Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection
Peter Gutmann has written up a paper analyzing the costs that are being introduced with the content protection mechanisms in Windows Vista. You can read the paper on his website here. Most of what’s in his paper is not new information to those of us following the development of Windows Vista, but he does a good job of summarizing a lot of the disadvantages of the new content protection mechanisms in Windows Vista.
Keep in mind that a lot of the things discussed there are also still at their version 1.0 stage of development, and it will only get worse as this technology matures. You can compare it to the way Microsoft changed Windows Genuine Crapvantage and Product Craptivation in Windows Vista and made things more complex for systems administrators in the end. Apart from the technology being in its infancy, much of it was also left out of Windows Vista because it wasn’t ready yet. This includes large parts of Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB). So if you think what is discussed in that paper is already really bad, this is to remind you of the fact that it’ll get much worse in the future if Microsoft continues their current policy.
Gutmann also mentions the following:
Note A: I’ll make a prediction at this point that, given that it’s trying to do the impossible, the Vista content protection will take less than a day to bypass if the bypass mechanism is something like a driver bug or a simple security hole that applies only to one piece of code (and can therefore be quickly patched), and less than a week to comprehensively bypass in a driver/hardware-independent manner. This doesn’t mean it’ll be broken the day or week that it appears, but simply that once a sufficiently skilled attacker is motivated to bypass the protection, it’ll take them less than a day or a week to do so.
This is a certainty. Just look at how Windows Media DRM continues to get cracked everytime, and look at how Microsoft’s latest anti-piracy efforts were easily bypassed. The only thing they achieve everytime is make the system a lot more complex and difficult to manage, not only for themselves, but also for end-users.
Not only that, but as Gutmann writes, all these extra “features” just make the software more bloated with no benefits to the end-user, and as a result requires faster hardware to run on:
Note C: We already have multiple reports from Vista reviewers of playback problems with video and audio content, with video frames dropped and audio stuttering even on high-end systems. Time will tell whether this problem is due to immature drivers, or has been caused by the overhead imposed by Vista’s content protection mechanisms interfering with playback.
If you upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista, you need faster hardware to be able to do the same things you did on Windows XP with slower and cheaper hardware. And that mostly because Microsoft added loads of software that does absolutely nothing of real use to the end-user and could easily have been left out.
One of the few things in Gutmann’s paper that gives me hope for the future is the following:
I know from the Microsoft sources that contributed that many of them care deeply about providing the best possible audio/video user experience for Vista users and are quite distressed about having to spend time implementing large amounts of anti-functionality when it’s already hard enough to get things running smoothly without the intentional crippling.
I always wondered if the team working on software like Genuine Crapvantage, Product Craptivation and the other Software Craptection Platform stuff goes to work very motivated every day knowing what they have to work on. In a previous post, I also asked if the Most Evil Team at Microsoft were proud of their work. If these people are really distressed about all of this, why don’t they take action? Why continue to work on these “features”? What is our beloved Steve-O (pictured on the right) doing these days? Even Bill Gates himself recently stated that DRM causes too much pain for end users:
Gates said that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which “causes too much pain for legitmate buyers” while trying to distinguish between legal and illegal uses. He says no one has done it right, yet. There are “huge problems” with DRM, he says, and “we need more flexible models, such as the ability to “buy an artist out for life” (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific.
So this leads to the following question I want to ask Gates: “Why did you then allow this technology to get into Windows Vista and other Microsoft products??” Surely he was in a position to not allow this technology to make it into any final Microsoft product if he really thought that it was bad for users. Does this make sense to you? Not to me. It’s just more stuff that points to how bad Gates screwed up during Windows Vista’s development.
All this content protection technology in Vista is going to make users dislike using it. I know it will make me dislike using it if Windows keeps degrading my user experience everytime I load some unsupported and “potentially harmful” (to the content providers, obviously) software. As it is now, things like User Account Control (UAC) are already giving me a hard time when I use Vista. For example, compared to Windows XP, I have to click an additional 3-4 times to delete a file in Windows Vista thanks to UAC, while it also seems to take 5 times longer. And with the high prices for Windows Vista, it will only make it less attractive.
Let’s also not forget a recent study by Forrester Research, that showed that sales at Apple’s DRM infected iTunes Music Store have dropped off dramatically during the first half of 2006:
December 13, 2006 (Reuters) — Sales at Apple Computer Inc.’s online music shop iTunes Music Store dropped off dramatically in the first six months of 2006, according to a recent survey.
