Virtualization May Break Vista DRM

Nom du Keyboard writes "An article in Computerworld posits that the reason Microsoft has flip-flopped on allowing all versions of Vista to be run in virtual machines, is that it breaks the Vista DRM beyond detection, or repair. So is every future advance in computer security and/or usability going to be held hostage to the gods of Hollywood and Digital Restrictions Management? 'Will encouraging consumer virtualization result in a major uptick in piracy? Not anytime soon, say analysts. One of the main obstacles is the massive size of VMs. Because they include the operating system, the simulated hardware, as well as the software and/or multimedia files, VMs can easily run in the tens of gigabytes, making them hard to exchange over the Internet. But DeGroot says that problem can be partly overcome with .zip and compression tools -- some, ironically, even supplied by Microsoft itself.'"

devil's advocate

It would be possible for Vista's DRM to be (relatively) secure if the virtualization software also supported DRM; this potentially opens the way for Microsoft to specify some virtual environments as "acceptable" for use with the Vista home versions.

Re:devil's advocate

Well the problem is that with virtualization. A guest OS is only as secure as its host OS. Which is why I presume that they don't want any WinXP or other machines that are lacking in the DRM department to be running Windows Vista virtual machines.

Another potentially real problem would be that vista as an actual OS in a computer runs slow as hell. People using virtual machines to 'test' Vista would end up with an even slower crummier machine and thus taint their perceptions for the negative. Nothing kills a product faster than the good old 'Word of Mouth' and there has been plenty badmouthing of Vista by all levels of tech support (not sales people though they gotta sell those Vista pieces of crap any way they can.

In short, the only 'acceptable' virtual environment for Vista would probably be Vista itself. They want to lock you into this crappy and crazy DRM scheme that they probably cooked up with Hollywood and hardware vendors to keep people on the upgrade treadmill indefinitely. (since if you cant watch the latest movies you need to upgrade to a computer that can run Vista, which means probably buying a whole new computer which means whole new hardware...)

Re:devil's advocate

Another potentially real problem would be that vista as an actual OS in a computer runs slow as hell. People using virtual machines to 'test' Vista would end up with an even slower crummier machine and thus taint their perceptions for the negative. Nothing kills a product faster than the good old 'Word of Mouth' and there has been plenty badmouthing of Vista by all levels of tech support (not sales people though they gotta sell those Vista pieces of crap any way they can.

I have as much reason to hate MS's operating systems as the next guy. No, scratch that, I have vastly more reason to hate MS's OS's than the next guy, having watched them attempt to undermine and destroy OS/2 back in the early 90's, back before it become fashionable to hate MS OS's. I remember having to put up with the constantly shifting Win32s extensions for Windows 3.1, which were modified for the sole purpose of breaking OS/2 compatibility. Or their (then new) "per-processor license agreements". I haven't run a Windows machine as my desktop since 1992, having run OS/2, Linux, and Mac OS X (in that order) since that time.

As such, it really pains me greatly to say -- Vista under virtualization is surprisingly decent and well behaved. I've been running the 64-bit Business Edition of Vista inside VMware Fusion on a new 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 2GB of RAM, and it's surprisingly quick and agile. Sure, I don't get Aero (which just looks bad to me anyhow -- honestly, how is an alpha-blended window title a good thing?), and I'm not using it to play games, and I don't use it to browse the web or do e-mail or digital media, but overall it has been very well behaved, and has been surprisingly quick to boot and run. I've even experimented with it running digital video, and the performance has been very good.

Now of course, I can see why they'd be worried about their DRM stance. As the VMware audio and video go through a virtualized driver/device to the Mac's hardware, it would be easy to use readily available tools to hijack the stream (like Rogue Amoeba's excellent Audio Hijack Pro [rogueamoeba.com].

