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Skriven 2006-12-22 22:09:46 av mike (1:379/45)
Ärende: A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection
===========================================================
From: mike <mike@barkto.com>


http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt


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


"...It's somewhat bizarre that I have to go to Communist China in order to find
vendors who actually understand the consumer's needs...."





===
           A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection
           ===================================================

                Peter Gutmann, pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz
        http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt
                      Last updated 22 December 2006

Executive Summary
-----------------

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to
provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data
from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources.  Providing this protection incurs considerable
costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support
overhead, and hardware and software cost.  These issues affect not only users
of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection
measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into
contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example
hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server).  This document analyses
the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that
this incurs throughout the computer industry.

Executive Executive Summary
---------------------------

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

Introduction
------------

This document looks purely at the cost of the technical portions of Vista's
content protection.  The political issues (under the heading of DRM) have been
examined in exhaustive detail elsewhere and won't be commented on further,
unless it's relevant to the cost analysis. 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.  This conundrum is displayed over and over again in
the Windows content-protection specs, with manufacturers being given no hard-
and-fast guidelines but instead being instructed that they need to display as
much dedication as possible to the party line.  The documentation is peppered
with sentences like:

   "It is recommended that a graphics manufacturer go beyond the strict
letter   of the specification and provide additional content-protection
features,   because this demonstrates their strong intent to protect
premium content".

This is an exceedingly strange way to write technical specifications, but is
dictated by the fact that what the spec is trying to achieve is fundamentally
impossible.  Readers should keep this requirement to display appropriate levels
of dedication in mind when reading the following analysis [Note A].

Disabling of Functionality
--------------------------
 Vista's content protection mechanism only allows protected content to
be sent over interfaces that also have content-protection facilities built in.
Currently the most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF
(Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format).  Most newer audio cards, for example,
feature TOSlink digital optical output for high-quality sound reproduction, and
even the latest crop of motherboards with integrated audio provide at least
coax (and often optical) digital output.  Since S/PDIF doesn't provide any
content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled when playing protected
content.  In other words if you've invested a pile of money into a high-end
audio setup fed from a digital output, you won't be able to use it with
protected content.  Similarly, component (YPbPr) video will be disabled by
Vista's content protection, so the same applies to a high-end video setup fed
from component video.

Indirect Disabling of Functionality
-----------------------------------

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.

Decreased Playback Quality
--------------------------

Alongside the all-or-nothing approach of disabling output, Vista requires that
any interface that provides high-quality output degrade the signal quality that
passes through it.  This is done through a "constrictor" that downgrades the
signal to a much lower-quality one, then up-scales it again back to the
original spec, but with a significant loss in quality.  So if you're using an
expensive new LCD display fed from a high-quality DVI signal on your video card
and there's protected content present, the picture you're going to see will be,
as the spec puts it, "slightly fuzzy", a bit like a 10-year-old CRT monitor
that you picked up for $2 at a yard sale.  In fact the spec specifically still
allows for old VGA analog outputs, but even that's only because disallowing
them would upset too many existing owners of analog monitors.  In the future
even analog VGA output will probably have to be disabled.  The only thing that
seems to be explicitly allowed is the extremely low-quality TV-out, provided
that Macrovision is applied to it.

The same deliberate degrading of playback quality applies to audio, with the
audio being downgraded to sound (from the spec) "fuzzy with less detail".

Amusingly, the Vista content protection docs say that it'll be left to graphics
chip manufacturers to differentiate their product based on (deliberately
degraded) video quality.  This seems a bit like breaking the legs of Olympic
athletes and then rating them based on how fast they can hobble on crutches.