Since January, the number of monthly iTunes transactions has declined 58%, while the average size per purchase declined by 17%, leading to a 65% overall drop in monthly iTunes revenue, U.S. market research group Forrester Research Inc. said in a report on the results of a study of North American consumers.
“It is too soon to tell if this decline was seasonal, or if buyers were reaching their saturation level for digital music,” Forrester said in the report, which was published for Forrester clients last week and made available to Reuters today.
There has been some controversy over what the results of this survey actually mean, but if it really shows that sales at iTunes have declined that much, it might be because buyers were reaching their saturation level for DRM infected music. What might have happened, is that buyers are only now beginning to realize the limitations of content they buy at iTunes. The reason why they are realizing it now is probably because they are experiencing it first hand. After about 2-3 years, most of them might be upgrading their computer, or upgrading to newer iPod models or even different devices and are beginning to discover how “easy” it is to move the content they bought on iTunes over to new devices. Most of them will likely be learning a very hard lesson too. And perhaps that is what has resulted in a decline of sales through iTunes.
And if Microsoft continues with their current policy, the same thing is going to happen with all of their DRM infected products. Apart from Windows Vista, that also includes their Zune music player. People might upgrade to Windows Vista initially, but if they later discover the limitations being imposed by all the content protection software, we might see a similar decline in Windows Vista sales after some time. And just like iTunes, it won’t be clear if Windows will ever be able to recover from that since it might already be too late. Once consumers have learned the hard lesson, they aren’t likely to go back.
This entry was posted
on Monday, December 25th, 2006 at 4:37 pm by Karel Donk
and is filed under 
December 27th, 2006 at 2:31 am
> There has been some controversy over
> what the results of this survey actually mean
No, there hasn’t. It means nothing, as the publishers of the study have clearly said.
The rest of your points remain valid, though.
December 27th, 2006 at 8:02 am
> Let?s also not forget a recent study by Forrester Research, that showed that sales at Apple?s DRM
> infected iTunes Music Store have dropped off dramatically during the first half of 2006:
On the contrary, let’s forget it since this false conclusion has been disputed even by Forrester: http://blogs.forrester.com/devicesmedia/2006/12/itunes_sales_ar.html
December 27th, 2006 at 8:32 am
Marko:
I read that blog entry before and notice the following comment there:
“Remy Fiorentino from Forrester here, I helped Josh with the analysis for this report.
TIMK – The 65% decline in revenue was between January 2006 and June 2006. This decline is statistically significant, but is still based on a sample of 181 iTunes buyers. When we compare this to 2005 data, we see that revenues declined 39% from January 2005 to June 2005. Is 2006 worse than 2005? It’s hard to say. However, the January 2005 revenue was a bit higher than the January 2006 revenue, and the June 2005 revenue was more than twice the June 2006 revenue. Our data suggests that the iTunes growth has slowed, though neither Josh nor I would say sales have “collapsed”.”
Seems clear to me. I think what happened is that after all the media attention and Apple’s stock going down because of it, Forrester began backpedaling on their report and became very cautious. The fact that Apple refuses to be open about their marketing data also didn’t help. So like I said, while we should be careful with how we interpret these results, it would be good to keep the option I mentioned in my post open.
December 28th, 2006 at 11:23 am
While Microsoft is doing this to WIndows, the US and other rich country governments are pushing to have webcasting and simulcasting included in a treaty at the World Intellectual Property Organisation. The next meeting of WIPO is in January, so if there are people out there who can put pressure to support the few developing countries who are resisting these attempts it would be great. Also since “cracking” any of these protection measures is becoming more and more of a crime, it is time that some action was taken especially to avoid this from happening. Why should state resources (especially in developing countries) be used for this?
Besides the technical, we really need to tackle WIPO as well to stop essentially rich country governments from making this nonesense a permanent legal feature in international agreements.
December 28th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
“After about 2-3 years, most of them might be upgrading their computer, or upgrading to newer iPod models or even different devices and are beginning to discover how ?easy��? it is to move the content they bought on iTunes over to new devices.”
What’s hard about burning your AAC file to an audio CD, then ripping it back to an MP3?
December 28th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
MarkH:
I could also ask “What’s hard about going to Doom9.org, downloading the latest WMA crack, and remove the DRM from my music files?”
