Friday, December 22, 2006

How Vista plans to steal the christmas

I read an analysis on what Vista does to achieve the goal of content protection, i.e. preventing you from copying e.t.c. of all those movies on Blue-ray and HD-DVD, and I am stumped. Things will go wrong by design. Before you yourself do anything wrong. To make things clear, there is a critical difference between concepts of secure computer and content managed computer. Former is designed to protect our computers from access by an unauthorised party. Later is designed to protect our computer from access by an authorized party. Us. This is of course very hard. How does one achieves it? Analogy to what MS approach comes down to, is filling our every single little pocket with a grenade to "protect" us from reaching into those pockets as long as even one of them might have "managed content".

There are two direct consequences to this. First, managed content becomes a Trojan horse that robes us of control over our own computer, and then benevolently lets us use it's resources, until we reach into one of the pockets and accidentally pull one of the grenade pins. Second, managed content robes us of our security, for it is not hard to imagine what can happen to a person on a crowded street (which is Internet) with pockets filled with grenade pins. Eventually someone will pull one out.

Read all about it here.

5 comments:

Woland said...

Off topic:
Congrats on the upgrade, however, choose a different theme. This one is kinda dull.

On the subject:
You might be interested in what Robert Cringely has to say.

Unknown said...

that's on purpose!

Irina Tsukerman said...

Yes, it's dull, you can say THAT again. Down with this format! Down, I say!

Unknown said...

Nay, its awesome!

Irina Tsukerman said...

No, it's not, and you know it.