It probably won’t surprise blog readers that I did not run out and buy Windows Vista at the first available opportunity when it was released recently. (Nor did I run out for it at the second, third, fourth, or any subsequent opportunity…) Aside from my general loathing of the Windows platform in general, Vista’s stunningly wrong-headed Digital Restriction Management (DRM) “features” would have put me off the platform if I was even moderately inclined to consider running Windows.
But don’t take my word for it — here’s what Bruce Schneier has to say about Vista’s DRM:
Microsoft has reworked a lot of the core operating system to add copy protection technology for new media formats like HD DVD and Blu-ray disks. Certain high-quality output paths — audio and video — are reserved for protected peripheral devices. Sometimes output quality is artificially degraded; sometimes output is prevented entirely. And Vista continuously spends CPU time monitoring itself, trying to figure out if you’re doing something that it thinks you shouldn’t. If it does, it limits functionality and in extreme cases restarts just the video subsystem. We still don’t know the exact details of all this, and how far-reaching it is, but it doesn’t look good.
Read the rest on Schneier’s blog, and then decide if you want to “upgrade” to Vista.
