Anxiously Awaiting

I recently read an article written by a professor at New Zealand’s Auckland University. It can be read in full here. In short, this article describes a number of issues with Windows Vista’s methods of content protection, and the general way that the OS handles some key features for users. Naturally since I am an audiophile, I was pretty angry about some of the things I read.

In basic terms, among other things the article talks about Vista’s delivery of what it considers premium and non-premium content. Anything that is not considered to be premium content will be either “reduced in quality” or not played at all. The article privides a good scenario of this:

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.

That’s enough to prevent me from upgrading to Vista at all right there. It seems that Microsoft is intent on tightening its grip on consumers by implementing things such as this. This system could also force manufacturers to get their sound cards or speakers certified by Microsoft before Vista will recognize them as “secure.”

Vista isn’t making it easy for Driver developers either:

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.

It’s sad that facts such as these never reach the general public. Instead, all they see is the intense hype and marketing campaigns that companies launch. It would be interesting to listen in on a Vista configuration session for an average power user with a large non-licensed MP3 or WMA collection. Some people may not be able to tell the difference between “downgraded” premium content and the regular thing, but those of us who can would be very upset.

I’ll be the first to admit that Vista has it’s power points. Aero Glass looks great, but X11 servers like XGL and Compiz–which have been around long before Glass–look equally as cool. The SuperFetch feature that Microsoft is crowing about is nothing more than something Linux based operating systems have been doing for years. In the various Linuces, utilization of RAM has always been approached with the “if it’s unused, its wasted” philosophy. As a matter of fact, a quick look via top reveals that my system is using 811MB of my 1GB of RAM, and it’s perfectly fast.

I for one have almost switched completely to Novell’s SuSE Linux 10.2. All that’s left is formatting one of my 250GB drives in reiser and copying my music and video collections over. I’ll still keep my Windows XP partition for the occasional Visual Studio 2005 C# session, but in short:

Goodbye Microsoft.