Beyond the obvious playback-quality implications of deliberately degraded
output, this measure can have serious repercussions in applications where
high-quality reproduction of content is vital.  For example the field of
medical imaging either bans outright or strongly frowns on any form of lossy
compression because artifacts introduced by the compression process can cause
mis-diagnoses and in extreme cases even become life-threatening.  Consider a
medical IT worker who's using a medical imaging PC while listening to
audio/video played back by the computer (the CDROM drives installed in
workplace PCs inevitably spend most of their working lives playing music or MP3
CDs to drown out workplace noise).  If there's any premium content present in
there, the image will be subtly altered by Vista's content protection,
potentially creating exactly the life-threatening situation that the medical
industry has worked so hard to avoid.  The scary thing is that there's no easy
way around this - Vista will silently modify displayed content under certain
(almost impossible-to-predict in advance) situations discernable only to
Vista's built-in content-protection subsystem.

Elimination of Open-source Hardware Support
-------------------------------------------

In order to prevent the creation of hardware emulators of protected output
devices, Vista requires a Hardware Functionality Scan (HFS) that can be used to
uniquely fingerprint a hardware device to ensure that it's (probably) genuine. 
In order to do this, the driver on the host PC performs an operation in the
hardware (for example rendering 3D content in a graphics card) that produces a
result that's unique to that device type.

In order for this to work, the spec requires that the operational details of
the device be kept confidential.  Obviously anyone who knows enough about the
workings of a device to operate it and to write a third-party driver for it
(for example one for an open-source OS, or in general just any non-Windows OS)
will also know enough to fake the HFS process.  The only way to protect the HFS
process therefore is to not release any technical details on the device beyond
a minimum required for web site reviews and comparison with other products.

Elimination of Unified Drivers
------------------------------

The HFS process has another cost involved with it.  Most hardware vendors have
(thankfully) moved to unified driver models instead of the plethora of
individual drivers that abounded some years ago.  Since HFS requires unique
identification and handling of not just each device type (for example each
graphics chip) but each variant of each device type (for example each stepping
of each graphics chip) to handle the situation where a problem is found with
one variation of a device, it's no longer possible to create one-size-fits-all
drivers for an entire range of devices like the current
Catalyst/Detonator/ForceWare drivers. Every little variation of every device
type out there must now be individually accommodated in custom code in order
for the HFS process to be fully effective.

If a graphics chip is integrated directly into the motherboard and there's no
easy access to the device bus then the need for bus encryption (see
"Unnecessary CPU Resource Consumption" below) is removed.  Because the
encryption requirement is so onerous, it's quite possible that this means of
providing graphics capabilities will suddenly become more popular after the
release of Vista.  However, this leads to a problem: It's no longer possible to
tell if a graphics chip is situated on a plug-in card or attached to the
motherboard, since as far as the system is concerned they're both just devices
sitting on the AGP/PCIe bus.  The solution to this problem is to make the two
deliberately incompatible, so that HFS can detect a chip on a plug-in card vs.
one on the motherboard.  Again, this does nothing more than increase costs and
driver complexity.

Further problems occur with audio drivers.  To the system, HDMI audio looks
like S/PDIF, a deliberate design decision to make handling of drivers easier.
In order to provide the ability to disable output, it's necessary to make HDMI
codecs deliberately incompatible with S/PDIF codecs, despite the fact that they
were specifically designed to appear identical in order to ease driver support
and reduce development costs.

Denial-of-Service via Driver Revocation
---------------------------------------

Once a weakness is found in a particular driver or device, that driver will
have its signature revoked by Microsoft, which means that it will cease to
function (details on this are a bit vague here, presumably some minimum
functionality like generic 640x480 VGA support will still be available in order
for the system to boot).  This means that a report of a compromise of a
particular driver or device will cause all support for that device worldwide to
be turned off until a fix can be found.  Again, details are sketchy, but if
it's a device problem then presumably the device turns into a paperweight once
it's revoked.  If it's an older device for which the vendor isn't interested in
rewriting their drivers (and in the fast-moving hardware market most devices
enter "legacy" status within a year of two of their replacement models becoming
available), all devices of that type worldwide become permanently unusable.

