Does Windows 7 contain more DRM than Windows Vista? Does Windows 7 limit you from running cracked applications, and will it open the firewall specifically for applications that want to check if they’re cracked or not? Does it limit the audio recording capabilities? According to a skimp and badly written post on Slashdot, it does. The Slashdot crowd tore the front page item apart – and rightfully so.
Titled “Draconian DRM Revealed In Windows 7”, the story was written by a user who supposedly had discovered new instances of DRM in Windows 7. However, only three seconds of looking at the item was all it took many Slashdot readers to realise that this post was utter nonsense. As a result, the Slashdot crowd tore it apart.
Supposedly, Windows 7’s DRM prevented the user from cracking Photoshop. The user installed Photoshop CS4 on Windows 7, and then he went on to fiddle with one of the “nag DLLs” of the application. He replaced the DLL with a cracked version, and was surprised to see that Photoshop would no longer work. The user was also amazed that Photoshop had added itself to the firewall exception list. He then went on about Windows 7 locking him out of the “Local settings” folder.
Let’s take a look at this step by step. Several commenters did it for me, so I didn’t even have to do it myself. Firstly, messing with DLLs is difficult and dangerous for a reason. Since many types of malware use DLLs to infect your system, several protection schemes are put in place to prevent this thing from happening. Of course, replacing a working DLL with a cracked one is asking for trouble in the first place.
Photoshop adding itself to the firewall list is hardly news either. The Photoshop installer is run as an administrator (you give it permission to do so explicitly) and just like countless other applications, it adds a firewall exception to the list (as a Slashdot reader noted: “If a program is already running on your computer then it means the firewall is no longer responsible for stopping that application in any way – the firewall only protects against outside threats”). The one about the “local settings” folder is also interesting, as it shows a clear lack of knowledge on Windows: Windows Vista and Windows 7 do not have a “local settings” folder. It’s in AppDataLocal now – the old “local settings” folder is just an NTFS junction now, and since Explorer can’t handle these very well (bad Explorer!), will give you an access denied message.
The user then dives into Windows 7’s audio capabilities. He writes: “Under XP you could select ‘Stereo Mix’ or similar under audio recording inputs and nicely capture any program then playing. No longer.” This is correct. Windows 7’s default drivers (he doesn’t specify which card) are limited in functionality, so that the official drivers from the manufacturer can still offer added value. The stereo mix functionality is probably part of the official drivers that the user did not install. However, since we don’t know what card, nor what drivers he used, we’re in the dark here.
So, what DRM does Windows 7 have? It won’t be a surprise to learn that it doesn’t contain any more DRM than Vista does, and as we all know by now (well, “all” as in people who actually use Vista), that DRM is irrelevant. Protected Video Path and Protected User Mode Audio, the DRM in Windows Vista and Windows 7, doesn’t come into play because, well, little to no media actually make use of it. As Ars notes:
Though there was plenty of outcry over PUMA and PVP prior to Vista’s launch, the story is once again a familiar one: most people don’t notice. Little or no media actually demands the use of the protected paths, so on most users’ systems, Windows never invokes them. Play back unprotected media on a Vista machine and the DRM subsystems simply don’t get used.All these Vista DRM features are found in Windows 7. But just as with Vista before it, the vast majority of users will never see the DRM in any practical sense; the features are there just in case Hollywood decides to make use of them. The overblown, unrealistic, and just plain made up horrors of DRM in Windows Vista never came to pass (in spite of the huge publicity that the Gutmann diatribe received), and so it will be with Windows 7.
FUD
“When it comes to bashing Microsoft, it seems that any old canard will do; facts are strictly optional.” That’s about as best as I’ve ever seen it summed up. There is enough wrong with Microsoft and Windows other than these so-called DRM issues; it’s sad that various anti-Microsoft advocates have to resort to tactics that they blame Microsoft of: fear, uncertainty, doubt. There are various users on OSNews who stoop just as low as Slashdot did yesterday, and that’s sad.
Personally, I have grown very sick of the DRM FUD flown around by Free software enthusiasts. I try to use Free software wherever I can myself, and I try to make others see the values of it too. However, I try to stick to the facts, and I try to be honest about the shortcomings of Windows and the strong points of Free software so that my friends and relatives can make an informed decision.
Resorting to FUD hurts the alternatives to Windows and Microsoft. Please bear that in mind.
how do i word this without admiting to piracy (hypathetically of course)….as someone with the latest (was there a recompile this week?) beta, and someone who is stress testing the hell out of it, I would have (only in theory of course) tested many many pirated apps as i couldnt possibly aford Maya, 3D studio max, autocad, lightwave, photoshop, dream weaver, _________(insert large expiensive piece of software here), and I have yet to see (that is if I did that, which I don’t) a single nag or, “OMG pirate! report to Microsoft?” warning pop up.
But I can’t be certain of course as I didn’t do any of those things (shifty eyes)…
Edited 2009-02-18 23:51 UTC
Wow, you must be quite the technical wizard, do be able to *need* all those apps that you didn’t illegally obtain.
“Wow, you must be quite the technical wizard, do be able to *need* all those apps that you didn’t illegally obtain.”
I do a lot of stuff (none of which involve my first post about not pirating all those apps;) ).
Example: I am working on a website called The Social Fish Tank ( http://www.SocialFishTank.com )that is a chat room client but in a 3d fish tank environment like those great 3d fish tank screen savers. The technology is based on the Unity 3D engine 2.5 ( http://www.unity3d.com )and each user can create custom “tanks” (chat room environments created as fish tanks that they can populate with items you would see in fish tanks and corel and all sorts of stuff), and invite their friends who create their fish avatar (or go with the default generated at random) and they swim around as you talk. you can also control the fish in it’s environment and have it interact with things and the other fish. each “tank” is prive and has it’s own link, the option to make it publicly avalible is also there.
I haven’t posted the site as I am not anywhere near done (and funding for the project got lost in this troubled economy) but eventualy thats what will be there. To save time I am contimplating creating it as a front end to http://www.tinychat.com but i like to create my own things.
Typically “I have a friend who…” is useful in these cases.
The statement by the slashdot user (reproduced in the article) that a firewall only protects you from outside threats is nonsense – it assumes that a firewall cannot protect against an installed application because the application can simply make an exception for itself in the firewall settings. This is not true – on most operating systems, an admin or super-user password is required to allow this, and even when the user is logged in as a administrator (and you wouldn’t do that for your day-to-day work, would you?) a prompt would still be displayed by any modern OS.
An application whose installer requires you to give your admin password can, of course, make a hole in the firewall for itself, but it is very different from a covert malicious application.
To run the Photoshop Installer you have to pass through a UAC prompt, giving the program a full admin token.
Wait… you mean the OS is designed to allow an external application -alledgedly launched by an admin- to tinker with the firewall settings without giving explicit notice that such thing is happening??
I am not being sarcastic, I am truly shocked by the logic behind that! o_O
I hope at least third party firewalls won´t be as fragile as that :S
If I write an app that changes the firewall settings in Linux or BSD and you run that app with root privileges, then your firewall settings will be changed without you getting any explicit warning from your firewall software (assuming you don’t have SELinux or something similar installed). This is no different.
hmm.. yes, and no…
IMO, given the variety of combinations on thoses OSes, writing and app to change the firewall setting would end up being more problematic than helpful, unless it is malware or some very specific application.
Also, that is a kind of attitude (on the apps/devs, not yours) that *nix people find regrettable, so doing it would work pretty much against the developer´s interest. Especially if we are talking about the installer of a non-network related application such as photoshop.
The fact that we are talking about the firewall built into the OS and which many (most?) of the users will rely upon having this feature surprises me when microsoft is making efforts to change people´s perception about security.
it isn’t problematic, linux has netfilter/iptables built in, anyone (or anything) with root can change it.
As was previously mentioned, the only way to stop that from happening is to use more finely grained security. Security is already too complex to start going down that path for windows, at least for the home consumer versions.
