[Infowarrior] - Vista Prevents Users Playing High-Def Content

Sat Aug 11 15:17:05 UTC 2007

Vista Prevents Users Playing High-Def Content
Vista requires premium content like high-definition movies to be degraded in
quality when sent to high-quality outputs.
Jon Brodkin, Network World
Friday, August 10, 2007 6:00 AM PDT
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,135814-pg,1/article.html

Content protection features in Windows Vista are preventing customers from
playing high-quality video and audio and harming system performance, even as
Microsoft neglects security programs that could protect users, computer
researcher Peter Gutmann argued at the USENIX Security Symposium in Boston
Wednesday.

"If there was any threat modeling at all, it was really badly done,"
Gutmann, from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, said while giving a
talk on Vista content protection. "Once the enemy is the user and not the
attacker, standard security thinking falls apart."

Vista requires premium content like high-definition movies to be degraded in
quality when sent to high-quality outputs, so users are seeing status codes
that say "graphics OPM resolution too high." Gutmann calls this "probably
the most bizarre status code ever."

While Microsoft's intent is to protect commercial content, home movies are
increasingly being shot in high definition, Gutmann said. Many users are
finding they can't play any content if it's considered "premium."

"This is not commercial HD content being blocked, this is the users' own
content," Gutmann said. "The more premium content you have, the more output
is disabled."

Gutmann, who wore a white T-shirt marked with a Windows Vista logo during
his presentation, first issued his criticisms several months ago with a
paper titled A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection.

Gutmann's paper called Vista's content protection rules "the longest suicide
note in history."

Microsoft acknowledged that quality of premium content would be lowered if
requested by copyright holders, the BBC reported. Microsoft defended its
copyright protections after Gutmann's paper came out, saying they are common
features of many playback devices, the BBC article says.

The protections allow copyright holders to prevent video from being played
in high definition unless users have equipment that supports the
High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) digital rights management
system developed by Intel. If PC users have graphics cards with video
connections that don't support HDCP, they are out of luck.

High-definition audio is also blocked in many cases, Gutmann said Wednesday.

"It's taking this open architecture that IBM created 25 years ago and making
it closed again," he said.

In a 132-slide PowerPoint presentation, Gutmann outlined numerous features
of Vista that he says are frustrating customers and programmers. New
functionality related to content protection makes it hard to develop new
drivers, he said. When ATI was finally able to ship Vista drivers, they
crashed Windows, and Dell and Gateway had to delay Vista upgrades because
they couldn't get working drivers, he said.

Gutmann said hardware costs will increase because vendors can't provide
Vista-approved security functionality unless Hollywood studios like MGM,
20th Century Fox and Disney grant written approval saying the content
security meets their standards.

A Vista function known as "tilt bits" -- like the tilt sensor in pinball
machines -- requires hardware and software drivers to report every minor
glitch, even ones that cause no problems, Gutmann said.

"Every otherwise unnoticeable minor glitch is suddenly surfaced and turned
into a showstopper," he said.

Separately, all the extra encryption required to meet Vista's content
protection standards means some computer components can never enter
power-saving mode, he said. Thus, when you play a movie your CPU keeps
running at full steam, he said. The extra power demands make it hard to
reduce electricity usage.

"It's a bit of an extreme claim, but you could say Windows Vista causes
global warming, because it's burning so much power with all this nonsense,"
Gutmann said.

The encryption requirements render high-end graphics processing units less
effective, he said, because the best of those products emphasize graphics
performance over content protection. On Vista, US$100-video cards can thus
outperform those that cost $1,000.

Gutmann argued that Microsoft placed content protection above all other
priorities when building Vista, perhaps to gain favor and money from
Hollywood. Microsoft should have instead focused this effort on security
features that protect users, Gutmann said, such as encrypted paging to
protect user secrets, protected content domains that keep out malware, and
anti-debugging techniques to prevent rootkit hooking.

New Zealand's government, which has argued that digital rights management
fails to address the rights of people and government, appears to be the only
government worldwide to express public concern about Vista's content
protection standards, Gutmann said.