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There's been a significant
amount of "buzz" circulating on the internet for a good while now over an
article written by a well respected computer scientist and cryptologist named
Peter Gutmann, whose article, "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content
Protection" has gained considerable notoriety since its initial publication in
late 2006. Having been updated a few times its current revision date at
the time of our publication is February 18, so a few weeks have
passed since Mr. Gutmann's last update. After reading this article over several
times, we felt a need to examine it, and post some counterpoints. It's clear
that this gentleman has done a great deal of homework on the topics involved,
and we'd be remiss if we claimed to be Ph.D.'s ourselves. We simply share over thirty years of experience in the world of tech. He is notable in the computing community for his development of cryptlib, an open
source solution for encryption and authentication systems not to mention his
contributions to PGP v2. Still, the more we read this over, the more confusing
the whole premise became. The conclusions (for the most part at least) about
why content protection is a broken train wreck of a mess at this stage are
pretty hard for anyone to refute. Some specific conclusions however are
specious, and seem to show a lack of exposure to actual Vista
machines in the scenario's he discusses. More to the point we feel
the articles premise focuses on Vista, when
much larger issues are at stake, and thus we tend to think that there's a
certain level of "skew" involved in its focus.
We're not doing this to openly disrespect Mr. Gutmann, not at all. Indeed, and again we reiterate, it's quite clear this gentleman earned his Ph.D., and deserves all the accolades he's received since its initial publication. We do indulge in some rather humorous takes on Mr. Gutmann's interpretations, but these are done tongue-in-cheek primarily to drive home our reasoning processes when analyzing his article. We've included a few links directly to his article so you can check his article in its original form, and to comply with it being released under "Creative Commons" guidelines. What we do encourage is open, reasonable discussion about the issues involved, and where Microsoft (and Sony, Toshiba, Apple, Westinghouse, and a few dozen other companies) take us when it comes to these issues. Please leave comments at the end of the article, or discuss this in our forum! One final point we want to make absolutely clear at the outset is that we're not particularly zealous fans of Windows Vista ourselves. We don't hate it nor do we understand why anyone would develop hatred for an inanimate construct, but we're not experiencing much in the way of love for it either. For us, and this is an issue that's been made clear in reviews and articles about Vista in other publications, it's simply a fact that we don't see or feel that there is any particular or compelling reason to care about Vista, at least at this very early stage of it's deployment. The changes from a use standpoint we feel are rather mediocre and minor, and bring very little to the table that we can't already experience with Windows XP. That situation will change as Vista gains wider adoption, just as it's changed in the past with other key Windows operating system releases. We will proceed with original text from his article, and then interject our points where we feel they are appropriate.
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