The threat of driver revocation is the ultimate nuclear option, the crack of
the commissars' pistols reminding the faithful of their duty [Note B].  The
exact details of the hammer that vendors will be hit with is buried in
confidential licensing agreements, but I've heard mention of multimillion
dollar fines and embargoes on further shipment of devices alongside the driver
revocation mentioned above.

Decreased System Reliability
----------------------------

Vista's content protection requires that devices (hardware and software
drivers) set so-called "tilt bits" if they detect anything unusual.  For
example if there are unusual voltage fluctuations, maybe some jitter on bus
signals, a slightly funny return code from a function call, a device register
that doesn't contain quite the value that was expected, or anything similar, a
tilt bit gets set.  Such occurrences aren't too uncommon in a typical computer
(for example starting up or plugging in a bus-powered device may cause a small
glitch in power supply voltages, or drivers may not quite manage device state
as precisely as they think). Previously this was no problem - the system was
designed with a bit of resilience, and things will function as normal.  In
other words small variances in performance are a normal part of system
functioning. Furthermore, the degree of variance can differ widely across
systems, with some handling large changes in system parameters and others only
small ones.  One very obvious way to observe this is what happens when a bunch
of PCs get hit by a momentary power outage.  Effects will vary from powering
down, to various types of crash, to nothing at all, all triggered by exactly
the same external event.

With the introduction of tilt bits, all of this designed-in resilience is gone.
 Every little (normally unnoticeable) glitch is suddenly surfaced because it
could be a sign of a hack attack.  The effect that this will have on system
reliability should require no further explanation.

Content-protection "features" like tilt bits also have worrying denial-of-
service (DoS) implications.  It's probably a good thing that modern malware is
created by programmers with the commercial interests of the phishing and spam
industries in mind rather than just creating as much havoc as possible.  With
the number of easily-accessible grenade pins that Vista's content protection
provides, any piece of malware that decides to pull a few of them will cause
considerable damage.  The homeland security implications of this seem quite
serious, since a tiny, easily-hidden piece of malware would be enough to render
a machine unusable, while the very nature of Vista's content protection would
make it almost impossible to determine why the denial-of-service is occurring. 
Furthermore, the malware authors, who are taking advantage of
"content-protection" features, would be protected by the DMCA against any
attempts to reverse-engineer or disable the content-protection "features" that
they're abusing.

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 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.

Increased Hardware Costs
------------------------
 Vista includes various requirements for "robustness" in which the
content industry, through "hardware robustness rules", dictates design
requirements to hardware manufacturers.  For example, only certain layouts of a
board are allowed in order to make it harder for outsiders to access parts of
the board. Possibly for the first time ever, computer design is being dictated
not by electronic design rules, physical layout requirements, and thermal
issues, but by the wishes of the content industry. Apart from the massive
headache that this poses to device manufacturers, it also imposes additional
increased costs beyond the ones incurred simply by having to lay out board
designs in a suboptimal manner.  Video card manufacturers typically produce a
one-size- fits-all design (often a minimally-altered copy of the chipset
vendor's reference design), and then populate different classes and price
levels of cards in different ways.  For example a low-end card will have
low-cost, minimal or absent TV-out encoders, DVI circuitry, RAMDACs, and
various other add-ons used to differentiate budget from premium video cards.
You can see this on the cheaper cards by observing the unpopulated bond pads on
circuit boards, and gamers and the like will be familiar with
cut-a-trace/resolder-a- resistor sidegrades of video cards. Vista's
content-protection requirements eliminate this one-size-fits-all design,
banning the use of separate TV-out encoders, DVI circuitry, RAMDACs, and other
discretionary add-ons.  Everything has to be custom-designed and laid out so
that there are no unnecessary accessible signal links on the board.  This means
that a low-cost card isn't just a high-cost card with components omitted, and
conversely a high-cost card isn't just a low-cost card with additional
discretionary components added, each one has to be a completely custom design
created to ensure that no signal on the board is accessible.

