“Some argue that the consumer gets little or negative ‘benefit’ from this increase, this is false. The consumer gets premium content on their PC”

Pete Levinthal
Software Engineering
ATI Technologies, Inc

This is a fair statement. Playing HD content from a Blueray or HD DVD disk is clearly an advantage that end users would appreciate. So in the sense that a benefit is an advantage I would say Levinthal’s statement is accurate. However, benefit can also refer to “profit” which would make his statement questionable. Considering that he mentions ‘negative “benefit”‘ I think we should delve further into this connotation. Profit is the positive difference between the amount spent and the amount earned. So in purely mathematical terms the amount of “cost” to the end user to play premium content must be lower then the amount gained in the operation of HD playback for a profitable expierence. I believe it is safe to assume what the amount gained is, HD playback. What isn’t so clear is what the costs are. In the programmers universe cost is generally associated with amounts of cpu cycles spent solving some problem. Thus if a programmer writes a function for a program which needlessly recomputes values it is considered “expensive”. An accomplished programmer can write elegant solutions which do not incur much cost.

Keeping the previous definition of “cost” in mind I think it is fitting to look into what the premium content protection really costs a user. From this analysis we can make a fair judgement on whether a user profits overall from the ability to play HD content. According to the Microsoft presentations here,   here,   here, and   here the playback of HD content requires no less then two rounds of encryption/decryption before the video is sent to the display. First the video comes from the original HD media in encrypted format and is decoded. That decoded media is then encoded again using the AES algorithm and sent across the PCIe bus. Once it reaches the other side of that bus it is decoded and then sent across the HDMI interface to the display.

The entire process is documented here in a presentation by Microsoft:

Based on my own valuation of HD content playback I would say that the price is either near or exceeding the gain of watching content on my PC. Clearly the price of these computations goes down every 18 months* by 50% according to Moore’s law. This led to my earlier prediction that an affordable and usable system running Vista is perhaps 5 years away. Before I close on this installment I want to give a preview of the next piece I have lined up. This image struck me and has pervaded my thoughts about this article.

This image from a presentation delivered by Dave Marsh (Program Manager, Windows Media Technologies) captures how Microsoft frames this problem. Perhaps not intentional but all too apparent in this image is their end user acting deviously and maliciously hurting Hollywood, Microsoft, and probably America.

* Wikipedia cites Moore as stating 12 months between the doubling of transistors which given my previous statement would reduce the distance of a usable and affordable system 3.3 years away. There are other references in the article that state the chip making industry adheres to the “doubling every 18 months”. My prediction was that of 3.5x current capacities for an affordable system to play back HD content on a Vista PC.

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing is doing a serialized reading of Peter Gutmann's paper, A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. If you haven't read the paper yet, your procastination has paid off. You can now have it read to you. It's one of the better resources out there for getting informed about all of the new restrictions that have been smuggled into Vista.

Here's the feed link for the series, and here's the first installment.

UPDATE: You can find the OGG version here.

One commenter on digg.com asked what the sense of my article is. Is it just that Microsoft Vista will introduce new levels of encryption to the playback of HD content? I wish it were as simple as that. And this goes way beyond the idea that consumers will have to pay for the extra components on the video cards which will not be used if they don’t play HD content. It goes way beyond the fact that pirated HD content is already available which invalidates all their efforts to date. The real issue that warrants your attention is that Microsoft has teamed up with the entertainment industries (RIAA + MPAA) to create an operating system that can control what you do, where you do it, and how you do it. The real issue is that they are collectively pushing degenerative technology which is causing a cultural backslide.

The new features which create “pipelines” to secure audio and video ensure that consumers can not play movies or music on devices that are not approved. More then ever, the industries who produce the entertainment consumed by the masses treat those very same people as potential criminals. Microsoft isn’t kowtowing to demands; they are gladly aiding the entertainment industry to fight a battle they themselves are waging. Piracy affects anyone who distributes products under a restrictive copyright regime. Unlike what many a blog commenter has tried to argue DRM is not free. There are significant costs involved which I have tried to outline in my previous articles in the form of additional hardware, resource usage, engineering time, technical support, and PR spin to counter people like me who are against such things. One commenter on the windowsvistablog was nice enough to extract all six mentions of who is paying for these restrictions. The consumer.

Yet if one were to conduct a survey among users I would find it difficult to believe that anyone would list DRM high on their wish list. It’s difficult to imagine someone asking for “computers which run software you can’t see, can’t understand, can’t control, and which reports to other people what is going on in your network without your ability to interrupt or do anything?”. Even if the payoff is the ability to play back HD content from major studios. This is the leverage that Microsoft has touted from the beginning and their hope is that consumers value this “ability” so highly as to turn a blind eye to the degenerative methodologies embedded in the very core of their new operating system.