Edited 2009-02-19 13:33 UTC
It is when you don’t know about the changes that will occur.
By default, Windows Vista/2008/7 auto-detect application installers, and attempt to elevate to Administrator level.
So it’s fairly common for an app installer to run with high enough privileges to do whatever it wants.
For me that is all the more reason to have the firewall double-checking with the admin before allowing changes to the firewall.
If that kind of thing is happening in *nixes too I think it´s also a bad choice, not right in windows.
Two wrongs don´t make a right I think.
That is of course if the program is using an api to do it, but if its available in the registry it can drop in a new setting in the local user registry and viola!
Who cares what Microsoft is doing. They are past tense.
So is your comment.
Searching in google they list about 81,800,000 results for “Windows 7”.
I guess some people care.
OK, so it turned out the article was a complete and utter bull$hit. Nothing new, people were bashing MS from the day one, we’ve all seen tons of posts like that.
And it’s not like there haven’t been any official FUD coming from the other side either: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10145332-16.html?part=rss
Edited 2009-02-19 01:00 UTC
Also noted in the Ars article:
My only comment here is that the OS is using the end-user’s CPU resources to check if it needs to degrade the end-user’s machine’s capabilities. How is this in the best interests of the end user? This is a particularly interesting question for end users whose machines do not contain a HD-capable optical drive, and whose monitors are not HD monitors. How does this function serve them?
The other thing to note is that the intervals noted, 30ms and 150ms, are probably constant. On a high-performance machine, the CPU time taken out by the polling is quite small compared with the interval time of 30ms, and so the DRM polling does not tax the machine intolerably. Even so, I have heard that Vista machines when idle typically consume some 15% more CPU time than do the identical specification machines running other OSes.
But that is for a high-end machine. As one goes down the performance scale, the CPU time taken up by each poll would become longer, in proportion to the reduction in CPU grunt, but the inetrval between such polls would of course be kept the same. This means that Vista’s DRM would consume even more of a percentage of the CPU’s performance as the CPU performance gets less. A sort of a double-whammy effect.
This is, IMO, a significant source of the popular reports of dreadful performance of Vista. On high end machines DRM isn’t a burden, but as one considers lower and lower specification machines (which after all are the type of machines that many individual consumers would buy) the double-whammy of the DRM taking up more performance, and the machines available performance being less to begin with, starts to take a very noticeable toll.
And to what end? What does an end user, and owner of a lower-end machine (but still running Vista), gain when he or she gives up this performance in order to run Vista? From the end user’s perspective … very little at all. This is especially so if they don’t happen to own any HD-capable hardware … maybe it takes the polling routine the longest time if there isn’t any actual hardware there in the first place … becuase there would be a need to check if the user hadn’t installed any …
So, in conclusion, I call “bunkum”. IMO, the end users do indeed notice Vista’s DRM … they just complain about it in terms of “Vista is dog slow on my machine” rather than calling it as being due to the DRM.
Except… This polling only happens when the paths are in use… And that requires that the media use it… Which they don’t.
So, besides the fact that the effect of the polling itself is negligible, it doesn’t even happen in the first place.
There is a small hole in your logic though. The article states (and I think it is safe to assume) that Windows 7 contains the same amount of DRM than Vista does… maybe even more? If that is indeed the case, and the source of Vista’s sluggishness is the DRM, then how does Windows 7 manage to be so much faster than Vista, when 7 has the same amount of DRM as Vista? Perhaps maybe they removed some of the DRM in 7?
Highly doubtful.
In regard to the anti-Windows camp, I remember there were some discussions on this very site before Vista was released that indicated you would no longer be able to rip audio CDs in Vista with ANY program without DRM being attached. That’s ok though, because when claims like that are made, we can see right through them.
Oh, some people here even made those claims as recent as a few weeks ago, despite being decidedly debunked.
That’s FUD for you. Goes both ways, obviously, though. There are people on all sides of the fence that resort to FUD, sadly.
I don’t recall that at all …
There was only a claim made on this site a few weeks ago in which some end user was said to have asked “why can’t I make .mp3 files on my Vista laptop that I can play in my car”.
That is a trillion miles away from “you would no longer be able to rip audio CDs in Vista with ANY program without DRM being attached”.
Please at least try Thom to strive for some editorial accuarcy … it severly strains your credibility when you make false accusations after all … which funnily enough is the very thing your whole article seems to be about in the first place.
Edited 2009-02-19 01:40 UTC
Here’s one:
http://www.osnews.com/thread?346846
What is wrong with that?
I don’t use Vista, and that was an operation that someone had asked me about. That person had claimed they couldn’t make a .mp3 file using Vista on their laptop that would play in their car, yet they were able to do that using XP.
Also, someone else had sent me a file that they had ripped using Vista that did have DRM on it (but that one was WMA). As I don’t use Vista … I couldn’t verify how these users had managed to use it to rip something and end up with unplayable files (of which DRM was the cause at least once) … hence the need to get people to try it for themselves.
… as it turns out, there is a dialog box that you have to uncheck an option if you don’t want DRM on your WMA files after you rip them.
Edited 2009-02-19 05:17 UTC
In this case, you are speaking about a specific application, Windows Media Player.
There are dozens of different apps out there (yes, even free ones) that allow you to rip DRM-less audio files, in pretty much whatever format you choose. There’s nothing inherent in Vista that prevents you from doing this.
This is essentially true … except for the fact that Media Player is a part of the Windows OS. It is, as far as many people are concerned, THE way that one plays and rips media files on Windows.
However, I posted the text was quoted in this thread in response to an earlier post in the earlier thread where someone had asked “how does Vista DRM affect end users”?
Even though I don’t use Vista, I knew through indirect experience of two occasions where end users had been frustrated by Vista handling off media files, and that at least one of those was directly due to the DRM. The fact that there are many ways that knowledgeable end users can get around the DRM in these cases does not in any way invalidate the point that it had frustrated those users …
I would also bring up the point … why on earth would an end user ever WANT to apply DRM to a media file they had ripped?
Again, please stop lying.
Back when we had that discussion, you only had ONE example, and it was about mp3s. As was proven then, WMP CANNOT add DRM to mp3 files it creates. It can only add – optionally, I might add – DRM to WMA files.
These people were not affected by DRM, they were affected by… Well, we don’t know. You never dove into the case to find out what was actually happening. You just came up with an anecdote of someone who ripped a CD using WMP and then couldn’t play his files in his car stereo, which could have had any number of reasons – but as we established then, DRM was not one of them. Still, you continue to spread your proven-to-be false assumptions.
You are a liar, lemur2, and you get exposed every time, all the time. In case you haven’t noticed, you are becoming the laughing stock around here.
Which isn’t fair, because that should be me, damnit!
Edited 2009-02-19 11:14 UTC
Come off it Thom, you must believe that your readers are idiots or something.
Everything I said about those two cases was 100% true. And there were two separate cases. Abssolute dinkum. Struth.
The most likely causes in each case were these:
(Case 1) Someone sent me a .wma file that had DRM on it (initially, I hadn’t recalled that that one was a .wma file). This probably arose because that user did not know about the need to uncheck a setting in Windows Media Player for ripping in DRM-free .wma format.
(Case 2) someone else asked me why they couldn’t rip .mp3 files using their Vista laptop so that the files would play in his car’s mp3 player. There are a number of possibilities here, the most likely of which is that the original audio CD had DRM protection … it probably had a data track as well as audio tracks, and when that person tried to “rip” the audio tracks CD Vista likely honored the DRM and merely copied DRM’d .mp3 files from the data track instead.
It is also possible that this user also had produced DRM-encumbered .wma file where he thought he was ripping to .mp3 files … and that Vista had hidden the file extensions from him so he did not realise that error. This person is reasonably competent, however, so I don’t think this possibility is quite as likely.
Either way, the DRM provisions of Vista had still got in his way, and had frustrated him in his objective to rip .mp3 files that he could play in his car.
Two bona fide examples Thom … just as was always claimed. No lie whatsoever.
