| Thursday, December 28, 2006 |
16:58 - Unbounded vistas
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt
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Via Stephen Rider, here's a "Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection" that contains such one-liners as:
Executive Executive Summary
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The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the
longest suicide note in history.
I haven't read through it all the way, but something that already jumped out at me as particularly hilarious was Note C:
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.
Having just watched the apparently quite widely and justifiably derided pseudo-science confuse-u-mentary What the Bleep Do We Know?, this note spookily relating Windows DRM to quantum mechanics—using about the same kind of contortions of logic as the movie does, only tongue-in-cheek in this case—has got to be one of the funniest things I've read all week.
What I have to wonder, though, is how long Apple can keep from following suit. I mean, it's can't be that Microsoft is just fixated on wrecking the experience of its own products so as to make nice with the content producers, is it?
I have to say I kinda prefer Jobs' approach: just buy the bastards.
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Brian Tiemann
