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The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words fallsupon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.


Nowhere is this insincerity more evident than in movie and record label explanations of DRM. The term DRM is, itself, a masterful euphemism. DRM stands of "digital rights management" and, as one Slashdot signature explains: "DRM manages access in the same a prison manages freedom". The point of DRM is quite simply to allow intellectual property rights holders to come into your living room and determine what you do with the movies and music that you've legally purchased. The strategy for giving themselves power over your media library is simple: they strong-arm the hardware and software manufactures into designing products that play movies and music only how, when and where the labels allow.

If consumers truly understood the extent to which their rights to use products that they have purchased have been curtailed by movie and music executives, the economic backlash would be staggering. To avoid this disaster, three strategies are employed:

1. Use of euphemistic language
2. Reliance on legal and technical obscurity
3. Operation through intermediaries

The euphemistic language is far more pervasive than just DRM. Other common terms include: Plays-for-Sure, Trusted Platform Module, Ouptut Protection Management, and Protected Video Path. These terms play on widespread security and privacy fears. What is left unsaid is that the protection is against the consumer, the management is of consumer behavior, and the trust is in the hardware and software to thwart users.

In addition to the plain-English euphemisms, content providers depend on the fact that most computer users don' t have the expertise to understand their actions. One prime example of this is the Sony Rootkit fiasco (there's a great timeline here on Boing Boing). A rootkit is a type of software that allows a program to run undetected on your computer. Rootkits are one of the primary tools of hackers because they allow viruses and other malicious software to run on your computer undetected. When a rootkit is successful, not even anti-virus software will be able to detect the presence of programs protected by the rootkit. Rootkits are designed and deployed by malicous (black hat) hackers. Like, for example, Sony's music label. Sony used rootkits to hide programs that were installed when users played Sony CDs on their computer. These programs, which controlled what you could do with the music on that CD, were a nuisance themselves.

The larger problem with the rootkit was that it protected any program that ran from a specific location. In essence, Sony snuck into your computer, then turned around and opened a gaping security hole anyone could use, and then disguised that hole. They saved virus-makers the trouble of creating and installing a rootkit on your system.

In fact, only 4 days after the Sony rootkits were first discovered, hackers started using the security hole to cheat in World of Warcraft by deliberately hiding cheating software using the Sony rootkit. A few days after that attorneys for the EFF took a look at the EULA (end user license agreement)that accompanies the rootkit-infected CDs and found that the EULA is more legally outrageous than the rootkit was technically outrageous. Even Macs, much vaunted for their resistance to Windows-based viruses, were also vulnerable to Sony's rootkit infection. Finally, two weeks after the rootkit is made public, Sony stopped shipping CDs infected with the rootkit. They also released an uninstaller that is later proven to leave behind a wealth of additional code for hackers to take advantage of.

The only reason that Sony didn't go bankrupt as a result of this scandal is that most people have no idea what a rootkit is, and even fewer people read their EULAs. The public outcry was muffled by confusion as to what, exactly, Sony had done wrong.

All of this brings us to the upcoming release of Windows Vista. Computer World has a detailed article on the role that DRM will play in Windows Vista (linked from Slashdot). The content providers, like Sony, are employing their third strategem in an effort to distance themselves from the DRM-measures they impose on their consumers. Windows Vista is designed from the ground up to offer some extremely powerful, low-level DRM protection. One example is the gradual closing of the "analog hole". The analog hole simply refers to the fact that no matter how much DRM protection you impose on a computer, DVD, DVD player, MP3 player, etc, that signal eventually has to make its way to an output: monitor and/or speakers. You can always play the content according to DRM rules, and record the analog output. The loss of quality is minimal, but now all DRM has been stripped, and the user can have full control over the product. Windows Vista incorporates the Protected Video Path to combat this. In conjunction with TV makers, this allows the DRM on your computer to check the integrity of connection from the computer to the TV. If anything is amiss along this chain, the signal can either be downgraded in quality or scrambled beyond recognition. That's part of what you'll be paying for if you buy Windows Vista.

Of course the the content providers are being careful about this. They are staying quietly in the background while Microsoft and hardware vendors try to explain to the public that these "features" are really beneficial. In addition, content providers are almost sure not to actually close the analog hole all right away. If consumers realize how much control they are giving to the content providers, they will never buy these products. So instead the content providers will play nicely until DRM-enabled hardware and software has massive market penetration. Then, with the flip of a switch, they can essentially hobble all that fancy equipment you've bought and consumers, who will have invested billions, will be left with no recourse.

I'm aware of the rationale behind DRM, by the way. Content providers use DRM to stop piracy. The trouble is, it hampers the way consumers use their products legally as well. If you've ever tried to copy songs from your iPod to a computer you own you've run into the brick-wall of anti-consumer DRM. Yes, you can get music files back off your iPod, but only by breaking Apple's FairPlay DRM (which probably violates the EULA too). Furthermore, there's little evidence that DRM is useful in stopping the kind of piracy that actually hurts record label and movie studio profits. When Chinese factories churn out copies of Star Wars for sale - that's piracy. When kids trade MP3s it's called marketing. (See: The Real Story About the Cost of Piracy)

So where does this leave us? How do consumers avoid the DRM pit-trap that is MS Vista? Well, rule #1 is: don't buy it. There's really nothing wrong with Windows XP for now. Ask yourself if there's really anything wrong with the operating system, and you'll likely realize that, for the time being, there isn't. When you buy a new computer, keep in mind that you already have a copy of Windows XP from your old one. You can use the sticker on your computer to legally install Windows XP on your new computer. (There are plenty of sites on the net that will walk you through that.)

If you do want to upgrade your OS, try a Macintosh. They do multimedia better than Windows machines. They have better security. They are easier to use. And you can always use Boot Camp to install Windows XP (not Vista!) on your Macintosh if you need to use Windows-only programs from time to time (and the only Windows-only software you're likely to miss are th games). There are also several products that allow you to run Windows-only software inside OS X, but these won't work for demanding applications like recent games.

And finally, get ready for linux. OS X (the operating system of Macintosh) is widely held as the easiest-to-use operating system. Guess what - it's built on Unix. That's the same OS that linux derives from. I've tried to use Linux. It's not ready for the primetime yet. But it has come a long, long way towards being as friendly - if not friendlier - than Windows. Many linux advocates are already sensing that the coming of Windows Vista will bring a sea-change in operating system use as users disgusted with the crippled and expensive MS offering look for cheaper and freer (as in liberty) alternatives. Give Linux another 2 years of development (and Windows XP should be fine for the next two years) and Linux just may be a step up in convenience from Windows XP.

Matt Rostoff, lead analyst at research firm Directions on Microsoft, sums it up well in the Computer World article: "I could not be more skeptical about the viability of the DRM included with Vista, from either a technical or a business standpoint... It's so consumer-unfriendly that I think it's bound to fail -- and when it fails, it will sink whatever new formats content owners are trying to impose."

Whatever you do, stay away from Vista.