Oh, BTW … the original discussion actually turned up the fact that one CAN apply DRM to mp3 media files. A link was provided to a 2004 article where the owners of the mp3 patents had announced the ability to do so.
We got to those conclusions by the end of the discussion. Why are you trying to confuse the issue now?
And what on earth is this continued attempt at slandering me all about, Thom?
Edited 2009-02-19 11:42 UTC
(Case 1) Someone sent me a .wma file that had DRM on it (initially, I hadn’t recalled that that one was a .wma file). This probably arose because that user did not know about the need to uncheck a setting in Windows Media Player for ripping in DRM-free .wma format.
Windows Media Player has not ever defaulted to ripping your music into protected WMA. It didn’t in XP, it didn’t in Vista, and it doesn’t in Windows 7. For this scenario to occur a user will have to on his own enable copy-protecting their encoded media files. Why on earth are there so many oblivious people acting like they know about this software? Thom is not the liar here.
(Case 2) someone else asked me why they couldn’t rip .mp3 files using their Vista laptop so that the files would play in his car’s mp3 player. There are a number of possibilities here, the most likely of which is that the original audio CD had DRM protection … it probably had a data track as well as audio tracks, and when that person tried to “rip” the audio tracks CD Vista likely honored the DRM and merely copied DRM’d .mp3 files from the data track instead.
This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and borders on trolling with the incredible lack of technical knowledge. The very way audio CDs work prevent them from being DRM-protected on the disk, you are thinking about mixed-data CD-ROM discs that are not actual standards compliant compact discs which won’t play universally due to this. You have to use a format that supports DRM (non-mp3) and also tell the program you are ripping with to copy protect the files. And by the way, you can play WMA files on Linux, you always have been able to. You will not be able to play copy-protected anything on anything without the proper license and a player that supports the DRM mechanism.
Oh, BTW … the original discussion actually turned up the fact that one CAN apply DRM to mp3 media files. A link was provided to a 2004 article where the owners of the mp3 patents had announced the ability to do so.
Would you like to do everyone a favour and either cite your source or edit Wikipedia’s mp3 entry to prove this? Right now it says: the lack of DRM restrictions, which makes MP3 files easy to edit, copy and play in different portable digital players (Samsung, Apple, Creative, etc.)
//Even though I don’t use Vista, I knew through indirect experience of two occasions where end users had been frustrated by Vista handling off media files,//
That’s because those end-users are fuxing idiots.
A minor tweak in the polling routine might have a very significant impact. For example, if the polling routine first up checked if there was ANY HD-capable drvier installed, and exited straight away if not, rather than checking for the physical presence of any of many possible types of HD-capable hardware … perhaps in the case of low-end machines such a change might hav had a significant impact?
I don’t know … I’m just speculating. The point is though that I can see a possibility that such an optimisation, or some close equivalent, might have indeed been possible. One can’t after all put HD video through the machine if one hasn’t installed any HD-capable drivers.
Furthermore, it wasn’t until after Vista came out, and netbooks became popular, that there was any incentive to try to make Vista work on lower-spec devices. The big-corporation idea for some while up to the release of Vista, after all, seemed to be to persue an endless upgrade cycle … consuming ever more CPU, RAM, disk and Watts of power on every spiral.
Edited 2009-02-19 01:30 UTC
“Even so, I have heard that Vista machines when idle typically consume some 15% more CPU time than do the identical specification machines running other OSes.”
Sounds like you’ve never used it. Mine sits about 1% when idle, except when the indexer is running. Then it may go as high as 15%. Then it settles back down when the indexer stops, which is when it is not idle.
Funny how 99.8% of the comments about how much of a “resource hog” Vista is, and how “dog slow” Vista is, and how “DRM-happy” Vista is … come from pinheads who’ve either never used it, used it only for a brief time pre-SP1, or are too lazy and anti-MS to tweak it.
But don’t dare try the same tactic with Linux on the desktop. It’s flawless. Really.
Part of the problem is that I can check to see exactly what linux does. I can communicate with others who can confirm my findings. We can argue about the impact of varius coding techniques ( like the scheduler debate a while back).
This is of course impossible with Windows or any other closed source OS. So basically we know that there is some DRM in Windows, we can only do some external tests to see what it does and rely on the companies good word. So yes, there are more false rumors about windows, but that’s because there is less information possible about what it does.
How about this then:
I’m a developer and I work on Vista Business SP1 with all the latest patches, on fairly high end hardware for 9hrs a day (I geenerally work through lunch).
Me, and *all* the other developers I work with, agree that Vista is a dog slow resource hog.. DRM doesn’t really come into our job much though. We all run either XP, Linux or OS X primarily at home, and some of them got rid of Vista at work and installed XP instead.
I have Vista Ultimate SP1 on a high end game capable computer (C2Q 2.83GHz, 8GB DDR3 RAM, 2GB Radeon 4870×2), along with XP and Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha, and it feels slower than my OS X laptop (C1D 2.16GHz 1GB) for general productivity.
Of course you might choose to believe I’m lying, but there’s no convincing some.
While there are plenty of Open Source Advocates who will criticize Windows (rightly and wrongly) at the drop of the hat, they are not alone. It is very fashionable among the technology literate to hate Microsoft, including Microsoft only users. A devout Windows user (and hater) who was less knowledgeable than he believed couild have written this just as easily as a advocate with an ax to grind.
Don’t know if that is a reason to put a feeble article up on Slashdot, however. I’d agree with the contention that it is very important for FOSS to stick strictly with what actually happens, and what the actual story is, rather than making up wild accusations when criticising Windows … even though Windows advocates do not feel in any way so constrained when having a go at FOSS.
Edited 2009-02-19 01:20 UTC
It’s not like real people are going to read this. OK, so there are some people on /. who aren’t Linux devotees. Still, I think it’s better to air this dirty laundry among the Open Source community to show people why random MS bashing does more harm than good. Anyone who spells Microsoft with a dollar sign is an idiot and needs to be re-educated. It does no good to keep quiet about it.
I truly am amazed when I see the lengths some people will goto to justify their hatred of a given organisation – as if Microsoft were worse than some North Korean police state.
Vista had poor performance because there were alot of changes and insufficient time to optimise these changes; they aren’t going to optimise it in the service packs because of the risk associated with breaking things not only in Windows but also out in the ‘real world’.
Windows 7 has been optimised and improved, and amazing, the so-called ‘performance sucking’ DRM still lives and Windows 7 still out performs Windows Vista. If there were some truth in the ‘performance sucking’ of DRM then the performance different should be negiable.
I’ve got my Acer Aspire One (they ran out of eee pc 901’s when I went down to pick one up) and am looking forward to seeing Windows 7 being released. If it means that one can run the latest version of Windows in a constrained environment, I can’t work out what the complaints are about.
Then again, I guess its ‘cool’ to hate Microsoft.
Ran out of time? How long exactly was it between the release of XP and the release of Vista?
Well, yes, that is the claim, and there is no reason to suspect why it wouldn’t be so. In fact, given Vista’s poor performance, it is hard to see how Windows 7 could fail to be a significant improvement.
Yes. This is in fact what “optimization” is all about.
Doesn’t follow. Obviously you are not wholly familiar with optimistaion. A fair approach is to ignore almost everything else and concentrate very hard on the “inner loop”, the most-often repeated pieces of code. DRM polling is a fair candidate …
Criticising Vista’s poor performance is relevant to this rant … how exactly?
Abusing me by way of message achieves what?
Windows Vista was restarted and based on Windows 2003 SP1 rather than Windows XP. There was a penalty that was paid because of it, but management at that time believed the penalty was worth it.
Considering that when the change was made – Netbooks and other resource constrained devices weren’t on the radar, they were making decisions based on what one could reasonably expect in the future based on present conditions.
If it were DRM as the primary cause of performance issues, and given that the DRM has been retained, then going by the detractors logic, there should have been no significant improvement.