It shouldn’t have to be that difficult to use music that you paid for the way you want to. I wonder how many of the people buying from iTunes actually know about the restrictions before they buy. How much effort does Apple put into explaining to buyers exactly how the music can be used, what restrictions it has etc. before letting them buy.
December 28th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
“What?s hard about burning your AAC file to an audio CD, then ripping it back to an MP3?”
For starters, the process you describe will cause multiple losses of quality.
Discounting the loss from the original audio to AAC (you would have that already by virtue of your purchased / ripped-to-AAC content), you have:
1) A loss due to the process of converting from AAC to WAV to get it on to the CD
2) A loss from the re-encoding process to rip it from the CD into MP3.
Lots of purchased content (and user-ripped content for that matter) is encoded at the minimum quality necessary to provide acceptable playback – not a lot of headroom to accomodate multiple codec decodes and reencodes.
Of course, all this assumes that the user is savvy enough to actually burn those AAC files to MP3s. Many are not.
Eric
December 28th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
?What?s hard about going to Doom9.org, downloading the latest WMA crack, and remove the DRM from my music files?��?
Nothing, if you know about it, and I’d imagine there are millions more people out there who know how to burn and rip a CD then know about Doom9. Whether they know that will strip the DRM protection is another matter, of course.
I’m not arguing with your basic premise re. Gutman’s article, etc., by the way. Only that moving AAC and WMA files isn’t all that difficult. Heck, “The Screen Savers” mentioned the trick on air a few years ago, so how mysterious could it be?
December 28th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Although it seems that Microsoft is doing something wrong with content protection (and I agree it is wrong!), I don’t think it is Microsoft’s choice. All providers who will deliver players for HD-DVD or comparable techniques will have to build in this kind of technologies. It is a requirement of the contentproviders to downgrade the qualtiy if any attempt (or suspicion of this ) of copying is detected. Without this downgrademechansim a hardware or software provider will not get the licenses to use HD-DVD (or BlueRay) technologies. MS is just the first to deliver this kind of technology.
Another point is if we have to accept it. Maybe we should start a class suit (or how is that called) if software is without warning disabling/degrading our equipment.
December 28th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
I’m off TDC and on to Linux. Buh bye M$ & Windoze
December 31st, 2006 at 8:25 pm
Hi all!
Karel, read here:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt
Happy New Year!
January 3rd, 2007 at 9:14 am
Guttman’s article is mostly FUD that is a nicely slashdotted hype amongst anti-MS communities.
A more accurate description of the contect protection delivered by Vista is found here:
http://blogs.dasmirnov.net/paul/2006/12/31/windows_vista_drm_nonsense
January 4th, 2007 at 8:12 am
DRM is not bad as such. It’s – for starters -far better then a general tax on all media on which copyright protected material may be stored. It’s just the way DRM works currently that makes people angry.Personally I like the Apple drm and I think it’s fair. Probably, if i woud own more than 5 computers that would be different… MS on the other hand fails to deliver a system that’s not intrusive. And of course, to use MS encrypted materials you need to use a Windows system.
January 7th, 2007 at 4:58 am
aside from being extremely biased with anti-Microsoft slang, this doesn’t contain any reference to specifications or white papers from Microsoft supporting its claims. The auther could have saved a lot of time by just writing “I don’t like Vista.” because that’s about all I can conclude from it. Show me some facts guys!
January 7th, 2007 at 6:15 am
Zayin, did you check out the references in his paper?
January 14th, 2007 at 3:41 am
Aside from 3 links that lead to external outside reviews, all the links lead to other reports from the same web page. Yes I did, and the 3 reviews outside of this web page weren’t very resourceful either!
January 17th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
I can only confirm that playing an .avi film in 1280x720resolution 22min long and 680mb big.
Will start a process called “Media Foundation Protected Pipeline EXE” and eats around 50procent of my overclocked 3ghz P4 HT with 2gig ram. it can?t stream it, it freezes from time to time. And on my XP it streamed just fine.
Sure the drivers for Audigy 2 and Geforce 6800Ultra is only in Beta state. But It clearly shows that a movie clip in a high resolution will get problems on Vista and that a special process starts. Vista is a final “offical” version.
