Vista security spec called "longest suicide note in history"

[mdlbear]

Vista security spec 'longest suicide note in history'

VISTA'S CONTENT PROTECTION specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history, claims a new and detailed report from the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

"Peter Gutmann's report describes the pernicious DRM built into Vista and required by MS for approval of hardware and drivers," said INQ reader Brad Steffler, MD, who brought the report to our attention. "As a physician who uses PCs for image review before I perform surgery, this situation is intolerable. It is also intolerable for me as a medical school professor as I will have to switch to a MAC or a Linux PC. These draconian dicta just might kill the PC as we know it."

The actual report is here; I originally found it on cryptome.

Comments

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

sgailean was just telling me about this. My prediction? It will destabilize and defunctionalize (is that a word?) the PC to the extent that the market will rebel, and Microsoft will internally say "oh shit", and quietly make it go away.

Me? I don't have a computer even remotely capable of running Vista; it affects me not at all, at this point, and I don't have any video equipment that's even got an S-Video connector on it, much less anything like HD. I'm just fine with continuing to run Pentium-3 level computers until the silliness subsides... Mind you, I'm not saying "I don't care", just that an awful lot of people will get hammered by it because of needing the very latest fastest hottest thing so that they can play Revenge of HaloDoom IV.

(Not strictly true. My current music computer does indeed meet their minimum specs. It's certainly the only one with enough RAM, though. And given what they're doing to media support... yeah, right.)

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

In fact... Linux isn't the big winner here. Apple is. If they provide a clean, easy upgrade path from Windows, they stand to cash in big from this - particularly if they get off their high horse about being a hardware company that happens to have their own OS.

[mdlbear]

They can't handle the volume -- they're trying to compete with Dell, HP, and a thousand companies in China. A broader view of the next couple of years can be found at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Well, that's kind of what I mean - for that to work, they need to lighten up about being primarily a hardware company, and do the work to allow it out into the OEM market.

[mdlbear]

I actually hope they go the other way -- they're doing fine in the fashion market; they should stick to that and leave software to become an open-source commodity. Their business practices aren't significantly better than Microsoft's, and they'd be much worse as a monopoly.

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

Actually, I rather hope they move in a yet third direction: they could join IBM in figuring out how to make the open-source commodity market work much, much better for them.

See, I think that by and large they do have the best user experience - and while I seriously hope that more Linux projects can learn from that, I remain somewhat skeptical that they're going to do it. The Linux stuff has been doing the "function over form" thing so hard for so long that I think that most of the developers have lost sight of the fact that even a reasonable number of computer geeks just want to sit down and have it work: "I hate Windows because if something goes wrong, you can't get under the hood to fix it. I hate Linux because you have to."

It's less true than it used to be by a decent shot - my wife's machine runs Linux - but I still spend way too much time on both of our systems making things work that should Just Go.

Apple gets a huge unfair (?) advantage by limiting their hardware exposure, so it's somewhat apples and blueberries...

[mdlbear]

Check out the Beryl UI. The myth that Linux has a lousy UI is really getting tired. Gnome even got some very favorable comments this afternoon from a former Apple employee who had just installed Ubuntu on his MacBook under Parallels.

My wife just uses Linux to read her mail, and her problems are due to lack of experience and lack of interest in learning, not to any intrinsic problems with Linux or its UI.

One of the things I don't like about the Mac and Windows UIs is that you have no choice. If you don't like a shared menu bar on top of the screen -- and I for one can't f*ing stand it -- you have no choice but to go with Linux or Windows. And if you want to be able to customize your menus, use focus-follows-mouse, and use a command-line environment that's designed to be used by experts, you have no choice but Linux.

[eleccham.livejournal.com]

I haven't come across Beryl. It's not so much that I think Linux has a lousy UI - it's stuff like:

• * The Actiontec GT701WG DSL modem/router - the one that Qwerst hands out with their DSL - has an egregious bug in it: on the wireless side, it advertises itself as the primary DNS server in the DHCP information. However, it doesn't actually serve DNS. MacOS and Windows both fail over gracefully; Linux appears to take issue and some percentage of queries simply fail. (Even weirder, it seems to depend on what you're looking up, though that could be my imagination...)


• I've not figured out a way to cache/save WEP information somewhere, a la Keychain. I've been told that there's some way to get it into some Gnome wallet-like utility even if you're running KDE, but hell if I can figure out what it is...

There are more of those, but I can't recall them off-hand. They're not huge critical show-stoppers... but a bunch of stuff that requires working around by hand.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

This is perfectly horrible. What a mess! Oh, well--glad I'm out of the computer industry. I speculate that the following is likely:

1. XP is going to persist for a very long time in office applications.

2. All this security technology takes us back to the bad old days where one needs a studio to produce high-quality video and audio, since if this is implemented one will need to purchase or lease specialized hardware that allows the creation and editing of high-quality audio and video. I think Apple will clean up there; I suppose the final step in production will be having the content one creates on Apple hardware translated to encrypted form in expensive studios. As you say, though, Apple can't handle the volume requirements of personal computing.

3. In the USA, adoption of Vista in home systems, with Apple taking over the technical and graphic arts areas and XP persisting in Office applications for years, possibly decades. The server market is likely to abandon Windows entirely; Windows has been doing poorly there anyway. I cannot imagine how AEC is going to respond; the new security features strike at the ability to create and manipulate models and graphics, but the industry is dependent on AutoCAD, which only runs on Windows. My guess is that hybrid solutions will become popular, with Apple hardware being used to bridge the gaps.

4. In Europe and Latin America, government-sponsored "free" (but tax funded) or partially-free software seems likely to emerge.

5. I don't know about the rest of the world; really interesting questions, there. OLPC may exert an unexpectedly great influence.

I think Microsoft has gone batshit crazy, personally.