This extends beyond simple board design all the way down to chip design.
Instead of adding an external DVI chip, it now has to be integrated into the
graphics chip, along with any other functionality normally supplied by an
external chip.  So instead of varying video card cost based on optional
components, the chipset vendor now has to integrate everything into a one-
size-fits-all premium-featured graphics chip, even if all the user wants is a
budget card for their kids' PC.

Increased Cost due to Requirement to License Unnecessary Third-party IP
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Protecting all of this precious premium content requires a lot of
additional technology.  Unfortunately much of this is owned by third parties
and requires additional licensing.  For example HDCP for HDMI is owned by
Intel, so in order to send a signal over HDMI you have to pay royalties to
Intel, even though you could do exactly the same thing for free over DVI. 
Similarly, since even AES-128 on a modern CPU isn't fast enough to encrypt
high-bandwidth content, companies are required to license the Intel-owned
Cascaded Cipher, an AES-128-based transform that's designed to offer a
generally similar level of security but with less processing overhead.

The need to obtain unnecessary technology licenses extends beyond basic
hardware IP.  In order to demonstrate their commitment to the cause, Microsoft
have recommended as part of their "robustness rules" that vendors license
third-party code obfuscation tools to provide virus-like stealth capabilities
for their device drivers in order to make it difficult to interfere with their
operations or reverse-engineer them. Vendors like Cloakware and Arxan have
actually added "robustness solutions" web pages to their sites in anticipation
of this lucrative market.  This must be a nightmare for device vendors, for
whom it's already enough of a task getting fully functional drivers deployed
without having to deal with adding stealth-virus-like technology on top of the
basic driver functionality.

Unnecessary CPU Resource Consumption
------------------------------------

In order to prevent tampering with in-system communications, all communication
flows have to be encrypted and/or authenticated.  For example content to video
cards has to be encrypted with AES-128.  This requirement for cryptography
extends beyond basic content encryption to encompass not just data flowing over
various buses but also command and control data flowing between software
components.  For example communications between user-mode and kernel-mode
components are authenticated with OMAC message authentication-code tags, at
considerable cost to both ends of the connection.

In order to prevent active attacks, device drivers are required to poll the
underlying hardware ever 30ms to ensure that everything appears kosher.  This
means that even with nothing else happening in the system, a mass of assorted
drivers has to wake up thirty times a second just to ensure that... nothing
continues to happen.  In addition to this polling, further device-specific
polling is also done, for example Vista polls video devices on each video frame
displayed in order to check that all of the grenade pins (tilt bits) are still
as they should be.

On-board graphics create an additional problem in that blocks of precious
content will end up stored in system memory, from where they could be paged to
disk.  In order to avoid this, Vista tags such pages with a special protection
bit indicating that they need to be encrypted before being paged out and
decrypted again after being paged in.  Vista doesn't provide any other pagefile
encryption, and will quite happily page banking PINs, credit card details,
private, personal data, and other sensitive information, in plaintext.  The
content-protection requirements make it fairly clear that in Microsoft's eyes a
frame of premium content is worth more than (say) a user's medical records or
their banking PIN.

In addition to the CPU costs, the desire to render data inaccessible at any
level means that video decompression can't be done in the CPU any more, since
there isn't sufficient CPU power available to both decompress the video and
encrypt the resulting uncompressed data stream to the video card.  As a result,
much of the decompression has to be integrated into the graphics chip. At a
minimum this includes IDCT, MPEG motion compensation, and the Windows Media
VC-1 codec.  As a corollary to the "Increased Hardware Costs" problem above,
this means that you can't ship a low-end graphics chip without video codec
support any more.

