As I posted in the past, Microsoft Vista is crammed full of DRM to the core. PC World is reporting while it may have been Microsoft’s intent to protect commercial content, home movies are increasingly being shot in high definition, says computer researcher Peter Gutmann. Many users are finding they can’t play any content if it’s considered “premium.” Content protection features in Windows Vista are preventing customers from playing high-quality video and audio and harming system performance, even as Microsoft neglects security programs that could protect users.

Gutmann, from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, said while giving a talk on Vista content protection. “Once the enemy is the user and not the attacker, standard security thinking falls apart.” Vista requires premium content like high-definition movies to be degraded in quality when sent to high-quality outputs, so users are seeing status codes that say “graphics OPM resolution too high.” Gutmann calls this “probably the most bizarre status code ever. This is not commercial HD content being blocked, this is the users’ own content,” Gutmann said.

Peter Gutmann wrote a paper I posted about titled A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. Gutmann’s paper called Vista’s content protection rules “the longest suicide note in history. It’s taking this open architecture that IBM created 25 years ago and making it closed again,” he said. This is a truly interesting read.

    | Tags: vista, Windows