Part of the adherence to the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) specifications is the deliberate obfuscation of drivers and the withdrawal of open hardware specifications. When an approved device is given a piece of HD content the operating system begins negotiating with the device to verify that it is real and authentic. To accomplish this, undocumented calls are made to the device verifying that it is not a fake device intent on viewing unencrypted frames of the premium content. How does this affect you? Dave Marsh responded that “HFS uses additional chip characteristics other than those needed to write a driver. HFS requirements should not prevent the disclosure of all the information needed to write drivers.” What he doesn’t mention is that the authors of the drivers for future video hardware are under contract to obfuscate their code and keep their specifications closed. Closed specifications affect hardware design for ALL operating systems. Free software driver developers will find less and less publicly available documentation. One of the commenters on my original post had a great response which I’m including here.

“I don’t care about ‘premium content’, neither copied nor purchased, and yet I, as a software developer, have to live with the fact that it’s hard to use 3D graphics cards using free drivers. Thanks to the deal between the likes of MPAA-Microsoft-ATI, the situation won’t improve, it will only get worse. “

Our joint statement with Friends of the Earth International, the Green Party, People and Planet and the New Internationalist calling for a free society based on free software has now been signed 600+ more times over by activists around the world.

If you haven't yet, please add your signature to the statement calling on activist groups and individuals of all stripes to reject Microsoft Windows Vista and pursue free "as in freedom" software like GNU/Linux. Help us demonstrate how much support there is for a digital world without arbitrary restrictions on the freedoms we need to be effective agents for political change.

Word is out that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is in Beta mode. Reviewers mention that it is relatively unchanged, i.e., it is still running as a giant piece of proprietary malware, but, that it is running a little bit faster (one report takes a shot at it claiming that it is almost as fast as Windows 98). Unfortunately, Service Pack 1 still leaves Vista designed to restrict what users can do with their software.

So, my advice is: don't wait for Service Pack 1. Despite the free software worlds constant battle to acquire hardware specifications (often reverse engineering them) in order to develop free software drivers, GNU/Linux still supports far more hardware than Vista ever will. One of the reasons for this is because Vista needs certain hardware requirements to implement Digital Restrictions Management schemes and Trusted Computing schemes so that the hardware and the software can restrict how you can use your software, your data, and all of your multi-media content. I'm not sure you can run GNU/Linux on a shoebox, but you certainly don't need a top of the line machine like Vista requires. Most distributions run on anything from your old 12-pound laptop from the early 90s to the latest and greatest super-computer cluster, as well as most everything in between. When you install GNU/Linux, you decide if you want to stay on the cutting edge and be a "beta tester," or you can choose to run a heavily tested and stable version of an application. GNU/Linux is not designed to restrict the user.

In fact, free software carries freedom to the user. Microsoft claims absolute ownership over their software, but, with free software, you have all the same rights as developers do to use, to change, to share (even to sell) the software to whomever, and for whatever purpose you see fit -- and, as long as you continue to pass along those same freedoms to everyone else, it will always be free software. So, don't wait for SP1, install your favorite GNU/Linux distribution today, and be a part of a thriving and respectful community that values your freedom of choice and your freedom to do what you wish with your software, your data, and your multimedia content.

Recently it emerged that Microsoft is removing the "kill switch" from Vista.

When you install Vista, Microsoft claims that you consent to being spied upon, through the "Windows Genuine Advantage" system. This system tries to identify instances of copying that Microsoft thinks are illegitimate. This system includes a "kill switch" which allows Microsoft to remotely deactivate your copy of Vista. This deactivation, whether deliberate or by accident -- as has been the case in some 500,000 cases already according to a study last year -- locks you out of your computer, and forces you to contact Microsoft to get access to your files.

While they may have now ostensibly removed the kill switch from Vista, they have not updated the hostile license they say you must agree to in order to use Vista. Vista still restricts your freedom, because freedom at the whim of someone else is not freedom.

Vista still enforces Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) -- technologies that companies like Disney, Warner, Netflix, Universal, Apple, Sony, Amazon, Fox and Microsoft are trying to impose on us all in order to have control over how our computers are used.

The public backlash that led to the kill switch in Vista being "removed" is a sign that people want software freedom. Today, Microsoft cannot offer people what they want. Thankfully, all is not lost -- free software distributions of the GNU/Linux operating system offer that freedom today. One lesson we should all take from this is that if we speak loudly enough, and demand software freedom, it can have results. But we also shouldn't be fooled -- Microsoft has just hidden the kill switch behind its back, still claiming the authority to use it. More pressure is still needed, and the only thing that will work in the end is for Microsoft to release their software under a license that respects the freedom of computer users.