Thank you for ignoring the kernel of this post; it was a counter to DRM phobia and the black helicopter nonsense regarding it and the apparent ‘performance sucking’ of DRM by virtue of it just existing in Windows.
The two are interlinked, but hey, you chose to ignore it in favour of attacking me personally.
How precious can you get?
Where did I attack you? I simply point out that Microsoft took a great amount of time following the release of XP to try to come up with a new product. The fact that Microsoft squandered it is hardly compensation for those people now suffering the poor performance of Vista.
DRM itself is “black helicopter”. No-one is allowed to know how it works. There is something in Vista that sucks performance, and DRM polling is an excellent candidate, given that it is invoked at 30ms intervals.
Being a good candidate for what caused the “performance sucking” in Vista also makes it an excellent candidate for optimisation in Windows 7. With skill and a bit of thought it might even be possible to “pull back” all of the sucked performance … yet still have the DRM.
Agreed that up until the advent netbooks there was no real incentive to heavily optimise Vista (that is just one of the problems of having a company in a monopoly position). In fact I noted that myself in an earlier post, when I talked about the “performance spiral”. This rather supports the idea that Vista is performance sucked, rather than detract from it.
Edited 2009-02-19 02:24 UTC
Stop lying, lemur2. As I’ve already pointed out to you in a comment you so skillfully ignored: the protected paths (the DRM) and thus the polling are only invoked WHEN YOU USE DRM’d CONTENT. Since practically no media make use of the protected paths, THERE IS NO POLLING.
Got it?
Edited 2009-02-19 02:26 UTC
If there is to be polling of “protected paths” when there is DRM’d content present, then there must at least be polling “if there is DRM’d content present” that occurs every 30ms in order to switch it on. No?
Why would I be lying? I have already said that no-one knows how DRM works. I have already said that this is speculation. What we do know is that Vista has lethargic performance on high-end hardware that gets considerably worse for lower-end hardware. I have speculated that the DRM polling is a good candidate for what has caused this lethargy. So far, no one has been able to say that it isn’t, despite the desperate attempts to do so.
The question that I always get back to is this … why can’t I get a version of Vista without the DRM? If my machine cannot play HD video content anyway, why do I need to have DRM embedded in my OS? Of what possible use is it in such a machine?
If I want to run Windows then perhaps (more speculation here) I must have DRM because Microsoft doesn’t want it to be possible for anyone to benchmark a Vista machine without DRM against a Vista machine with DRM? Just sayin …
Edited 2009-02-19 02:55 UTC
If my machine cannot make use of the bazillion drivers in the generic Linux kernel that comes with Ubuntu, why do I need to have them embedded? Of what possible use are them in such a machine?
See how stupid that question sounds?
Either way, I’m far from being a Microsoft advocate (extremely far, seeing how I run Linux in every machine I own), but the problem with DRM embedded in Vista HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH PERFORMANCE. AT ALL.
The problem with DRM in Vista has to do with giving Hollywood’s the unethical claims for intellectual property a free pass. The problem is that whenever a customer buys Vista, he or she is accepting Hollywood’s terms without even knowing it. That’s the REAL problem.
The rest is just bullshit. Pure and simple.
Oh come on … get real. Linux uses loadable modules … if you don’t have the hardware they don’t get loaded, they stay on the hard disk. One can SEE the source code to verify that this is so. One can even remove the hardware interroagtion on boot if one wants to (because one has no intention of ever changing hardware, and therefore doesn’t require plug-n-play) and one can blacklist whatever drivers one pleases … and again one can see the code that does all this and can verify that it does what it is supposed to do.
Finally, I can just delete any driver I don’t like.
Vista DRM OTOH … try removing it or disabling it (even if your machine does not have a HD optical drive you can’t do it).
How do you know? Have you seen the code? What does Vista actually DO with all the CPU time it uses, if not DRM polling?
And I repeat for the slow of uptake … why can’t I have a version of Vista without it, if my system can’t process HD content anyway?
Well, that is unarguable. This is a problem too. Agreed.
Unsupported assertion. Your statements are as much speculation as mine, despite your apparent vehemence.
Edited 2009-02-19 05:22 UTC
It was a stretch to show you how ridiculous your assertion about DRM-checking measures being active all the time sounds.
What? Why don’t you first PROVE that the CPU Vista is using is for “DRM Polling”? What sense would “DRM Polling” make if you’re not running any DRM content at all, huh? I mean, what sort of ridiculous line of thought are you following here?
Last I checked, outrageous assertions needed to have some sort of proof first, not the other way around.
Yes, but all the other bullshit about “DRM Polling 100% of the time” is hurting the true message.
What? YOUR statements come first. Your FUD comes first. Reasonable people shoot it down, and the people who first made the outrageous claims say “PROVE IT ISN’T SO!!”. How does that make sense to you at all?
It was a hell of a stretch all right. That much I’ll give you … no more.
If you are not running DRM content at any one moment in time … how would Vista know when you actually began to run DRM content at a later time? It must check at some time, must it not? The only place that Vista can put such a check that CANNOT be worked-around by some maverick application program is by having it run all the time as part of the kernel.
Vista is slow. Quite a bit slower than XP, even when Vista is running on more powerful hardware. The only two apparent core features of Vista that could feasibly account for this slowness are Aero bling and continuous checking if protected content is being processed.
OK, Aero bling is handled by the graphics GPU. This is shown experimentally by trying to run Vista on a system with a low end graphics GPU, such as Intel graphics.
That leaves only continuous polling for the presence of protected content by code for handling Vista DRM provisions as the prime suspect for the observed poor performance of Vista on machines with a decent GPU.
That observation in turn leaves the assertion that Vista DRM is NOT the cause of the slowness as the likely-to-be outrageous assertion.
Hmmph. How exactly is it hurting the message? Vista is slow. It has DRM. Provisions for DRM are very likely to be embedded in the running kernel, so that third-party userland applications cannot work around it.
What is exactly IS this “true message” that you imagine?
From my perspective, yours are the outrageous claims. vista is slow. Vista has DRM. DRM is very likely to be at least a contributor to the slowness. How about some credible argument (and not mere IMPOLITE SHOUTING) why this would NOT be so?
“Because Microsoft says so” is not credible argument.
Edited 2009-02-19 12:24 UTC
Nonsense, and you know it.
Vista would know you are running media that requires the protected paths because… Well, the file you just opened REQUIRES IT. It has it built in.
Does an OS or a browser continuously poll to see if a web page has Flash content? Of course not. The browser knows this because it the page tells it to load he Flash player.
There is no polling going on if you don’t run content that requires the protected paths.
Hooooo boy.
The working assumption that must be made by any DRM system that is part of a wider desktop system, which in turn includes applications written by third parties, is that someone will try to write an application that works around the DRM.
If one leaves it up to APPLICATIONS to check for DRM protected content, then it is trivially easy to write such a work-around application. One just decrypts the files and plays them at full resolution, regardless of what protection the DRM flags are asking for.
Ergo, checking for protected content, and degrading of protected paths if there is suspicion that they are being “tapped” and recorded, are necessarily functions that can only be entrusted to running continuously within the kernel.
Edited 2009-02-19 12:38 UTC
Come on, you don’t even need to have programmed to have some slight idea of how any OS handles events. How does your PC know when to decode h264 video? IT NEEDS TO BE POLLING THE SYSTEM 24/7 LOLZ!!!
Vista is slow because it requires tremendous amounts of RAM and a new memory caching system that runs like crap on anything less than 1 GB–and on anything with more than 1 GB, it’s supposed to run like crap until the OS gets used to what you do (more or less I believe that’s the idea of SuperFetch)–I believe they did this to eliminate the stupid amount of paging XP does. It has nothing to do with CPU time being eaten all the time.
By lying. There is a legitimate complaint to the inclusion of DRM-decoding capabilities in Vista, and the FUD is silencing the real reason.
I told you before. It’s making customers justify Hollywood’s unethical claims without even knowing they’re doing so. That’s the real complaint.
As I said, last I checked, you need to prove someone’s guilty before getting them in jail.
