Munden's Bar

Pete Gutman at Auckland University gives us the straight dope on Microsoft Vista

Executive Executive Summary
The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

Selected further quote :

However, one important point that must be kept in mind when reading this document is that in order to work, Vista's content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics, something that's unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry wishes it were possible.

The one thing I disagree with Pete about is how much it will affect those of us who use older OSes or Unix, at least other than potentially increased hardware prices. It will significantly increase the value of pre-Vista second-hand machines!

Because we don't need to access protected content, we just won't talk to idiots who use Vista. They'll become like AOLusers. There is already enough un-protected content in the wild, and enough artists who are happy to release new unprotected content, that the rest of the world will just ignore the leper colony of Vista users. People using Vista will be like the castaways in Lost.

Or, all Vista usrs will find they have to run hacked machines to talk to the rest of us, because as Pete says :

...the Vista content protection will take less than a day to bypass if the bypass mechanism is something like a driver bug or a simple security hole... and less than a week to comprehensively bypass in a driver/hardware-independent manner. This doesn't mean it'll be broken the day or week that it appears, but simply that once a sufficiently skilled attacker is motivated to bypass the protection, it'll take them less than a day or a week to do so.

I suggest that anyone who works with computers start publicising this to their bosses. Convince them that Vista is not the way. I'm certainly going to agitate loudly in my workplace against it , and I will be passing it on to our major clients in government and the banking sectors, who often care about reliability and cost.

Given the huge hardware upgrades required to run Vista, the potential for hugely inflated help-desk costs, and the potential for a hacker to remotely shut down people's computers, most cost and security conscious organizations should be able to realize that the cost and risk of training users and support staff to move to Open Office and Thunderbird/Evolution on Linux workstations using their current hardware is going to be less than moving from Windows 20000 to Vista, regardless of the cost of the actual operating system.