You may ask:  why are you posting this on a blog devoted to crime, justice and social justice issues?  My answer:  (a) If you are reading this, it affects you because it goes through a computer.  (b)  The way this is set up, it appears "switching to Apple or Linux" is intended to be made ineffectual.  ©  I smell antitrust violations (among other things) in this - and violations of the antitrust laws can be (and are) prosecuted criminally.

In reading this article  and this paper from a computer scientist, it seems pretty clear to me at least that MS Vista is not only a piece of garbage, but also an incipient catastrophe on many levels.

Take the time to read both the blog article and the computer scientist's paper, linked above.  They'll take a while, but it's time well spent.  And for those getting foul weather, what else were you planning on doing, anyway?

From the blog article:

The basic story here is that Microsoft is introducing a large suite of features and technology that enable Vista to control and enforce the use of so-called "premium content"...which amounts to copy-protected media such as HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks. This not only takes a lot of software technology to accomplish, but also requires a large amount of new hardware, as well as new driver technology to support it. The end result is that successful playback of this "premium content" demands that a secure connection is made between the media's reader device and the display it is projected onto. If this secure connection cannot be established (whether it be because you are using unsupported hardware connections, unsupported drivers or chipsets, or whatever) or if that connection is even interrupted, playback will silently fail. The results of this can be anything from severely degraded playback results, to a completely black display. Details of how and why this will happen, as well as the ramifications of Microsoft essentially forcing this technology on hardware manufacturers can be found in the paper.

There are a couple possibilities which jump out from the paper - which seems pretty well researched and written by someone with knowledge.  

The first one is the "medical-image-degradation" issue.  This is pretty easy to get one's head around.

The "medical-image-degradation issue" they talk about goes like this. Assume the following:

(1) you have a PC running Vista, and you are using it in a medical situation where the main purpose is to display medical images - e.g. CAT scans, MRI results, or real-time the 6 or 8 electrocardiogram traces of a ward's patients, to a monitor in front of a ward nurse at the workstation.

(2) The computer also has a CD-ROM which, like so many workplace CD-ROMs, spends a lot of work time playing music.

(3)  This music CD is copy-protected (as is just about every one).

(4) There's one tiny part in the PC (or some of the software) which isn't preapproved by Microsoft - or if it was, it isn't working perfectly.  Vista, it appears, will decide this state of affairs means someone's trying to hack and/or copy the copyrighted content.

What Vista will do, to prevent unauthorized reproduction of the copyrighted content, is to degrade (all) the audio/video signals going through the computer - silently and without warning. This appears to be done through compressing and decompressing the datastream.  This compression-decompression regime will introduce "fuzziness" into the video images (and the sound).

This is bad enough.  But, the worse result is inaccurate medical images bearing introduced "artifacts" - stuff which is there doesn't necessarily show up, and stuff which is not there may show up.

Even forbidding playing CDs on the computer may not prevent the problem - say you decide to economize by not buying a new accessory (or specialty program) to replace a perfectly good one that's already there.  The old accessory or program isn't preapproved - same result....

The potential for medical malpractice and fatalities seems, uh, obvious.  This is heightened by the growing practice of sending (via internet) your medical images to a Developing Country, e.g. India, where they are read by some radiologist getting $20k/year and being happy for it, and the results emailed back.

The second issue are the "homeland security implications".

It appears Vista allows MS to decide a particular chip, device, or program is up to no good, and to then deny service to prevent it from being used to copy protected content.  Remotely.  The way it works is MS tells Vista a certain chip, device or program is to be disabled - and all of them are, everywhere.  Until MS decides they've come up with a fix.

Bad enough that innocent you now has a paperweight where your PC was a minute ago.  But, there's more.

Buried deep in the paper is this money quote:

Even without deliberate abuse by malware, the homeland security implications of an external agent being empowered to turn off your IT infrastructure in response to a content leak discovered in some chipset that you coincidentally
happen to be using is a serious concern for potential Vista users. Non-US governments are already nervous enough about using a US-supplied operating system without having this remote DoS [denial-of-service] capability built into the operating system. And like the medical-image-degradation issue, you won't find out about this until it's too late, turning Vista PCs into ticking time bombs if the revocation functionality is ever employed.