Now there is no way in hell I'd ever run Windows as my primary OS -- still think their UI scheme is garbage, and don't like the fact they have both systematically loaded their systems with crap to appease other corporations while punishing their own end-users (DRM), and that they've frequently promised features they've never delivered (anyone else remember when they promised a stand-alone MS-DOS v7? Or when they promised an OODBMS-based filesystem for Cairo starting back in 1996? That same filesystem they didn't deliver with Vista? Or how about when they finally decided it was time to introduce a new filesystem for the 9X line that instead of using a well-designed FS they owned all the rights to, like HPFS or NTFS, they instead exacerbated the problem with a band-aid solution and invented FAT32?). It's still not what I look for in a desktop OS, but as much as it pains me to say it, on a modern machine (and the latest MacBook is hardly top-of-the-line, although it's certainly quite a capable system), under virtualization, Vista actually runs pretty acceptably. If I had to use it as my day-to-day system (and I don't use it much at all -- it's there to support a development toolset for some embedded programming I'm peripherally involved in), it certainly wouldn't be slow or painful to use -- it's instantly responsive, and has so far behaved very well (i.e.: it hasn't crashed yet).

Strange but true.

Yaz.

Re:devil's advocate

So, basically, you don't do anything with it except stare at a classic interface. Wait, what was the purpose again?

To run the ATMEL development suite primarily, which I can't run otherwise, to program an ATMEL AT90USB microcontroller. It runs an IDE, compilers/linkers, AT90 simulator environment, Subversion, and the FLiP microcontroller board programmer.

I've experimented with a number of other applications, including IE7, WMP, and several of the other built-in tools. I still don't like how they organize their OS, or the crappy UI, but system responsiveness has not been an issue.

I don't advocate anyone use this as their gaming or media environment -- hell, I don't avocate anyone use Vista for anything. But in response to the GP's claim that someone might want to evaluate Vista under a VM and get a poor opinion of its performance, Vista 64-bit actually stands up quite well under virtualization, at least on my system.

(I will note here that the 64-bit version of Vista appears to run slightly quicker than the 32-bit version on my MacBook, both under VMware Fusion, but I suppose YMMV).

Any other questions?

Yaz

Re:So let me get this straight..

LOL, you're upset with Vista and yet you rant about stuff that took place 10+ years ago. I don't see a single point other than DRM which is of recent relevance(which BTW *is* also present in MacOS.. which makes you a hypocrite? .. yeah i know what thats like) AAAAAND you run Vista when your dev suite also seems to work with XP. Now, before you dotters start flaming. I dont give a fuck about either OS. But if you want to present an argument at least think first?

Want to reply? Try my a little reading comprehension first.

Point 1: I didn't say I'm upset with Vista. What I did say is that I don't like the Widows Platform. As such, moving from running my embedded dev tools on XP instead of Vista really makes no difference to me -- I don't like either one, have a free license for 64-bit Vista Business Edition, and so use it in those few instances where I have to.

Secondly, I was defending Vista as actually running quite well under VM. So where do you get the idea that I'm upset with Vista? I dislike Windows because the entire line has been poorly designed, I don't like the UI at all, and MS routinely over-promises and under-delivers (how is WinFS, which was most recently supposed to ship in Vista and was yanked roughly a year ago "10+ years ago"?), but I don't have any particular hatred for Vista beyond it being another flavour of Windows crap.

As for your accusation of hypocrisy, Mac OS X doesn't have anywhere near the level of RM Vista has, and OS X's DRM is pretty easy to avoid: just don't buy songs from the iTunes Music Store. It doesn't have secured pathways that require handshaking with your video display just to play encoded videos, and it doesn't have a kernel you can only plug signed, vendor-validated extensions/drivers into (and which refuses to ply such content if you don't). It simply has a DRM decryption module built into a codec. That's it. It's easy to void and remove, and doesn't impinge developers abilities to develop applications or drivers for the system. Don't like DRM on the Mac? Drag and Drop iTunes to the trash and it's effectively gone. Then go and play your media in VLC.

So, before you post, at least use some reading comprehension first before you go foaming at the mouth?

Yaz.

Re:devil's advocate

Well the problem is that with virtualization. A guest OS is only as secure as its host OS. Which is why I presume that they don't want any WinXP or other machines that are lacking in the DRM department to be running Windows Vista virtual machines.

This is the problem that "Trusted Computing" is supposed to solve. The TCG (formerly TCPA) has an entire architecture for this laid out, that enables a "trusted boot" process, in which only a computer (or platform in TCG parlance) which has exactly the right hardware and boots exactly the right BIOS, bootloader, and OS in exactly the right sequence is allowed access to certain content, DRM keys, etc.