The inability to perform decoding in software also means that any premium-
content compression scheme not supported by the graphics hardware can't be
implemented.  If things like the Ogg video codec ever eventuate and get used
for premium content, they had better be done using something like Windows Media
VC-1 or they'll be a non-starter under Vista or Vista-approved hardware. This
is particularly troubling for the high-quality digital cinema (D-Cinema)
specification, which uses Motion JPEG2000 (MJ2K) because standard MPEG and
equivalents don't provide sufficient image quality.  Since JPEG2000 uses
wavelet-based compression rather than MPEG's DCT-based compression, and
wavelet-based compression isn't on the hardware codec list, it's not possible
to play back D-Cinema premium content.  Because *all* D-Cinema content will
(presumably) be premium content, the result is no playback at all until the
hardware support appears in PCs at some indeterminate point in the future.
Compare this to the situation with MPEG video, where early software codecs like
the XingMPEG en/decoder practically created the market for PC video. Today,
thanks to Vista's content protection, the opening up of new markets in this
manner would be impossible.

The high-end graphics and audio market are dominated entirely by gamers, who
will do anything to gain the tiniest bit of extra performance, like buying
Bigfoot Networks' $250 "Killer NIC" ethernet card in the hope that it'll help
reduce their network latency by a few milliseconds. These are people buying
$500-$1000 graphics and sound cards for which one single sale brings the device
vendors more than the few cents they get from the video/audio portion of an
entire roomful of integrated-graphics-and-sound PCs.  I wonder how this market
segment will react to knowing that their top-of-the-line hardware is being
hamstrung by all of the content-protection "features" that Vista hogties it
with?

Unnecessary Device Resource Consumption
---------------------------------------

As part of the bus-protection scheme, devices are required to implement AES-128
encryption in order to receive content from Vista.  This has to be done via a
hardware decryption engine on the graphics chip, which would typically be
implemented by throwing away a rendering pipeline or two to make room for the
AES engine.

Establishing the AES key with the device hardware requires further
cryptographic overhead, in this case a 2048-bit Diffie-Hellman key exchange. In
programmable devices this can be done (with considerable effort) in the device
(for example in programmable shader hardware), or more simply by throwing out a
few more rendering pipelines and implementing a public-key- cryptography engine
in the freed-up space.

Needless to say, the need to develop, test, and integrate encryption engines
into audio/video devices will only add to their cost, as covered in "Increased
Hardware Costs" above, and the fact that their losing precious performance in
order to accommodate Vista's content protection will make gamers less than
happy.

Final Thoughts
--------------
 "No amount of coordination will be successful unless it's designed with
the needs of the customer in mind.  Microsoft believes that a good user
experience is a requirement for adoption" -- Microsoft.

At the end of all this, the question remains: Why is Microsoft going to this
much trouble?  Ask most people what they picture when you use the term "premium
media player" and they'll respond with "A PVR" or "A DVD player" and not "A
Windows PC".  So why go to this much effort to try and turn the PC into
something that it's not?

In July 2006, Cory Doctorow published an analysis of the anti-competitive
nature of Apple's iTunes copy-restriction system ("Apple's Copy Protection
Isn't Just Bad For Consumers, It's Bad For Business", Cory Doctorow,
Information Week, 31 July 2006).  The only reason I can imagine why Microsoft
would put its programmers, device vendors, third-party developers, and
ultimately its customers, through this much pain is because once this copy
protection is entrenched, Microsoft will completely own the distribution
channel.  In the same way that Apple has managed to acquire a monopolistic
lock-in on their music distribution channel (an example being the Motorola ROKR
fiasco, which was so crippled by Apple-imposed restrictions that it was dead
the moment it appeared), so Microsoft will totally control the premium- content
distribution channel.  Not only will they be able to lock out any competitors,
but because they will then represent the only available distribution channel
they'll be able to dictate terms back to the content providers whose needs they
are nominally serving in the same way that Apple has already dictated terms
back to the music industry: Play by Apple's rules, or we won't carry your
content. The result will be a technologically enforced monopoly that makes
their current de-facto Windows monopoly seem like a velvet glove in comparison.

