Anilrgowda

Anger over Content Protection imbedded into Windows Vista and fears it will seriously hamper system performance or could even shut down entire networks, is being unwittingly spearheaded by an Auckland University researcher.
Peter Guttman, an Honorary Researcher with the university's Computer Science faculty and specialist in security techniques and systems, has become the darling of the anti-DRM movement and is now the subject of hundreds of internet posts over claims in his post A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection that Vista is fatally flawed.
Guttman says that "Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements to provide content protection for ‘premium content', typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources". But he claims that provision of this protection incurs considerable costs to system performance, stability, support overheads, and hardware and software costs.
"These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example, hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server)."
Guttman goes on to describe the Vista content protection as the "longest suicide note in history", a reference to Sir Gerald Kaufman's description of the British Labour Party's 1983 election manifesto, which produced its worst election result ever. Guttman says that 37-page manifesto is now surpassed Microsoft's own "Output Content Protection and Windows Vista" document, which is 44 pages long.
His densely packed, 13,000-word post is thick with similar attention-grabbing descriptions of Vista's shortcomings - "Windows Vista's content protection ... has to be able to violate the laws of physics...", "The threat of driver revocation is the ultimate nuclear option, the crack of the commissars' pistols reminding the faithful of their duty" - but the post is also full of footnotes and appendices to back his claims.
While many of his concerns concentrate on consumer issues, there are also several areas businesses should be aware of. These include:
"Once a weakness is found in a particular driver or device, that driver will have its signature revoked by Microsoft, which means that it will cease to function ... What this means is that a report of a compromise of a particular driver or device will cause all support for that device worldwide to be turned off until a fix can be found."
This he says could impact far beyond users of HD media as businesses use older devices for which no new drivers are created. He says an example of this would be "nVidia TNT2 video cards, which are still very widely deployed in business environments where they're all you need to run Word or Outlook or Excel (or, for that matter, pretty much any non-gaming application)."
Under a section sub-titled Decreased System Reliability, Guttman describes how Vista requires hardware and software to set "tilt bits" if anything unusual is detected. This could be anything from a slight power fluctuation or the shock of a particularly hard landing aboard an aircraft flight deck. These commonplace glitches, he says, will now be interpreted as a hack attack "...with the required reaction being that "Windows Vista will initiate a full reset of the graphics subsystem, so everything will restart"".
Guttman speculates what effect this could have on military systems and refers to a 1997 incident which saw Windows NT disable the Aegis missile cruiser USS Yorktown ("NT Leaves Navy "Smart Ship" dead in the water", Government Computer News, 13 July 1998). "Now Windows Vista can do the same thing via a by-design feature of the OS," he says.
Microsoft NZ said it was aware of Guttman's post and the claims he has made about Vista. Unfortunately, the company said the person best qualified to respond was in the US attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It said comment would likely be available by Monday.
M-net will be sure to bring that response and further comment from the elusive Guttman if and when we can.