This system does have a number of problems (and in its current state is still victim to virtualization), and as mentioned above is very difficult to implement, but Microsoft and others are pushing very hard to make it work.

Re:devil's advocate

Clearly, all these problems would be solved if the RIAA and MPAA sued Microsoft over their use of zip compression and its aiding in the piracy of audio... :D
Damn that's hard to say with a straight face.

Re:Nesting VMs

DRM is really one of the core components of Vista. It makes virtualization easier to defeat than you may realize. Go look up Palladium, renamed "Trusted Computing". It's hardware level authentication and software access control, and it's specifically designed to weld host authentication to file access. Those keys are hardware stored, on the motherboard, not software stored. And the encryption chips or CPU based encryption is not directly accessible to emulation, not without paying a genuinely unacceptable performance penalty in use.

Re:devil's advocate

You are mistaken. DRM cannot be secure.

The task is "allow A to send a message to B such that B can read it, but C cannot."

Under DRM, B and C are the same person.

Q.E.D.

The claim that a process will allow a customer to manage digital rights are akin to claims that a chemical process will allow a customer to change lead to gold. They are the claims of a fool, a charlatan, a newborn, or someone desperate. Or a devil's advocate.

Re:devil's advocate

I noted your "(relatively)." I disagree with the usage. I believe a coin made from lead that has been soaked in extra-sticky yellow paint is not (relatively) closer to being a coin made from gold than is a coin soaked in extra-degradable yellow paint, and I suspect you'd agree. Lead cannot be turned to gold by chemical or mechanical processes, full stop. No chemical or mechanical process makes lead "relatively" more golden than any other.

DRM can make it very inconvenient and very onerous for A to send a message to B, but it can never secure that message against interception by C where B and C are the same person. Telling worried rights-holders that one protocol is "less insecure", when security is impossible under all protocols, is a way to prey upon those worries and can be profitable, but never correct.

wow

Analysts say what probably happened behind the scenes is that Microsoft or one of its media partners decided at the last moment that encouraging consumers to use virtualization would, at least symbolically, be at odds with its attempts to enforce DRM.

"Microsoft doesn't want the music labels, TV networks and movie studios to come back to them and say that you are enabling this ability to move content around," said Mike McGuire, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

Not allowing virtualization because someone can share a multi-GB VM via Bittorrent and "break" DRM? Uh, I think there are easier ways to break it, but I stay away from DRM, so I could be wrong...

What next?

How long will it be until no one is allowed to run any executable at all that hasn't been signed by Microsoft, incase it's a DRM-breaking program?

Said before

Encryption allows Alice to send a message to Bob that can't be viewed by Jack. The problem with DRM is it uses encryption such that Bob and Jack are the same person.

Think about it.

Alice (the publisher of the song) is using encryption to ensure that you and only you (Bob) can recieve the message. But Jack (also you) is being prevented from viewing the message.

The only reason that DRM is making any kind of headway is because of the hand-waving around terms like "dual key cryptography" and "license management". When you get right down to it, the content producers exist to deliver content to me. Once I get it, the only thing limiting my distribution of that content is legal in nature - I'm afraid of getting sued or prosecuted, so I don't.

Speakers can be recorded, screens can be videotaped. DRM can make it more difficult to copy content, but it will NEVER make it impossible. And the sad part is, DRM frequently makes it more difficult to VIEW content legitimately.

As a good example, I just set up a Windows XP laptop for one of my sales associates. I spent an ungodly amount of time going thru "Genuine Advantage" this and "Genuine" that, along with some dozen or more reboots. It's riduculously annoying, especially when updating a new CentOS system takes a single line:


yum -y update; shutdown -r now;


Microsoft has it wrong, and it may well be their undoing to find this out.

Re:Said before

> "Encryption allows Alice to send a message to Bob that can't be viewed by Jack. The problem with DRM is it uses encryption such that Bob and Jack are the same person."

That's an extremely common view (as said in your comment title), but it's not true. Bob is your television, and you are Jack. I don't care how much cybernetics has progressed, we're not televisions yet, and we as human beings can't assimilate, store, and regurgitate digital content with any kind of quality.

