Vista Crippled by Content Protection

[hailgautam]

This reminds me of VIKI in I Robot. It is Dangerous to use such Software, life and freedom will be crippled. Matrix does not seem impossible any more.

Source

PC users around the globe may find driver software is stopped from working by Vista if it detects unauthorized content access. Peter Guttman, a security engineering researcher at New Zealand's university of Auckland, has written A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. He reckons Vista is trying to achieve the impossible by protecting access to premium content. Users will find their PCs' compromised by the persistent and continuous content access checks carried out by Vista.

Guttman thinks these checks and the associated increased in multimedia card hardware costs make Vista's content protection specification 'the longest suicide note in history.'

The core elements in Vista have been designed to protect access to premium content. The design requires changes in multimedia cards before Microsoft will support them for Vista use.

Content that is protected by digital rights management (DRM) must be sent across protected interfaces. This means cards using non-protected interfaces can't be used by Vista PCs.

Disabling and degrading

Vista is disadvantaging high-end audio and video systems by openly disabling devices. The most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format) which doesn't have any content protection. It must be disabled in a Vista system when DRM-protected content is being played. Equally a high-end component video interface (YPbPr) also has no content protection and must be disabled when protected video is being played.

• Vista covertly degrades playback quality. PC voice communications rely on automatic echo cancellation (AEC) in order to provide acceptable voice quality. This requires feeding back a sample of the audio mix into the echo cancellation subsystem, which isn't permitted by Vista's content protection scheme. This lowers PC voice communication quality because echo affects will still be present.

• This overt and covert degrading of quality is dynamic, not consistent. Whenever any audio derived from premium content is played on a Vista PC, the disabling of output devices and downgrading of signal quality takes place. If the premium content then fades away the outputs are re-enabled and signal quality climbs back up. Such system behavior today indicates a driver error. With Vista it will be normal behavior.

• Vista has another playback quality reduction measure. It requires that 'any interface that provides high-quality output degrade the signal quality that passes through it if premium content is present. This is done through a "constrictor" that downgrades the signal to a much lower-quality one, then up-scales it again back to the original spec, but with a significant loss in quality.' If this happens with a medical imaging application then artifacts introduced by the constrictor can 'cause mis-diagnoses and in extreme cases even become life-threatening.'

CPU cycle guzzling

The OS will use much more of a PC's CPU resource because 'Vista's content protection requires that devices (hardware and software drivers) set so-called "tilt bits" if they detect anything unusual ... Vista polls video devices on each video frame displayed in order to check that all of the grenade pins (tilt bits) are still as they should be.'

Also 'In order to prevent tampering with in-system communications, all communication flows have to be encrypted and/or authenticated. For example content sent to video devices has to be encrypted with AES-128.' Encryption/decryption is known to be CPU-intensive

Device drivers in Vista are required to poll their underlying hardware every 30ms -- thirty times a second -- to ensure that everything appears correct.

It is apparent that Vista is going to use very much more of a PC's resources than previous versions of Windows and degrade multimedia playback quality unless the user has purchased premium content from a Microsoft-approved resource.

Such over-reaching by Microsoft could prove to be the catalyst needed to spur increased takeup of Linux desktop operating software, or of Apple's Mac OS.
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[gxsaurav]

some of it is true, some is not. The thing is MS & soon MacOS will also be forced to use such content protection, because it's not these companies doing it, it's the Hollywood, MPAA, RIAA which is forcing these companies to do it. I M not sure if this type of content protection will even be playable on linux at all or not

In indian scenario, it won't matter much. First a TV is always better, 2nd we pirate movies like there is no tomorrow, 3rd, there are already a few workarrounds of it available everywhere

 

[kumarmohit]

Well Its still better than RIAA and MPAA taking the children, old and dead to courts...

 

[anniyan]

thats too bad.....

 

[Ankur Gupta]

Well its has both good and bad consequences...

 

[rajasekharan]

What content protection ??? Just go to a shop and buy the cd and rip it yourself thats all if you cant afford the money you know have P2P waiting for you .

