"Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called 'premium content', typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry."
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Member since:2005-10-12
Yes, kaworu is right, this is exactly the point. All computers will come with the 'features' of driver revocation and tilt bits, whose use is tied to the 'wrong' use of content. All computers. It is a cost we will all pay. Whether we want the ability to access 'premium' content or not. Or maybe it will be the use of 'the wrong' content that will trigger driver revocation and tilt bits?
20 years ago the arena was freedom of public speech and the press. The importance of computers nowadays as information access portals, rapidly becoming the main ones and displacing print media, means that the arena is now getting and keeping the freedom to use and manage ones gateway to information.
It is this general use of computers for all access to information of all sorts that makes it so wrong to impose restrictions on all computers, in the name of preserving the rights, or rather rents, of a small number of people who deliver a tiny fraction of the information they are used to access.
Member since:2005-11-11
//All computers will come with the 'features' of driver revocation and tilt bits, whose use is tied to the 'wrong' use of content. All computers. It is a cost we will all pay.//
I doubt it very much.
I will not buy any hardware that is labelled as "Vista Ready" and which therefore has these DRM-compliant deliberate time bombs built into the hardware itself.
I will buy hardware from China or Taiwan or somewhere with a Linux BIOS and zero DRM chips, and happily run Linux on it, and have a far, far more powerfull and capable desktop solution at a fraction of the cost as a result.
What sane person wouldn't do this?
Edited 2006-12-26 03:18
Member since:
2006-06-24
@eMagius: While I am not by any means a computing expert, I believe you are underestimating the issue.
The overhead described in the paper is several orders of magnitude greater than the decrypting of protected AAC files in iTunes: we are talking multiple encryption/decryption cycles within the path from the disk to the display, as well as a serie of device pollings.
The bits about driver revocation and tilt-bits, which you have ignored, are also scary to say the least: if an exploit is found the corresponding software or hardware component could be remotely disabled, without the legitimate owner of the system having any choice.
We are not only talking about losing access to one's media collection, we are talking about losing system functionalities not only related to protected media usage (having your video card only output in VGA affects more than just your ability to watch movies) through no fault of our own.