God, I hope it doesn’t look like I emphasize with Microsoft, because I really don’t. But the loonies in my own camp make me sometimes wish I did.
Hoo boy … another one that has drunk the koolaide.
If an application needs to know if the file it is opening is h264, where is there any possible harm in leaving that determination up to the application?
If OTOH you want to give a guarantee to a corporate partner that no maverick application can be written to run under your OS that can get past the restrictions they want to be placed on their content … then where else can one put such cannot-be-worked-around code other than within the kernel?
How do you know it’s within the kernel? Have you seen the source code?
I don’t know it is in the kernel, and I haven’t seen the source code.
I am speculating about where such a function would be.
I put on my Hollywood Big Media hat, and I pretend (role play) that I am talking to Microsoft about authorising their desktop OS to have the capability to play my protected content. I know that people can, and very often do, write maverick applications to run under Microsoft’s OS.
So where do I want to see such DRM functions? I want to see them operate within the kernel, so that no maverick application program written by “Pirates” can get around them, and be used by Joe Public to rip videos and distribute them via Bittorrent.
Makes sense.
Vista does have DRM, and it is a performance dog.
Take of your “vehemently defend Microsoft at all costs” hat, put two and two together, and see where it gets you.
Then shut the hell up or present some sort of proof. Speculating on how you feel like Microsoft would act is no way to get the point that DRM is bad across. It only hurts our chances of making people listen even more.
Excuse me?
Someone starts a discussion, on OSNews, concerning how a particular OS performs, on topic for the thread in question, with a reasoned argument … and beacuse it criticises performance of a Microsoft product then the best rebuff you can come up with amounts to “you must have proof in order to speculate about that, because I say so”?
Wow. The apparent standard of Microsoft shills is really slipping these days.
Try defending the actual point instead. You will get much further that way.
I think the point about a comaprison with on-demand virus scanners is really quite pertinent. An on-demand virus scanner cannot use conventional calls to the OS to access the data it is supposed to be checking … because those conventional calls may themselves have been affected by the virus. It really can’t even use the driver, because the driver also may have a virus infection. So an on-demand virus scanner needs to have a very low level of access to the data, and it needs that access as the data is actually being used by some program, and it must check the data stream against a set of known signatures …
Hmmmm, all of that sounds exactly like the set of functions that “check for DRM’d content being accessed” needs to have … doesn’t it?
On-demand virus scanners also tend to have a perfromance impact … rather similar in nature to the type of lethargic performance that Vista itself exhibits, are they not?
As I say … there was a brouhaha that came up when Vista first came out … that the OS itself would not allow programs such as virus scanners the level of access such programs required … there had to be a negotiation to get Microsoft to allow in Vista a sufficient level of access to let these programs work properly.
None of this is proof … but it is further decent supporting evidence that no-one has been able to present any real arguement to counter so far.
Edited 2009-02-20 02:00 UTC
If you are not running DRM content at any one moment in time … how would Vista know when you actually began to run DRM content at a later time? It must check at some time, must it not? The only place that Vista can put such a check that CANNOT be worked-around by some maverick application program is by having it run all the time as part of the kernel.
Umm, from purely software development point of view: how would an application or the OS know that one application is accessing file to which DRM should be applied? Constantly reading the memory areas allocated by that app? That wouldn’t fly, you can’t identify DRM protected content in the middle of all the random stuff, especially if the application has already moved forward with the file and the file header isn’t anymore in the memory.
No, there is no such polling. The logical and functioning ways of being able to do those things are two: when the application issues an open command for a file or resource the OS checks if the file header has DRM clause. If it does then the OS applies DRM. The second is when the application in question tries to output the contents somewhere: the OS checks again for DRM restrictions if the output is to any sound, video or file output.
So, no. Lemur2, if you had any programming experience you’d know it’s not possible to “poll for DRM content” unless the OS checks everything all the time, in which case the whole thing wouldn’t run even on very very high-end machines. And it would result in many false alerts, too, as there is no way to guarantee that any random data has no data blocks that look similar to DRM data blocks.
I’m just pointing out your mistake here. Other than that, I have no idea how much all the DRM stuff use CPU time. Not that I even wish to try, quite happy with XP for games and Linux for everything else.
The OS maintains file pointers for all opened files. It is also the ABI through which the disk is accessed. All that would be required is an agreed signature tag within the HDCP stream that flagged “protected stuff here”.
Wouldn’t work. One would just write an application that accessed the disk driver directly, rather than going via the “file open” API. A direct “file open” function written within the application itself.
Again wouldn’t work if the hardware can be used at full resolution for non-DRM’d content. The maverick application could just “pretend” that its output was not DRM’d.
CRCs (and hence DRM’d keys) are often quite long. MD5 is one system that is often used for checking that an entire CD has correct content.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Md5
“An MD5 hash is typically expressed as a 32 digit hexadecimal number.”
Even though this particular code has a flaw, in general a 32 digit number is in principle enough to be assured that the entire 700MB of a CD are correct.
Yes, there is a way to “guarantee that any random data has no data blocks that look similar to DRM data blocks”. Or at least reduce the chances so that we would be waiting until the heat death of the universe before such a “collision” was likely.
I don’t believe I have made any mistake. Perhaps I suggest you read up a little on DRM, PGP, encryption, decryption, CRCs, data integrity checking (say as used in TCP/IP for example) and other similar topics before you leap to conclusions next time.
Edited 2009-02-19 13:10 UTC
Umm, from purely software development point of view: how would an application or the OS know that one application is accessing file to which DRM should be applied? Constantly reading the memory areas allocated by that app?
The file open command is part of the OS, as such, when an application tries to open a file the OS can check the file contents. D’oh..
Wouldn’t work. One would just write an application that accessed the disk driver directly, rather than going via the “file open” API. A direct “file open” function written within the application itself.
Applications don’t have permissions to access device drivers directly, and again, the disk driver is part of the whole DRM scheme. It’d still initiate the DRM check. If you wanted to bypass that you’d have to write a disk driver of your own. And of course, if you write your own drivers you can bypass anything you wish.
Again wouldn’t work if the hardware can be used at full resolution for non-DRM’d content. The maverick application could just “pretend” that its output was not DRM’d.
Applications can’t set the property values of the outputs. The outputs exist all the time whether or not an application uses them. An application can’t “pretend” anything. If the app wants to send the output on the screen it has to use one of the existing outputs and it’s the OS that controls the properties of all those.
As for the content: as already said, the OS checks the properties of the media to be opened before the application gets access to it. If the media in question requests DRM then the application never gets direct contact with the contents and is allowed to only perform a limited set of functions on that. If the DRM clause says that the file is to be only used for audiovisual output then the application cannot read a single bit of the contents of the file and cannot write any of it to a file either.
I don’t believe I have made any mistake. Perhaps I suggest you read up a little on DRM, PGP, encryption, decryption, CRCs, data integrity checking (say as used in TCP/IP for example) and other similar topics before you leap to conclusions next time.
I’d much rather you read up on OS design and application development. You are not quite knowledgeable of several things here.
I seriously doubt that any of Vista’s slow performance comes down to DRM in any shape or form. It’s simply a badly optimized OS. As for DRM polling or hooking file access, why would they do that? Say you click on a DRM encrypted video file, it’s associated with wmp so wmp starts and then identifies this as encrypted file and then likely uses some service in Vista to obtain decryption keys and then play it. This of course means that only certified programs can play the file in question, other applications will simply throw an error. I simply can’t see any logical reason for Microsoft to poll or hook for DRM’d content unless they were only going to allow their own players to access this content and I doubt that since even then it’s a stupid solution. The DRM protection in windows is not about file access, but the data once it has become decrypted. And while protecting the decrypted data may very well use alot of system resources, this only comes into play when actually using the DRM’d content.
A case in point, a while back I read about the Bluray DRM being broken. This was done by a company named Slysoft which are selling a product named AnyDVD HD which decrypts said Bluray media, and according to their homepage this product is fully supported on Vista. If some poll/hook were in place to hog any DRM content access then this program would not be able to open and decrypt it.