> "Speakers can be recorded, screens can be videotaped."

Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy, and thus not in a position to compete with the real thing. Do you want to pirate an mpeg of some guy taping his television screen, or do you want to bittorrent the actual dvd contents? In the absense of the availablity of the dvd on bittorrent, would you be more inclined to buy the material? (For this paragraph, forget that you are a geek when I use words such as "quality" and when I presume you're a pirate - I'm talking about average users).

> "DRM can make it more difficult to copy content, but it will NEVER make it impossible."

Doesn't need to.

Or to frame the absurdity of that argument in an analogy that I feel works well: "Police can make it difficult to commit crimes (and not get caught), but they'll never make it impossible. Therefore we police are futile. When will they learn?"

> "And the sad part is, DRM frequently makes it more difficult to VIEW content legitimately."

No argument. We should be thankful that they have as difficult a time picking a DRM standard as they do. Fragmentation impedes their progress in locking everything down: CDs versus DVDs for instance.

Re:Said before

. It gets around DRM, but people will still want the superior DRMed version.

The millions of people pirating 128kbit crummy sounding MP3s and horribly compressed DivX copies of movies would seemingly be in complete disagreement with that statement. People downloading pirated content don't care so much about quality. Those who care about quality tend to also be the kind of people who also prefer legitimate copies, DRM or not.

Re:Said before

How? Ok, you get your HD cam out and record a plasma screen viewing of a Blu-ray disc. This is going to "kill drm"? No, this is going to result in poorer quality. This poorer copy is not going to kill drm. It gets around DRM, but people will still want the superior DRMed version.

Have you looked at any of the DVD rips floating around the net? 99.99% are reduced quality from the original. Most of the time it is a full-blown re-encode down to ~700MB (size of one CD), if you are lucky it is re-encoded down to 1.4GB (size of 2 CDs) and if you are in the midst of quality freaks, then it is just re-encoded down to 4.3GB (size of a single-layer DVD).

At the rate technology is progressing, somebody with a HD projector, a HD camcorder and a few extra lenses and filters will be able to do an analog capture that easily satisfies the average guy with a 50" LCD display.

It sure helps that even today all of the satellite HD signals are highly degraded, often re-encoding from 1920x1080 to 1280x1080 and the vast majority of the viewers don't give a damn. Even the broadcast networks do shitty job, Fox is bitrate starved for no good reason, running their stuff at roughly 10Mbps when the available bandwidth over the air is just under 20Mbps. NBC and ABC are only a little bit better. Only CBS seems to give a crap about the quality of their broadcasts.

So, either consumer standards are going to have get a LOT higher or pricing on DRM'd products is going to have get a LOT cheaper if they want to compete with the quality level available via "free."

All that assumes that no bored grad students ever take an electron-tunneling microscope to the "tamper-proof" chips in these DRM systems and extracts the keys necessary to do the decrypt at the digital level. Nowadays that's not particularly expensive to do.

Re:Said before

"Because for the first time, virtually any copyrighted work can be perfectly copied at the click of a button, and distributed with close to zero effort. Without DRM, you could make a fully perfect copy of an HD movie in less than an hour. Prior to mass-market digital technology, it took a lot of time and/or a lot of money to make a copy of something, and that copy was almost certainly going to be of lesser quality, and distribution beyond people you have physical contact with was quite expensive and/or time consuming."

So your saying that, new technology exists which makes distribution of content much cheaper...
And yet content producers want to charge the same or more for this cheaper to distribute content? While also restricting the customer more than they did with earlier distrbution methods? It looks like their business model is becoming obsolete, and theyre just trying to shore it up by restricting their own customers.

Why not sell a product/service that cannot be easily reproduced, such that your actually providing value for money... Movies shown in a cinema spring to mind, the cost of a cinema size screen and sound system is beyond the means of most people. And then there's live concerts for music.
You cant clone a live concert, because you cannot produce exact replicas of the artists (yet?) and the cost of setting up a bootleg cinema would be too high to be worth the hassle.
If you want to sell movies on dvd, they need to be priced such that copying them is not viable, and yes that is possible. Movie companies have access to factories where DVDs are mass produced at a cost of 1 or 2 cents each, no pirate group would be able to obtain blank media that cheaply, let alone the time and effort needed to write to it.

