The “professionally paranoid” Peter Gutmann at Auckland University has ripped into Windows Vista Content Protection (VCP) and written a paper, well, a web page then, called A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection that makes for worrying reading. I’ve seen a number of pieces on the Digital Rights Management “features” that Microsoft has built into Vista but Gutmann’s is probably the best so far. It references hardware vendors and Microsoft’s own documentation and presents a not very appealing DRM vista.

Introduction to “A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection”:

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 ardware 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.