 

[mail2and]

some of it is true, some is not. The thing is MS & soon MacOS will also be forced to use such content protection, because it's not these companies doing it, it's the Hollywood, MPAA, RIAA which is forcing these companies to do it. I M not sure if this type of content protection will even be playable on linux at all or not[

Yeah, RIAA/MPAA consists of madmen, literally. They sue 8 year olds and do all sorts of crazy things. I just hope we don't see DRM embedded in any OS. That'll be very very bad.

3rd, there are already a few workarrounds of it available everywhere

The world famous age old Indian art of Jugaad

 

[hailgautam]

The problems with content protection is that, for every one person who understands how to get rid of it, there are 10 more people who don't have a clue about the head or tail of it.

I may have the knowledge about how to work around, but my dad will surely go and buy that mp3 online.

And there as more and more people are thought "how to use computer- the Microsoft way" rather than "how computer can be used as an device", the problem will only aggravate.

In Matrix - the movie as well - what I was drawing a parallel in the beginning there were only a few people who lived out of it, and majority were in Matrix, even with out realizing that they were.

 

[tarey_g]

@haligautam,
To play the protected contet , slowly every platform will need to include this type of content protection ,as its enforced by hollywood and music industry. Bad thing but eventually it will happen. Just don't start bashing MS before knowing all the facts, MS provides many other reasons to the haters to enjoy cursing them .

btw,the article you posted here is all over the internet but is half bullsh1t. Take a look at this , this is the same thing i remember Robert Heron(High Definition Television Analyst for PC Magazine) saying in the Dl.tv podcast.

There's a lot of nonsense spreading across the internet over the DRM support in Windows Vista, I won't link to the article itself as most of it is inaccurate. I've seen it posted several time on Microsoft's newgroups and of course it's all over Slashdot and the like.

The article basically claims that your media playback will be crippled in Windows Vista because of the new protected content pathways. This is false.

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, Vista disables it, and you end up hearing a performance by Marcel Marceau instead of Pink Floyd.

This is an example of how the article is not only factually wrong on many issues but deliberately tries to be misleading.

He is perfectly true in saying that the SACD version won't play under Windows Vista, but that's not because of Microsoft. It won't play on any PC, Windows, Macintosh, Linux or any other PC operating system because Sony won't licence the drive for use in a PC.

We'll assume he means the CD Audio version... Well he's wrong. The protected media pipelines in Windows Vista, don't apply for any content on the market today, which includes HD DVD and Blu-ray discs on sale at the moment.

The protected media pipelines will only be activated on content that requests it. HD DVD and Blu-ray both have this in the specification and the general feeling going around is the film studios won't start using this until at least 2011

If you want to blame someone for all this, go talk to the MPAA. They're the people who said they didn't want full quality playback on PCs to try and reduce piracy. Microsoft offered a solution; they'll provide a way for the disc and application to know how secure the platform is so it can decide if it wants to playback in high quality.

So if you want your future HD DVD or Blu-ray films, when they start using the higher level copy protection, to playback at full quality, you'll need to use Windows Vista, or a future operating system with a similar technology. That goes for Mac OS and Linux too.

I'll stress again:

Windows Vista won't degrade or refuse to play your existing media, CDs, DVDs etc.

It won't decide to shutdown outputs to try and prevent copying with your existing media, it'll behave exactly like Windows XP.

The protected media pathways are only activated when protected content requests them.

HD DVD and Blu-ray films on the market today don't use this level of protection, and aren't expected to for several years yet.

The operating system doesn't decide what can play and what cannot play; it just reports the level of protection the system supports.

Full quality playback of protected content will only work on operating systems that support it. That means Apple will have to build a similar system for Mac OS, and something will have to be done with Linux, otherwise you just get low quality, or none at all.
If you read something that sounds nuts, it probably is nuts.

Source :
*www.dasmirnov.net/blog/2006/12/31/windows_vista_drm_nonsense
*www.computerweekly.com/blogs/david_lacey/2007/01/vista-content-protection-can-w-1.html

__________

The world famous age old Indian art of Jugaad

Hehe, true