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| PCWorld Lauds Dr. Peter Gutmann For His Misguided Vista FUD |
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 This story we saw over at PCWorld proves to us, more than anything we have seen in recent history, that fame overshadows fact. Once again, Dr. Peter Gutmann, author of "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection" (a diatribe on the evils of Vista we took apart months ago ), tinges reality with an agenda we find disturbing in its naivety.Some key inaccuracies in the PCWorld story... "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." We have been playing non commercial HD content on our Vista PCs since.....Vista was in beta. Heck, I am playing some right now, a 1280x720p h.264 encoded capture of a television program, on my new Emerson 32" HDTV. Mr. Gutmann is basing his assumptions on long-past issues with early Vista betas that *did* exhibit issues with unprotected HD content. A year has passed, Mr. Gutmann. Try to update your fear mongering with some updated facts. We have implored you to do this for quite some time. As far as HD disc content is concerned, the requirements for a "protected path" is an HD industry requirement for most hardware involved in HD disc content delivery (i.e. this isn't a Vista issue). Sure, it's a requirement that sucks, increases complexity, and is ultimately useless since the ability to strip protections from High Definition discs has existed for many months, ironically on Windows XP and Vista machines. "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." This little subtle bit of "greenspeak" sounds good, if only it were true. It is *not* cpu intensive to decode AACS on the fly. It *is* cpu intensive to decode h.264, MPEG4-v10, and WMV-HD encoded materials (which are approved HD encoding methods, though most HD content is actually encoded in MPEG-2, something an old high end P3 can handle fine), but this is the case whether media is encrypted or not. And besides, no PC whether it's running XP, Vista, or anything else is going to be in a low idle state when decoding video streams whether they're protected or not. The stakes are raised from the DVD era, because the movie industry freaks when 16 year old kids can crack their multi million dollar developed protection methods. But consumers, which are always the deciding factor in things like this are staying away from high definition disc formats in droves. An infintesimal fraction of the market is Vista machines as well, so it's basically a non issue. Microsoft is merely playing by the same rules the rest of the industry is. Sure, this closes alot of doors to open source operating systems (which is the real reason behind Dr. Gutmann's concern), but the open source community has bypassed licensing requirements for decoding media before, by placing the legal burden on end users. It's childs play to get a modern linux distro to play nearly anything, but *not* from a clean install without doing some work. All it requires is end users installing media players and media decoding extensions which are of questionable legality under current law. This is all fine and dandy with us, but it's a clear example of the "open source" community wanting to have it's cake and eat it too. Once again we want to make it absolutely clear that we here at Fastsilicon are NOT fans of Digital Rights Management, when these policies and technologies interfere with consumer's exercising their fair-use rights. Fair Use rights *are* clearly being abrogated for misguided reasons, due to an industry being afraid of an inevitable future. These are issues with law that need to be addressed, debated and dealt with, this is clear. From a security standpoint however, regardless of what your politics are it's increasingly clear that the industry is (and should be) moving towards content security instead of network centric security. Not because we think mega corporations need more draconian ways to pull money out of our pockets, but because from a security standpoint content centric security makes the most sense for everyone. Surely a contributor to the PGP project in days past can see this? If only he could step outside of his politics and base his arguments on reality and facts. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           
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