22nd, 2007 at 1:59 pm
Basically, Vista will be so crippled by Hollywood copyright protection schemes (read: paranoia) that not only will your computer be pretty much useless for any next-generation task (HD movies and gaming), but will actually be useless for mundane tasks.
Vista will dedicate so much of your computer’s resources to making sure you aren’t pirating something that there will be little left for things like internet browsing or word proccessing.
In addition, if even the tiniest thing goes wrong behind the scenes in the OS, everything stops working because Windows thinks you’re trying to pirate stuff.
I’m moving to Linux.
January 24th, 2007 at 2:57 am
My feeling is that eventually, computing will move to a remote-hosted model. In this model, your computer essentially has no local writeable storage, and you access all applications and content via the network.
The idea of a WebOS is a subset of this concept, and YouOS.com is an absurdly unstable example. It crashes every time I log in.
Remote-hosted computers offer a number of advantages, both to the user and to the software/content vendors.
For the user:
- No need to install anything. Much like visiting amazon.com, if there is an update, it happens transparantly to the user.
- No need to administer, install, and configure multiple computers. Customizing my PC heavily is hugely annoying because I have a home PC, a laptop, and a work PC. Every customization I make must be replicated across all three.
- Content you own is owned everywhere you go: at work, in your home, at a friend’s house, on your mobile device. You simply own a LICENSE, independent of all physical manifestations.
For the vendor, gains are obvious — an end to piracy:
- Software licenses can be sold in the form of logins. Much like online-only games, it’s difficult to pirate a login to a remote server. One-time sales (ie Call of Duty, Unreal Tourney), subscription (ie WoW) or virtual property (ie Magic: Online) are all viable models for any application type in the remote hosted model.
Some technical problems do stand in the way, such as the need for streaming-speed network access at all points of usage, and the pesky problem that writeable media DO exist.
From the user’s point of view, there are also vast concerns about privacy, but perhaps this could somehow be solved via encryption.
I’m not suggesting that this model is actually a good thing, but as I think about the reality of the piracy problem, I frankly do not see any other sustainable business model for software and electronic content delivery.
In 1984, one of Sun’s founders said, “The network IS the computer.”
I don’t see any other vision of the future that makes as much sense, and I’m not sure whether or not it’s a good thing.
January 25th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Would you honestly want to store all your private information on someone else’s server though? And in any case I don’t see why remote-hosted applications and local writable storage is necessarily mutually exclusive. Not to mention it would require a computer to be connected to the web at all times whether you like it or not. Frankly I don’t see how that benefits the consumers at all.
January 26th, 2007 at 9:14 am
I don’t understand how remote storage prevents piracy. At some point you still have to display the content on your screen, which means it has to be unencrypted somewhere where you can muck around with it (e.g. I could reverse engineer the screen itself). Without a mechanism to stop me from physically doing what I want with my computer it seems inherently impossible to prevent piracy. I might be missing something though.
January 30th, 2007 at 1:11 am
Paul, you’re right about content ultimately being exposed to piracy. I mean, they are working to prevent it by making these “protected” areas in your system that use encryption in public areas and permissions with digital signing in private areas to prevent you from peering into the bits of copy-protected content. But in the end, the light going into your eye isn’t encrypted, so the information is there to be stolen.
I guess I was thinking more of software piracy as opposed to media piracy. Media piracy is going to be extremely difficult to solve and we’ll see how this “protected path” stuff works, but remote hosting seems to pretty easily solve software piracy.
February 5th, 2007 at 9:01 am
FreeBSD rules, all the security, none of the raw anal sex .. I mean product activations and twice the chocolatey goodness you’ve come to expect from a $500 ass fucking.
March 4th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
I have two words….Automate DRM
August 14th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
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