Decrypting the data merely requires that one can read it, one has a decryption key, and that one knows the encryption algorithm that was used.
One can get code to implement a complete ntfs filesystem from sources such as this one:
http://www.ntfs-3g.org
… so there is no point in wrting DRM protection schemes within the normal filesystem calls of the OS. It has to go in the kernel.
Mind you, if a maverick program includes its own filesystem access functions, and it includes a decryption key from somewhere (wasn’t there one posted on the Internet a while back?) then even if the DRM protected content detection code runs in the kernel then all that that code can do once the maverick program starts running is to degrade the protected content pathway through the machine. I can’t see how this can stop the maverick program from achieving its ends anyway.
So there is an absolute need, from the Big Media point of view, to be very protective of the keys.
Why do you doubt it? The kernel is the best place to put the detection of DRM’d content from a rights management point of view. It is only bad news to have it there from an end user machine owner point of view.
Becasue they don’t want maverick programs to be able to read the data, decrypt it, make a “plaintext” version output file and be able to submit that file to Bitorent tracker sites.
Then clearly clicking on a video file icon is not going to be the way that you launch your maverick program, is it?
It doesn’t mean any such thing.
This thinking is starting from a wrong premise. You are assuming that the program that is running which has decrypted the data is a program that is co-operating with the Vista DRM scheme. That is not a valid assumption.
That is an oft-repeated assertion that no-one ever offers any evidence for.
Meanwhile, Vista has DRM, and Vista has poor performance … take off your “must defend Microsoft” hat and put two and two together for a moment.
I don’t contend that the poll/hook “hogs” the DRM content. I merely contend that the poll/hook runs all the time, within the Vista kernel and/or hardware device drivers, and when it detects a “DRM content here” signature in any data stream it sets the hardware outputs to degraded performance state.
That functionality would account for slow performance of Vista, but it would not prevent the operation of the AnyDVD HD maverick program as you describe it.
Edited 2009-02-19 23:47 UTC
It is a valid assumption because it’s the way it actually works. The protected media path in Vista is simply a collection of hardware and software that provides an encrypted path from the OS across the PCI bus to the video/audio processors. The protected media path is accessed through the API provided by the Media Foundation SDK. It’s up to the application to use this API to play protected media using the Vista DRM system.
There is no constant scanning of streams looking for the signatures of protected content and there is nothing stopping anyone from decrypting the content manually (AACS has been cracked and the decryption keys are available online) and sending the video/audio streams directly to the hardware, bypassing the protected media path entirely.
I don’t know whether the 30/150 ms polling for the integrity of the protected path happens constantly or only when an application has requested the services of the Media Foundation SDK. Regardless, the performance impact of this type of polling would be negligible compared to something like a TCP/IP stack and would certainly not be noticeable to users. (And for reference, I just checked and my mid-range Vista system idles at 1% CPU usage)
That said, I do agree that the system is a complete waste because it increases the cost and complexity of the hardware and software involved and ultimately provides no real protection for content (look up the trusted client problem).
Please take the advice of some of the other posters here– there are real reasons why DRM is a problem and conflating those with wild speculation (especially when information about these things is readily available on MSDN) only serves to dilute the real substance of the argument.
Edited 2009-02-21 09:46 UTC
So one doesn’t use the file open command within the OS …
Yes, this is the point. You have to put the DRM checks in the kernel or the disk drivers directly. These run all the time. The DRM checks can’t be part of the file open commands, because maverick applications will just use their own.
The only other comment I’d make is that Microsoft writes the OS and kernel, but typically not the drivers …
There was quite a brouhaha when Vista first came out about the “level” of access to the filesystem that was required by virus scanner programs. Vista was originally going to ship in such a state that third party virus scanners couldn’t get sufficient access to the file system below that of the device drivers, because even drivers can get viruses. I don’t recall how that brouhaha was actually resolved … but it seems quite pertinent to this discussion.
BTW … if one is writing maverick programs with an aim to circumvent Vista’s DRM, one doesn’t have to write one’s own device drivers … there is source code available for a whole raft of drivers available from this site:
http://www.kernel.org
I meant the maverick application’s output, not the hardware output.
The maverick application could just masquerade as a media player outputting non-DRM’d content, instead of the actual truth that it was outputting decrypted video data coming originally from the Blueray drive.
True. So the trick is for the maverick application to masquerade such that the OS thinks it is only processing non-DRM’d data. One has to bypass the “DRM content detection” parts of the OS to achieve that.
… only if the maverick application co-operates by accessing the data via a function within the OS that does the checking. The only place within the OS where such checking can be placed so that it is not trivial for the maverick application to bypass it would be within the kernel, or within the hardwar drivers (which are effectively part of the kernel anyway).
Only true if the maverick application co-operates by using access methods that are coverd by the DRM checking.
Touche.
Seriously, you have to think more like a “maverick application” writer. There are heaps of tools available to you as source code. Hardware drivers, filesystems … even complete operating systems and virtual machines. Unless the DRM checking is part of the always-running kernel, there are alternative ways to read data from hardware and output it to hardware at full resolution. I know this because there are applications that CAN output data to the hardware at full resolution. If those applications can do it, why can’t a maerick application?
You can have the kudos for OS design knowledge … but I’ll claim the kudos for using hardware in ways that I might want to despite the OS design.
Do we have a deal?
Edited 2009-02-19 23:01 UTC
Yes, this is the point. You have to put the DRM checks in the kernel or the disk drivers directly. These run all the time. The DRM checks can’t be part of the file open commands, because maverick applications will just use their own.
There is no other way to access files than using the file open instructions provided by the OS or writing your own drivers. You don’t seem to understand that opening, closing and modifying resources like files all do pass through the kernel no matter which library or driver you request to open the file from. It’s low-level hardware access and usually only the kernel has such low-level access to anything that it can access on-disk structures.
As for the the whole of writing a filesystem driver of your own: you can’t run two filesystem drivers for a single filesystem, they’d instantly run into problems due to different cache data. You’d have to make Windows replace the default NTFS driver with your own. And well, that requires admin rights. As an admin you CAN bypass all DRM as long as you get to install your own drivers that don’t honor DRM.
Only true if the maverick application co-operates by using access methods that are coverd by the DRM checking.
There are no such unless you install those previously mentioned drivers that bypass DRM.
As for your curious idea of scanning all application memory data for DRM content.. Well, let’s see. We’ll assume the computer in question has 4GB of RAM, 2GB of which is actual data. Then let’s assume that a DRM key would be a 256-bit one (since I haven’t bothered to find out how long they in reality are). That’s 32 bytes of data. To find a single 256-bit DRM key from 2GB of random data it would have to check every byte and then count the following 31 bytes, check if it conforms to any known DRM key and move to the next byte. Continue this until all the random data has been checked.
Now, simple math shows that 32*2GB = 64GB (not exact value since not all the memory is contiguous. But for the sake of example we’ll make things simple). If the interval of checking the memory was even 150ms, that would be around 426GB/s. Do you really believe any home computer would be capable of checking 426 gigabytes of memory every second? Even the memory bus bandwidth isn’t anywhere near fast enough to handle that load, even less the CPU be able to check that much stuff for DRM keys. In theory if it was possible to check the existence of a DRM key once per tick the machine would have to be 426Ghz…And believe me, it takes several hundreds if not thousands of ticks to check it in real life.
The whole thing is, you’re talking about things you don’t know enough about yet you try to portray yourself as someone with lots of experience. Admit that you have no idea how DRM actually works in practice and be content with just saying that you don’t like its presence.
Yes there is. On-demand virus scanner programs require just such a low-level of file access. Otherwise they would have no hope of detecting viruses.
Not so if all you were doing was reading data …
Not at all. NTFS allows many threads to simulatneously access the one disk. I see no reason why one couldn’t run a read-only version of ntfs-3g alongside Vista’s own ntfs driver acessing the same disk at the same time.