This Suxx
January 17th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Hi Akira,
I can also confirm that even for videos of much lower resolution, “Media Foundation Protected Pipeline EXE” gets starten when I open them and uses 100% CPU at the beginning and around 10-20% CPU during playback. In addition, it takes almost 45 seconds before Media Player actually starts playing the video after opening it.
Video and audio playback seems to use much more resources in Vista, and you even get freezes and gaps in the audio.
On that very same PC, in XP, everything worked much faster.
January 17th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Hi Karel
my file wasn?t a avi it was a wmvfile. with a smaller avi the *media foundation* never started on my machine.
But it feels like all movies plays with some lag.
I haven?t noticed any problem with cd or mp3 files yet.
But It seems that downloading through steam is extremly slow. is it just steam or is there something with vista and the talked about communication handling under vista?
/akira
January 17th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Akira, for me the ?Media Foundation Protected Pipeline EXE��? starts for almost all avi files, which use DivX or Xvid. I don’t know about downloads going slower, so far I haven’t had issues with that. I don’t use steam however.
January 30th, 2007 at 10:53 am
I have to comment one comment
: DRM does NOT remove media taxes if some group of publishes enforces them on you. Here in Europe we do have NOT only DRM, but media taxes TOO. These items have only one thing in common: Recording industry wants its many at whatever cost.
February 2nd, 2007 at 4:35 pm
I hate the idea of capitulating to the movie studios, but what choice do we have? Eventually they will make the process of copying movies difficult enough to force even Linux users to pay for them.
Actually, it doesn’t sound so Machiavellian when I say it that way.
But it does bother me is that I may never be able to watch high definition movies with my MacBook Pro.
February 2nd, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Well we always have choice. Just don’t buy their content. I haven’t bought music from Apple’s iTunes ever. And I will never do it because of the restrictions. I won’t buy DRM infected CD’s either. If everyone starts doing this, they will see that there is no point in all the restrictions. For music, they are already waking up: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/21/yourmoney/music.php?page=1
The same will happen to movies in the future.
February 2nd, 2007 at 8:55 pm
Hopefully they will wake up. I would like to watch HD-DVDs on my Macbook, regular DVDs don’t look very good on a 1920×1200 pixel monitor. I’ll buy an HD-DVD drive, but I won’t spend another $4000 on a new computer just to watch DRM’d movies.
February 7th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
I don’t think i will make an upgrade now, maybe two years later, as my XP is running prefect.
February 17th, 2007 at 4:40 am
I just tried Vista, and I think it’s great. Very rich pictures
February 17th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
very rich pictures?
how couldn’t I see this point… I’m so boring – I’ve been using my OS to work.
If I wanted rich pictures I’d get an Mac. Or go to the Kindergarden…
February 20th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
This is why I switched to linux shortly after having windows XP (when it just came out) media player deny me the ability to play music that I had used WMP to rip off of a CD that was made in a home studio by my friend’s band.
February 23rd, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Check the official microsoft blog
burn baby burn….
http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/01/20/windows-vista-content-protection-twenty-questions-and-answers.aspx
March 16th, 2007 at 12:18 am
I recently bought a Acer Lappy with Vista Basic, firstly i had to upgrade to 1 gig of ram just so vista would run with decent performance. Then after that i noticed how my Mp3′s and Divx Videos would not run smoothly all the time. Apart from this Vista is great, beautiful to look at and easy to use. But seriously if MS doesn’t figure out this mp3 and divx lag.. which i believe to be the DRM i am going back to XP, cos why bother using a system that looks good but doesn’t work properly! Peace Out:razz:
April 2nd, 2007 at 12:34 am
GReat job everyone..
April 2nd, 2007 at 10:09 am
someone i know got hold of some vista laptops….very nice systesm, i still hate vista though. just like i hated the church’s actions against females in the middle ages….not the church but how they influenced peopl around them…vista is doing the same kind of thing to people.
having said that … i installed nemos codec pack on this vista laptop (no problems) then install AnyDVD and then Hitman3 and then dumped a few divx movies on there for him…
he hasnt complained yet.
yet. but then again he is a simpleton taht like to have one push button gadgets that impress his workmates. anything more than on button to push and he feels like an idiot..im sure of it.
July 18th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Sounds like Dr. Frankenstein has been hard at work influencing MicroSoft to protect his pennies! Dr. Frankenstein resides in Follywood California these days!!! Yes kiddies, U can thank the Follywood boyz and their attorneys for this one!!!