Peter Gutmann wrote:
The worst thing about all of this is that there's no escape. Hardware manufacturers will have to drink the kool-aid (and the reference to mass suicide here is deliberate [Note C]) in order to work with Vista: "There is no requirement to sign the [content-protection] license; but without a certificate, no premium content will be passed to the driver". Of course as a device manufacturer you can choose to opt out, if you don't mind your device only ever being able to display low-quality, fuzzy, blurry video and audio when premium content is present, while your competitors don't have this (artificially-created) problem.
As a user, there is simply no escape. Whether you use Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 95, Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, Solaris (on x86), or almost any other OS, Windows content protection will make your hardware more expensive, less reliable, more difficult to program for, more difficult to support, more vulnerable to hostile code, and with more compatibility problems.
Actually there is an escape. Manufacturers can opt out and explicitly support things like Linux. They can build machines specifically designed to run open source operating systems with open source drivers. This will catch a large portion of the newly disgruntled ex-Microsoft crowd. If you are a graphics card manufacturer, your display will look sharp when not running Vista, and will be much cheaper, and outperform those running with Vista specifically because it won't require the extra baggage, and will be much cheaper. Being cheaper will attract the thrifty consumer, and allow higher profit margins for the manufacturers. Right now there are companies that build Linux computers out of various notebooks from IBM, Sony, and Acer. These can be even cheaper if they're not first bought off the shelf and reinstalled, but rather built for Linux from the start. Remember how Lenovo originally said they'd only support Windows? They backtracked pretty quickly and supported Linux on the T60P. Gee, I wonder what made them do that? But I do note that they only support one distro of Linux, which probably means that their drivers are locked down and closed source which is bad. What's to stop a device manufacturer from building two sets of devices? One set unencumbered, one set for Microsoft? Oh, right, secret agreements. I'm sure that those will evaporate. Last years card won't meet the Vista criteria any longer, or will be cracked, so perhaps the manufacturer will at that point open up the drivers or the specs, or someone will reverse engineer the driver. If you were a graphics card maker, how would you prevent your card from going obsolete or being cracked? Firmware upgrades you say? Wonderful! You've just aided reverse engineers! They'll figure out how your firmware process works, and once that's done, how to build their own firmware to reflash your cards with, one that isn't encumbered. Sure you want to play that game? There is already a push from the open source community to require manufacturers to open source their drivers. Its mainly from the OpenBSD group, and it's certainly not a large enough push, but it will gain momentum over time. There were grumblings from the Linux kernel side, but Linus was opposed. So there are plenty who wish this to come to pass and will lobby for it. There already exists a project to create an open source graphics card. One where the specs and the drivers are open: http://wiki.duskglow.com/tiki-index.php?page=Open-Graphics At first such things will be hobbyist projects driven by FPGA's and be more expensive. As momentum grows, this will change. Besides, FPGA's offer something far more interesting: the ability to upgrade your hardware with just a file upload. Throw in some off the shelf DSP's and CPU's, fast memory (perhaps with DIMM slots for upgradeability) and you've go the makings of a killer graphics card that could compete with the big dogs. In fact, why not throw in some great audio hardware too? Just think of it, about to play back a DVD? Don't waste CPU cycles on it, upload your mpeg1 decoder to the video card and let it's CPU do the work. Want to output in 3D, upload code directly to the video card and let it's CPU do the red-blue mixing. Want to play games, the game can upload its own code to the card so it can be optimized for that specific game. Want to play MP3's, OGG's? upload the codec to the video card, and just stream the file to the card. Want to render a web page? Push the HTML and its graphics directly to the card! And so on! I for one, would rather pay $1500 for such a card than $500 for the latest and greatest from nVidia or ATI. Over time such projects will grow, and they will be fueled by Microsoft's idiotic plans. There is already a very nicely designed Linux computer on the market designed to be a PVR, DVD player and fit in your living room that you can buy for about $800 that is a better Tivo than Tivo, and doesn't kowtow to the MPAA. There's no reason you can't build your own of those if you wanted to for about half the price, but it's good that there's a consumer version of it. It's a perfect analog for the anti-vista machine of the future.
Here's an offer to Microsoft: If we, the consumers, promise to never, ever, ever buy a single HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc containing any precious premium content [Note D], will you in exchange withhold this poison from the computer industry? Please?
I have a better offer to Microsoft: go fuck yourselves. Personally I haven't bought a Microsoft operating system since Windows 2000, and have no plans on upgrading to anything other than Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, or OS X. The XP activation dance convinced me to not do so. Nor will I buy any computer with Windows installed on it, nor will I support Microsoft servers at work, despite having over 11 years of experience with it (the more you know about Windows, the more you realize how crappy it is!) I'm sure that whatever artificial needs for windows software I might have will be addressed by the fact that my employer will have a windows machine available for me to convert Office documents to whatever format I'll need, even if they're just postscript or PDF. In the end, even these will evaporate, especially if Microsoft starts locking down their data formats too. Sure, sure, a lot of corporations will still insist on Office and such, but slowly they will switch, and those that will require it will have machines to allow access to them, thus allow conversion from them. Likely they'll realize that this will be a poison pill to them, and loosen the restrictions, but I hope they go full steam ahead with this plan instead.