This quote: "an external agent being empowered to turn off your IT infrastructure in response to a content leak discovered in some chipset that you coincidentally happen to be using is a serious concern for potential Vista users", I translate to mean: "if Microsoft decides (using their own secret criteria) whether something that's going on in one device (a chip, board, piece of hardware, etc.) indicates someone's trying to hack into copyright-protected content with/through that device, they can turn it off remotely. When MS decides that, they send out a signal which makes useless every single unit of that device everywhere. In other words, they can turn off your computer (and that of everyone else using the same components as you) any time, for any (or no) reason."

Naturally, one can see both the military advantages to shutting down an adversary's computer network - we reportedly did that to Iraq's air defense computers before the 1991 Gulf War.  One can see MS is not going to be likely to see much revenue from export, particularly to foreign government customers.

The commercial advantages - both to MS and to any entity which can figure a way to game MS into blasting a competitor's systems - are equally obvious.

And, wait until it crashes a hospital or an air-traffic control system.

Let's not even talk about what this allows in terms of blocking content....

Third, the problem of old hardware, buying new hardware, and disabling functionality - overtly and indirectly.  The "it looks broken, therefore it's working properly" result.  It seems this is already being reported from "early adopters"....

From the paper:

Vista's content protection mechanism only allows protected content to be sent over interfaces that also have content-protection facilities built in. ... In other words if you've sunk a pile of money into a high-end audio setup fed from an S/PDIF digital output, you won't be able to use it with protected content.
* * *

As well as overt disabling of functionality, there's also covert disabling of functionality. For example PC voice communications rely on automatic echo cancellation (AEC) in order to work. AEC requires feeding back a sample of the audio mix into the echo cancellation subsystem, but with Vista's content protection this isn't permitted any more because this might allow access to premium content. What is permitted is a highly-degraded form of feedback that might possibly still sort-of be enough for some sort of minimal echo cancellation purposes.

The requirement to disable audio and video output plays havoc with standard system operations, because the security policy used is a so-called "system high" policy: The overall sensitivity level is that of the most sensitive data present in the system. So the instant any audio derived from premium content appears on your system, signal degradation and disabling of outputs will occur. What makes this particularly entertaining is the fact that the downgrading/disabling is dynamic, so if the premium-content signal is intermittent or varies (for example music that fades out), various outputs and output quality will fade in and out, or turn on and off, in sync. Normally this behaviour would be a trigger for reinstalling device drivers or even a warranty return of the affected hardware, but in this case it's just a signal that everything is functioning as intended.

Why am I not surprised?

Then, there's the paradox - does this program rely on defying the laws of physics?

The computer scientist's paper also notes that for Vista to operate correctly, it has to defy the laws of physics.  It intends to prevent copying data, but operating computers (particularly through the internet) requires data to be copied multiple times.  In the paper's

Note C, this is explained in particularly hilarious fashion:

Note C: In order for content to be displayed to users, it has to be copied numerous times. For example if you're reading this document on the web then it's been copied from the web server's disk drive to server memory, copied to the server's network buffers, copied across the Internet, copied to your PC's network buffers, copied into main memory, copied to your browser's disk cache, copied to the browser's rendering engine, copied to the render/screen cache, and finally copied to your screen. If you've printed it out to read, several further rounds of copying have occurred. Windows Vista's content protection (and DRM in general) assume that all of this copying can occur without any copying actually occurring, since the whole intent of DRM is to prevent copying. If you're not versed in DRM doublethink this concept gets quite tricky to explain, but in terms of quantum mechanics the content enters a superposition of simultaneously copied and uncopied states until a user collapses its wave function by observing the content (in physics this is called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox). Depending on whether you follow the Copenhagen or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, things then either get wierd or very wierd. So in order for Windows Vista's content protection to work, it has to be able to violate the laws of physics and create numerous copies that are simultaneously not copies.

In other words, to work, Vista requires something to exist and not exist at the same time (i.e., "a superposition of simultaneously copied and uncopied states").  This is fine, in a quantum mechanics way, but everything crashes into either existence or non-existence ("collapses its wave function") the moment the paradox is observed.  Which, I deduce, would happen at the moment someone tries to actually use the computer with this program in it.

I invite your comments.