In short, piracy only exists because the original media is disproportionately priced compared to its production cost. DRM exists not as a solution to piracy, but as a method to wring more money out of their paying customers.

The advantage of digital for piracy

The advantage of digital for piracy is not that you can get a perfect copy. Perfection is not the goal in piracy. In many cases a camcorder shooting a screen is fine. Instead, the advantage of digital is that the quality is not degraded further as an infinite number of generations are made. Traditional pirates were limited to making 2 to 5 generations of VHS tapes because after that, almost nothing was left of the original movie. But an analog ripped (not cracked) MPEG file can be traded all over the world without any further single bit errors (although some of that will happen at times). The internet scares the content industry because of the speed (the latest release can be in the hands of millions before the big opening). Digital scares them because it enables the multi generational sharing as we already see in P2P. The problem is, they are fixated on encryption, which is at best going to prevent the average Joe from making a perfect copy and sharing with his neighbor across the street. When Joe finally figures out how to make an analog rip or just shoots it off his screen with a camcorder, his neighbor might reject it because it's not perfect, but you can bet the world will eat it up via the internet.

Re:Said before

I think his point is that it doesn't matter, breaking the crypto is hard, there are easier ways - I can pull apart my LCD TV - oooh looky here 2000 odd wires along the top, 100 odd along the bottom, that and 3 8-bit A/Ds and I can recover an HD signal good enough to play back at full quality on another TV - doesn't even break and access method in the dmca sense since it's just sample data as it is - that's a fun weekend project for a bored hardware hacker, and a business proposition for a pirate

Point is it's not hard, IMHO crypto as a means to avoid piracy is a joke, there's no point until we DO get that encrypted tap straight into the brain - the reason it's there is to piss off and control the customer

Ridiculously annoying, and sometimes impossible

As a good example, I just set up a Windows XP laptop for one of my sales associates. I spent an ungodly amount of time going thru "Genuine Advantage" this and "Genuine" that, along with some dozen or more reboots. It's ridiculously annoying...

Being a generous IT worker, when an employee's machine goes bad I'll sometimes give them my own machine if they need something fast. Last time I did this, a copy of Vista which I purchased directly from Microsoft's website suddenly became "not genuine". Not wanting to fuss with it, hoping I'd be able to get my machine back and make my copy of Vista genuine again, I ended up passing the time frame (30 days?) allotted for using the OS, then was locked out with a red screen saying "this copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Business is not genuine". This statement was clearly a lie if taken literally, but discussing vocabulary destruction through marketing would be quite a digression.

So, I went back to using my dual-boot linux partition and another spare PC for my day-to-day work.

Fast forward a few weeks...

Last Friday I got my laptop back, put the hard disk back in, and what's this? Vista still said it was not genuine. I tried to re-activate online but it said I couldn't do that because that key had already been activated. (Gee, you think? Maybe when I bought it?) So, taking the only course left, I called Microsoft on the phone and entered a series of numbers about 30 digits long. When the computer couldn't validate my install it forwarded me to some Indian call center, a place I'm familiar with because I've had to do this process more than a few times.

But this time was different... (Don't get your hopes up, it wasn't different in a good way. I was on the phone with a Microsoft offshore call center, remember?) Not only was my personal system down, but apparently their whole call center system was down. They were unable to validate my install and told me I'd need to call back later after they got their system back up and running. Apparently there was no other backup call center online, I simply had to hang up and call back another time when their system was back up.

Back to my trusty dual-boot Linux partition with its `sudo bash -c 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && reboot'`, or my Mac with its `sudo bash -c 'softwareupdate -i -a && reboot'`

Oh, and Jim Allchin can kiss my ass. "It's rock solid and we're ready to ship." Rock solid as in paper weight. What good is a stable OS that won't let you use it?

Re:Said before

The Genuine Advantage always seemed like a $100 fix to a $5 problem. I don't understand why they just don't offer the customers at retail they same price they offer companies like Dell for the license or even something at 2-3x times the price. You would find people a lot less willing to pirate Windows if it costs $40 instead of $220. They could get rid of all those people they have for licensing support and whole sections of their software engineers, I'm sure that would make up a large portion of the $180 difference licensing price.

xkcd has to be mentioned here..

