Microsoft Vista: Run, Don't Walk Away

Ahh, insomnia. When I suffer, the readers win.

We've been playing around a little bit with the Vista beta at work. But, best machine we had to run it on, a HP dc220 with a Pentium 4 - 2.8 GHz processor, 1GB PC-2300 SDRAM and built-in Intel video would not run the Aqu... um, Aero Glass interface.

The hardware requirements for the full Vista interface are daunting, especially for corporate customers. The Enterpries Hardware Plan requires a 1GHz or better processor, 1GB of RAM and a minimum 128MB dedicated video card. Most corporate PC's ship with video on the motherboard which shares the system RAM.

But the most disturbing thing about Vista to date are the extreme measures Mister Softee has gone to do make sure that you don't do anything with your computer the record and movie industries don't approve of.

Peter Guttman, a security researcher has dug into the innards of Vista and exactly how it keeps you from doing what you want with your computer. He has written a detailed analysis of the digital rights management features of Vista and has concluded that The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the
longest suicide note in history.. A bit of this article is below. (Sorry for the funky line breaks. I couldn't be bothered to fix them at 1:45 a.m.)

However, one important point that must be kept in mind when reading this document is that in order to work, Vista's content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics, something that's unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry
wishes it were possible [Note C]. This conundrum is displayed over and over
again in the Windows content-protection requirements, with manufacturers being
given no hard-and-fast guidelines but instead being instructed that they need
to display as much dedication as possible to the party line. The
documentation is peppered with sentences like:

"It is recommended that a graphics manufacturer go beyond the strict letter
of the specification and provide additional content-protection features,
because this demonstrates their strong intent to protect premium content".

Vista's content protection mechanism only allows protected content to be sent
over interfaces that also have content-protection facilities built in.
Currently the most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF
(Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format). Most newer audio cards, for example,
feature TOSlink digital optical output for high-quality sound reproduction,
and even the latest crop of motherboards with integrated audio provide at
least coax (and often optical) digital output. Since S/PDIF doesn't provide
any content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled when playing
protected content [Note E]. In other words if you've sunk a pile of money
into a high-end audio setup fed from an S/PDIF digital output, you won't be
able to use it with protected content.

Say you've just bought Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon", released as a
Super Audio CD (SACD) in its 30th anniversary edition in 2003, and you want to
play it under Vista. Since the S/PDIF link to your amplifier/speakers is
regarded as insecure for playing the SA content, Vista disables it, and you
end up hearing a performance by Marcel Marceau instead of Pink Floyd.

Similarly, component (YPbPr) video will be disabled by Vista's content
protection, so the same applies to a high-end video setup fed from component
video. What if you're lucky enough to have bought a video card that supports
HDMI digital video with HDCP content-protection? There's a good chance that
you'll have to go out and buy another video card that really *does* support
HDCP, because until quite recently no video card on the market actually
supported it even if the vendor's advertising claimed that it did. As the
site that first broke the story put it in their article "The Great HDCP
Fiasco" (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_nvidia_hdcp_support/) puts
it:

"None of the AGP or PCI-E graphics cards that you can buy today support HDCP
[...] If you've just spent $1000 on a pair of Radeon X1900 XT graphics cards
expecting to be able to playback HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies at 1920x1080
resolution in the future, you've just wasted your money [...] If you just
spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs expecting to be able to play
1920x1080 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies in the future, you've just wasted your
money".

(The two devices mentioned above are the premium supposedly-HDCP-enabled cards
made by the two major graphics chipset manufacturers ATI and nVidia). ATI was
later subject to a class-action lawsuit by its customers over this deception.
As late as August of 2006, when Sony announced its Blu-Ray drive for PCs, it
had to face the embarrassing fact that its Blu-Ray drive couldn't actually
play Blu-Ray disks in HD format ("First Blu-ray disc drive won't play Blu-ray
movies",
http://www.cnet.com.au/desktops/dvdburners/0,239029405,240091720,00.htm):

"Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that
support HDCP, this isn't yet possible".

limination of Open-source Hardware Support
-------------------------------------------

In order to prevent the creation of hardware emulators of protected output
devices, Vista requires a Hardware Functionality Scan (HFS) that can be used
to uniquely fingerprint a hardware device to ensure that it's (probably)
genuine. In order to do this, the driver on the host PC performs an operation
in the hardware (for example rendering 3D content in a graphics card) that
produces a result that's unique to that device type.

In order for this to work, the spec requires that the operational details of
the device be kept confidential. Obviously anyone who knows enough about the
workings of a device to operate it and to write a third-party driver for it
(for example one for an open-source OS, or in general just any non-Windows OS)
will also know enough to fake the HFS process. The only way to protect the
HFS process therefore is to not release any technical details on the device
beyond a minimum required for web site reviews and comparison with other
products.

This potential "closing" of the PC's historically open platform is an
extremely worrying trend. A quarter of a century ago, IBM made the momentous
decision to make their PC an open platform by publishing complete hardware
details and allowing anyone to compete on the open market. Many small
companies, the traditional garage startup, got their start through this.

Including Microsoft itself.

This
openness is what created the PC industry, and the reason why most homes
(rather than just a few offices, as had been the case until then) have one or
more PCs sitting in a corner somewhere. This seems to be a return to the bad
old days of 25 years ago when only privileged insiders were able to
participate.

And on and on... More follows on the hideous CPU overhead required to maintain the security of the playback stream; such as when idle checking the system every 30 microseconds to make sure nothing is happening.

I believe that MS is going to experience a tremendous amount of blowback at the consumer level. Maybe not so much at the corporate level. Large corporate customers will be happy with the new deployment and imaging tools and will be content to dial-down the user experience. And of course all those "content protection features" will help make sure that no one is playing DVD's or CD's on the company dime.

And it won't happen right away. No, it will be a year or so down the road, after millions of copies are sold pre-loaded on new comuputers and HDCP and Blu-Ray equipment and content begin to enter the market en masse. Then, as people realize (courtesy of people like me after they bring them to the shop to be "fixed" because they won't play DVDs) that Microsoft has crippled their PC and made their investment in expensive equipment and entertainment worthless... Then it will be torches and pitchforks time.