Not pertinent to the point I’m making. My point is that Vista’s checking for DRM content must necessarily reside within the kernel and/or the hardware device drivers … your text here actually supports a conclusion that what I am saying must be the case.
Only true if the functionality for checking for DRM content is embedded in the kernel and/or in the device drivers … which was my original point in the first place. You have argued yourself into a position of agreeing with me.
Where did I say that? I said that Vista’s checking for DRM content must necessarily run within the kernel and/or the device drivers, and it must run all the time, and it must check active data streams on the fly (“on their way through”, if you will). How on earth did we leap from that to “scanning all application memory data for DRM content”?
The performance required to do this is no more than the performance required from typical a disk driver, USB driver or TCP/IP stack. It is just an additional overhead of that order … and it nicely exaplains Vista’s relatively slow performance.
Edited 2009-02-20 00:07 UTC
Well, look at it this way… whatever performance issues that Vista has, Windows 7 (with the same level or DRM) doesn’t have the same issues. So either they found a way to properly optimize the DRM, or else the performance issues in Vista aren’t related to DRM.
Either way, just wait for Windows 7 to come out, which isn’t slow like Vista is, so you won’t have a reason to bitch about it anymore.
The performance issues with Vista will still remain (in Vista) even after Windows 7 is released.
Waiting for the arrival of Windows 7 is no solution for many of the people who have been unfortunate enough to have been sold a Vista machine.
As far as my waiting for Windows 7 goes … I have been clued in enough to have avoided Vista so far … why would I possibly have any interest at all in letting someone try to sucker me into using Windows 7?
Well, maybe these people should’ve done their research beforehand? The performance issues that Vista has isn’t exactly a big secret. I’m not here to defend Vista. I’m just saying that its performance issues are probably not due to the DRM, but more likely the WDDM not being very optimized, the indexing service (which constantly thrashes the hard drive), among other things.
If you are not interested at all in either Vista or 7, then why are we having this discussion? You seemed interested in aquiring a copy of Vista without DRM, as you expressed concerns about the performance issues being related to DRM.
So I told you that 7 does not have these issues, so you could skip Vista entirely and just pick up 7, but now you’re asking me why you would you possibly be interested in either? I don’t know.. you were asking about it, so I assumed you were interested, but I guess you’re just here to troll afterall.
You have been clued in huh? And you really expect us to swallow that line of #*@? Face the facts, you have an obsession with anything Microsoft related. You are a troll, pure and simple. Do you really want to insult our intelligences with this dribble? I mean anyone with even two brain cells can figure this out.
Can anyone find even one Microsoft topic where Lemur2 did NOT bring up DRM? Yet ironically, as has been previously proven time and time again, you are completely clueless as to what DRM is, what it does, and why it is there.
Does anyone else find it the least bit humorous at least that the one person railing and ranting about DRM, Windows, etc..is the one person that will never use any product what so ever by Microsoft, simply because it is from Microsoft?
“Does anyone else find it the least bit humorous at least that the one person railing and ranting about DRM, Windows, etc..is the one person that will never use any product what so ever by Microsoft, simply because it is from Microsoft?”
its not as humorious as it could be, seeing as (making this number up but it’s probably pretty close) 80% or so of the most vocal users ripping Vista appart have never once used it (ok maybe once, but only to say they have).
thats where the humor goes away and the insanity begins. People should only voice their oppinions as loudly as they have knowledge and understanding of what they are saying.
I don’t want to hear the person with the meaning of life whispering while the idiot yelling “2 + 2 = 5!” is stealing center stage. if you don’t know what your talking about shut the hell up, or i will rant at you and rip into you with vicious rhetoric. example given here, feel free to copy and paste this as example code for dealing with clueless n00bs
/end
Edited 2009-02-19 19:40 UTC
I would actually put the number much higher based on my experiences. I just have never seen anyone who is a Vista user complain about DRM. As one who uses different forums, newsgroups, etc. as a resource for my work, I come across literally hundreds of different issues each week regarding Windows (from Vista to Server 2003-2008). Now include all the different digital video forums I visit on occasion, adds up to quite a large exposure to the world at large. Yet in the past 2 years I can not count one single complaint/problem from a Windows user regarding DRM. Not one! If you lived in the sheltered existence the same as certain trolls live in, you would think that the number who have an actual problem would be in the 80% group.
My problem is just not that certain trolls seem to be completely clueless. It goes beyond that to make me question what the whole logic is behind their motives. I will repeat this a million times, why care when you don’t even use the product? I drive a Saab, I love Saabs, hence I visit Saab forums. But I sure in the hell never worry about what Ford is doing. And while on a closer issue, I may have certain opinions regarding Apple products, especially iPod and iPhone, I just could not be bothered to get involved. Why? What is the point? In the end, I have neither, and will not ever purchase either.
But if I spend my life ranting on about iPhone, I would consider maybe I have a need for therapy. Sometimes it becomes so sickly apparent that the real love some have for Linux, has nothing to do at all with Linux, but merely because it is (in their eyes) the anti-Microsoft OS. I honestly believe part of the rise of Ubuntu with so many of these kids today is not just that it is a ‘simple’ flavor of Linux, but it allows them to have an easy OS to use merely so they can lay claim to be true techie geek nerds, without actually having to know anything. Is that all Linux is then? I think most car salesmen would lose their jobs pretty quick if their whole argument to buy the BMW was “Well, it’s not a Mercedes!”.
Why would I be lying? I have already said that no-one knows how DRM works. I have already said that this is speculation. What we do know is that Vista has lethargic performance on high-end hardware that gets considerably worse for lower-end hardware. I have speculated that the DRM polling is a good candidate for what has caused this lethargy. So far, no one has been able to say that it isn’t, despite the desperate attempts to do so.
This right here says it all. You are arguing out of ignorance and acting like nobody at all knows how the DRM subsystem works. If you don’t understand the intelligent way to implement such a system then don’t talk about it like it’s a given everyone else is as clueless as yourself. There is no system-wide poll every X amount of minutes or seconds to see if DRM content is playing. The only time the system checks for DRM capability and then enables the protected path is WHEN YOU LOAD MULTIMEDIA THAT DEMANDS IT, DRM-ED MEDIA.
It makes absolutely no sense to constantly check to see if anything has asked to enable the protected media path. This would be like Valve Anti-Cheat or PunkBuster or Warden running full system assessments every X amount of minutes/seconds in order to make sure you aren’t cheating in any of the games that utilize them. It’s freakin’ stupid because you aren’t always going to be utilizing them, they are only brought into the mix when you play a game that uses them. Does the protected media path have the potential to cause slowdown? I guess we might find out when any media producers begin to use it in the years to come. For now, nobody’s making use of it and it’s pretty much just sitting there unused until Hollywood decides they want to start shipping Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs that will only play on a protected system.
What’s wrong with North Korea?
Everyone is subject to propaganda, be it from Microsoft, from the government or from FOSS.
If I ask most of the people in the west what they think about North Korea, they will spit many senseless words and yet they don’t know the first thing about North Korea. The same goes for Microsoft. If you are on the other side of the propaganda, you don’t have to know Microsoft to hate it.
Interesting how often comments like this come up, and yet no one likes to discuss the reasons people do hate Microsoft. On the other hand, we’ve just had an article on how Windows 7 beta testers are unhappy with Microsoft. Let’s be perfectly honest here. There’s lots of reasons to not be happy with Microsoft. Some of it’s not their fault, but on the other hand they have generated a lot of ill will by their own actions.
And when it comes to FUD, Microsoft salesmen telling potential customers that open source is less secure because it’s open source is also FUD, only we call it salesmanship.
I can’t believe there was an article on anti-Microsoft FUD, where nobody mentioned BoycottNovell.com!
“Irak as WMD …”
“Resorting to FUD Hurts the Alternatives to Microsoft …”
IN both cases I missed the real proof , Microsoft expert are saying Microsoft is fudding , the court agree , yet you claim Alternatives are doing it and even more then Microsoft. I fail to see the proof of that here.
