Carnal Reason

I want to recommend a most interesting article, A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. Vista is the replacement for Windows XP, soon to be rolling out on new PC’s everywhere. Here is the executive summary:

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.

Peter Gutmann, the author of this paper is not some rabid linux or mac fanboy. He is a serious academic computer security reseacher. Gutmann raises a lot of interesting points. I found this one especially interesting:

Beyond the obvious playback-quality implications of deliberately degraded output, this measure can have serious repercussions in applications where high-quality reproduction of content is vital. For example the field of medical imaging either bans outright or strongly frowns on any form of lossy compression because artifacts introduced by the compression process can cause mis-diagnoses and in extreme cases even become life-threatening. Consider a medical IT worker who’s using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer (the CDROM drives installed in workplace PCs inevitably spend most of their working lives playing music or MP3 CDs to drown out workplace noise). If there’s any premium content present in there, the image will be subtly altered by Vista’s content protection, potentially creating exactly the life-threatening situation that the medical industry has worked so hard to avoid. The scary thing is that there’s no easy way around this - Vista will silently modify displayed content under certain (almost impossible-to-predict in advance) situations discernable only to Vista’s built-in content-protection subsystem

That sounds like something that might interest the lawyers. Imagine, the world’s deepest pockets have intentionally degraded the display quality on a medical imaging system. For once, the radiologist is not at fault, no, he is just another victim. A good doctor screwed over by bad Microsoft, though not quite so badly as his deceased patient.

So why does Microsoft take this risk?

I think they want to pull an Apple on the content industries. The record labels got in bed with Steve Jobs and iTunes, and Steve is selling a lot of ipods and making a lot of money. Microsoft wants to get its hands around the distribution of movies and television insofar as this distribution passes through a computer. So Bill has to give the movie guys what they want, and that is DRM.

The amusing part is that it is well understood that DRM schemes are doomed to fail. But failure is a relative thing. DRM is just a way to drag out a few more years out of an untenable business model. And why not? If you could make many millions a year for just a few more years, wouldn’t you? In the end you lose control, but for the short run you keep raking it in. In the meantime, the consumer gets stuck paying more for worse computers. Paying more for devices that are designed to keep him from doing stuff he wants to do. Strange world.

Linux, anyone?

Posted on December 28th, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: General