Overall, Vista's content-protection functionality seems like an astonishingly
short-sighted piece of engineering, concentrating entirely on content
protection with no consideration given to the enormous repercussions of the
measures employed.  It's something like the PC equivalent of the (hastily
dropped) proposal mooted in Europe to put RFID tags into high-value banknotes
as an anti-counterfeiting measure, completely ignoring the fact that the major
users of this technology would end up being criminals who would use it to
remotely identify the most lucrative robbery targets.

The worst thing about all of this is that there's no escape.  Hardware
manufacturers will have to drink the kool-aid (and the reference to mass
suicide here is deliberate [Note C]) in order to work with Vista: "There is no
requirement to sign the [content-protection] license; but without a
certificate, no premium content will be passed to the driver".  Of course as a
device manufacturer you can choose to opt out, if you don't mind your device
only ever being able to display low-quality, fuzzy, blurry video and audio when
premium content is present, while your competitors don't have this
(artificially-created) problem.

As a user, there is simply no escape.  Whether you use Windows Vista, Windows
XP, Windows 95, Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, Solaris (on x86), or almost any other OS,
Windows content protection will make your hardware more expensive, less
reliable, more difficult to program for, more difficult to support, more
vulnerable to hostile code, and with more compatibility problems.

Here's an offer to Microsoft: If we, the consumers, promise to never, ever,
ever buy a single HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc containing any precious premium
content [Note D], will you in exchange withhold this poison from the computer
industry?  Please?

Acknowledgements
----------------
 This document was put together with input from various sources,
including a number that requested that I keep their contributions anonymous (in
some cases I've simplified or rewritten some details to ensure that the
original, potentially traceable wording of non-public requirements docs isn't
used). Because it wasn't always possible to go back to the sources and verify
exact details, it's possible that there may be some inaccuracies present, which
I'm sure I'll hear about fairly quickly.  No doubt Microsoft (who won't want a
view of Vista as being broken by design to take root) will also provide their
spin on the details.

In addition to the material present here, I'd be interested in getting further
input both from people at Microsoft involved in implementing the content
protection measures and from device vendors who are required to implement the
hardware and driver software measures.  I know from the Microsoft sources that
contributed that many of them care deeply about providing the best possible
audio/video user experience for Vista users and are quite distressed about
having to spend time implementing large amounts of anti-functionality when it's
already hard enough to get things running smoothly without the intentional
crippling.  I'm always open to further input, and will keep all contributions
confidential unless you give me permission to repeat something. If you want to
encrypt things, my PGP key is linked from my home page,
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001.

Footnotes
---------
 Note A: I'll make a prediction at this point that, given that it's
trying to do the impossible, 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 that applies only to one piece of code (and can therefore
be quickly patched), 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.

Note B: I see some impressive class-action suits to follow if this revocation
mechanism is ever applied.  Perhaps Microsoft or the content providers will buy
everyone who owns a device that inadvertently leaks content and is then
disabled by the revocation process replacement hardware for their system. Some
contributors have commented that they can't see the revocation system ever
being used because the consumer backlash would be too enormous, but then the
legal backlash from not going ahead could be equally extreme.  For anyone who's
read "Guns of August", the situation seems a bit like pre-WWI Europe with
people sitting on step 1 of enormously complex battle plans that can't be
backed out of once triggered, no matter how obvious it is that going ahead with
them is a bad idea.  Driver revocation is a lose/lose situation for Microsoft,
they're in for some serious pain whether they do or they don't. Their lawyers
must have been asleep when they let themselves get painted into this particular
corner.

Note C: The "kool-aid" reference may be slightly unfamiliar to non-US readers,
it's a reference to the 1978 Jonestown mass-suicide in which Jim Jones'
followers drank Flavor Aid laced with poison in order to demonstrate their
dedication to the cause.  In popular usage the term "kool-aid" is substituted
for Flavor Aid because it has more brand recognition.

Note D: If I do ever want to play back premium content, I'll wait a few years
and then buy a $50 Chinese-made set-top player to do it, not a
$1000 Windows PC.  It's somewhat bizarre that I have to go to Communist
China in order to find vendors who actually understand the consumer's needs.
===

 /m

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