I read the content offered and could not find the relation to alternative or Alternative advocate discussing windows 7 and any of the FUD.
Please , be so gracious to point out the names of people and groups I missed or pages of in the actual content with them on it …
Windows 7 is still a yougn beta ( if Microsoft past release history is any indication ) , so anyone jumping to conclusion now or saying anything about it are just gonna be talking about the beta copy they got , witch the actual number in this case is missing from the explanation , not the actual finished product. Pretty pointless. Beside most people wait for service pack 1 with Microsoft product , to really see how they trully perform.
I am gonna agree with Thom premise that making FUD about other serve no purpose and is hurting the one making it and his credibility.
I am gonna disagree with Thom personnal opinion added in , that offer no real connection or any valid proof bewteen alternative and this comment.
DRM are presnt in all Windows product , you don’t like it don’t use Microsoft product. You want to dicsuss it , say what you need to say once , don’t argue it needlesly with people who disagree.
If history is any indicator , Microsoft problem and discussing them will be at first called as lie and fud and proven true over time , same cycle for every Microsoft releases.
The real alternative problem is not FUD , Microsoft problem are not any alternative gains , Microsoft still as the majority of major brand OEM shipping it’s OS as first default even if it’s full of bug in the final. That’s not the majority of computer , but it’s still a visible chunk we need to get on first.
If your a community leader just tell your people that Fudding Microsoft serve no purpose , if they ask you who’s done it , say Microsoft claim some alternative did , so your just checking it’s none of your people.
Edited 2009-02-19 03:16 UTC
I dont know anything about the photoshop problems but I do see two valid points raised in the slashdot article. First, software can over ride the admin for firewall rules. The problem here is that the user was probably running as admin since that is the default, meaning that all software running has admin privileges. Adobe software can be notoriously a pain when it comes to license schemes. So I can certainly see this happening.
As for the sound card, Vista runs all sound card functions as software. It will not allow hardware to be directly accessed. I have sound cards that have optical ports that work flawlessly in Linux, but have NEVER worked in Windows. Some recording functions are disabled in Vista, particularly recording output sound. This was a problem for many people who used their sound card to do VOIP. The limitation stopped the app from being able to block the feedback from the speakers going into the mic.(this is why you dont hear an echo when talking to someone).
But the posters above have the right idea. If you dont like the DRM, STOP USING WINDOWS!
# ./override_firewall_rules.sh
I don’t disagree with the contention that Slashdot piece was FUD, but I disagree with the contention that anti-Microsoft FUD “Hurts the Alternatives to Microsoft”. Your title seemed quite interesting to me, but the content of your article didn’t really match the topic. Your last sentence is a thesis sentence, and you don’t go into any detail.
But I disagree with your contention anyway. FUD is an extremely effective weapon against the target of the FUD. That’s why it’s used by many organizations.
Maybe you want to play “fair” (whatever that means) but I think FUD is an extremely powerful PR tool. In fact, simply with FUD and FUD alone, I believe Windows 7 reputation can be ruined before it’s even out the door. That is what happen to some extent with Windows Vista.
But in the end of the day, FUD is just a weapon. Like any weapon, it can be used for good or bad. So don’t really concentrate on the weapon itself. That is not important. Concentrate on what the weapon’s being used for, and who is using it. That’s ultimately what matters.
Edited 2009-02-19 07:34 UTC
Ah yes, the goal justify the means. Good thing that has never gone horribly wrong.
“The ends justify the means” only makes sense if the means has to be justified. FUD is a weapon against the mind. It’s used in business, it’s used in your personal life. Even the US Military uses something that resembles FUD against its enemies. Is FUD justifiable on it’s own? Well that’s just a subjective question.
But I think this kind of FUD is effective, that’s my contention. Windows 7 FUD will by and large hurt the reputation of Windows 7. This article claims something different but fails to go into any detail on it.
Edited 2009-02-19 20:50 UTC
A little background here…
I am a Microsoft shareholder, I have been one since 1992.
I have this laptop with Ubuntu 8.04 on it.
I have one desktop dual booting XP and Ubuntu 8.10 (sucky OS)
I have another laptop with Vista, well, I gave it to the daughter.
My other machines have these OS’s installed:
1 Mac OSX
1 Solaris
1 Opensuse
1 Mandriva Laptop
I can understand the reasons for FUD being put out by Microsoft/Apple or even Sun. I cannot understand why someone who uses free software would put out FUD.
Why does someone who clearly is happy with their choice decide for themselves that MY decision is incorrect and I should be forced to see the errors of my ways ?
I have been using computers since 1981 when I got my first one and Acorn Atom.
I was of course nagged by ZX81 users who said their system was better… even though it clearly wasnt, it just had more users.
I moved onto a ZXSpectrum, and was nagged by c64 users, they said their system was better, it was for some things, others it wasn’t.
After this I got a Plus4, inherently way better than a c64, but once again I was nagged by c64 users as there system was better as it had more users, clearly the c64 was nowhere near as good as the Plus4.
Next, I bought an AtariST…. bitter war here with Amiga users, this one is still raging on. I admit Amiga always had the edge.
Once everyone decided to settle on PC’s it still was not simple.
DRDOS v MSDOS
GEM v Desqview
Win3 v Win95
Win95 v WinNT
Win2000 v WinXP
WinXP v WinVista
Win v Linux
Linux v BSD
BSD v Solaris
PC v Mac
The list goes on and on and on, so much so, that I got bored and fell asleep.
When I awoke, I had qwe,asd,zxc imprinted on the side of my face that hit the keyboard.
If anyone who uses Slackware decides that Opensuse is evil, then do me a favour and keep your opinion to yourself, you are happy with your choices, leave me to be happy or suffer with mine, thank you.
Uh … and yet you took the time to reply to this thread … so …
and your point is ?
///your point is?///
… apparently over your head. Your post indicated a “live and let live” philosophy, yet this site thrives on bashing others for the choice of their OS.
You must be new here.
Nah, only the retards seem to do that….
It was a nice try, Raver, but having been coming to this site long before I got this login, this place does thrive on flame wars, though I’ve noticed it’s not as bad as it used to be. Actually it used to get really ugly in here at times.
Why am I not surprised in the least bit that Lemur2 would be posting away madly in this thread?
Anyone want to take bets on how many posts until he starts the whole Wiki linking?
p.s. Lemur2, you do realize you have an obsession? Maybe it is time you talk to a psychiatrist before we see you on the news.
I kind of wonder what the problem is.
Microsoft Windows operating systems are built up from (to most people) closed-source, proprietary code which most mortal won’t be able to inspect.
Although I guess the NSA can, a.o.
As such, you can’t be sure of anything that’s going on in the system anyway. Then what’s the big deal with the DRM stuff? It’s not as if there are no alternatives.
I don’t think if you choose to run Windows you have any right to complain. Well the right’s there, but it’s meaningless anyhow. There’s only one way to complain in a capitalist society: Don’t Buy It. (or stop complaining)
Actually getting hold of the Windows source code isn’t too hard if you’re a University or other similar institute. I know at least one professor at my old university had access to the code, and that wasn’t even a US university. No need to be the NSA.
I think the word junction and symlink is being applied incorrectly. NTFS junctions have been around for years, I’ve used them successfully in explorer and they work just fine. The only oddity is that deleting a junction will delete the underlying directory as well. I use them whenever I’m doing a web based development project – use a junction to create a local directory that also points to a IIS directory on my local dev machine (yes you can use virtual directories, but that can be more of a pain that using a junction in the first place.) That way you can zip up one root directory for fast backups, have a more sensible tree for version control and also run the noddy built VS.NET in webserver if you want to. Also does not require assumptions to be made about relative paths when linking projects in to a single solution.
On the other hand, symlinks were added to NTFS in Vista. They are NOT the same thing, just similar. I’ve never used them – but I believe they work on a file level… a Junction can only be used to link to a directory or mount point.