Boggled

[unixronin]

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

-- Peter Gutmann

I just got around to reading Peter Gutmann's analysis of the Windows Vista Content Protection specification.  And I'm boggled.  Even when pushed by the paranoid and deluded content industry (read: the MPAA and RIAA), I have a hard time believing even Microsoft, after all the dumb things it's done, could be this stupid.

If there's anything that might choke the great mass of uneducated users enough to make them turn around en masse and tell Microsoft to shove it where the sun don't shine, this may be it, once the word starts getting out that all these mysterious failures and performance problems they're now having aren't bugs -- Vista is SUPPOSED to work that way....

Comments

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

Have you been following the ongoing plot line in The Help Desk comic at Ubersoft.net (http://ubersoft.net/?cat=2) about this? It's hilarious! Ubersoft Inc. is accusing companies who don't upgrade to their Verandas software of being terrorists!

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup, I have ... I wish it was entirely exaggerating.

(I think it was some executive at Turner who said -- in a nationally-reported press conference -- that if you fast-forward through commercials, or mute the sound, or leave the room to use the bathroom or fetch a beer while the commercials are on, you're stealing from the network. My answer to him is that if it takes me an hour of my time to watch forty minutes of programming because it's interleaved with twenty minutes of commercials advertising crap that I don't want and will never buy anyway, then he's stealing from me.)