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/alice_and_bob.png [xkcd.com]

Tens of Gigs? No way. Try 10kilobytes.

Why would the file have to be so large? There's no need to exchange the entire VM file... just swap the key file which is produced after authentication. To explain, if two VMs are set up as identical (e.g. same HDD size, same virtual processor, same virtual RAM, same video card, etc.) they will produce the same hardware "hash". Once an authentic software ID has been used to unlock the first file, a file will be written to disk which contains an encrypted signature which authenticates the software and thus "unlocks" it. That same key, copied elsewhere to an otherwise identical environment, will also authenticate the other environment. Put another way, one key will unlock them both.

I'm sure there's a legal use for this. I just can't think of one...

No way

Will encouraging consumer virtualization result in a major uptick in piracy?

No way. I told my mom and my aunt not to trade those VMs and they listen to me.

I don't want to see them in jail.

Man just the blurb drives me nuts

Want DRM free computing???

www.ubuntu.com

Not the whole story

I believe that there's more to Microsoft's dislike of VM than simply DRM, and I think that they're hoping to be shielded by a bit of DRM FUD.

Last year I was in Taiwan running WinXP under VirtualPC - with the appropriate upgrades after Microsoft had bought the product from its creators - and I had zero trouble.

This year, I'm in Taiwan again, but this time I'm running WinXP under Parallels. Shortly after my use of the machine here on the internet, I got this message telling me that my hardware had significantly changed since the original installation and that I needed to re-validate - I don't recall the rest of the message, but it involved Genuine Advantage and suggestions of unusability. So, even though I'm not carrying my original box around with the keycode (would you??), I decided to be brave and tapped on the warning from the tray as instructed. Took me right to an MS page at what appeared to be Microsoft-Taiwan, and it was quite persistent that I should continue to be routed to some Chinese language page. Long story short, I got some embedded wizard launched, got the MS phone number for the USA (Bangalore notwithstanding), called in, got re-validated and woot, woot, woot.

It seems - very strongly to me - that the only thing that Microsoft could have detected was my location in a way that didn't make sense to them, and I think I triggered something that decided I had a pirated copy. I really haven't had any use of my machine or anything change in any other way to cause me to suspect anything else.

So, how long before business travellers - and we fill a lot of 747s, virtually all running Windows - picking up VM for one reason or another start pitching fits when they discover that they can go into a full-screen presentation and be tagged publicly as potential software pirates?

I couldn't understand why MS had a real problem with Vista under VM, but if the cause I posited is in fact true, then the problem Microsoft is worried about goes back to the XP codebase. Say anything about Vista's new codebase, but it's all from the same company..... so, I think DRM is a specious explanation but it allows them to hide behind something where they can try to claim some innocence regarding VM - when in fact the OS may be more seriously broken w.r.t. VM than they're admitting.

I hope *IAA keeps wasting thier money on DRM

These jerks think they define popular culture. They don't.

DRM doesn't work. [freshdv.com] People steal the stuff before it's encoded with the DRM. The key is always distributed with the content or recoverable.

DRM can't work. [wikipedia.org] Their attempts are hilarious. In order to be perceived by a human it has to be rendered in analog format, at which point capturing and encoding it in an open format is trivial in all cases.

DRM shouldn't work. [blogspot.com] If they won't sell me the content for the device I want to play it on when I want to play it where I want to play it, I'll convert it [blogspot.com] and to hell with what they think I should be allowed to do. Fair use.

DRM is a security risk. [slashdot.org] I will not surrender control of my PC to render your content.

The more they annoy people, the more visibility worthy indie acts [harveydanger.com] get. People will listen to their popmart derivative garbage less [magnatune.com].

I am personally opposed to straight pirating the stuff but I have to admit my conviction on the subject is wavering at this point.

You want irony?

I use "Microsoft Plus! Analog Recorder" to record albums from Yahoo! Unlimited with the cable from line-out to line-in trick, effectively ignoring Microsoft DRM with their own software.

Hazards of monopoly

Microsoft feels it has covered its baases. It owns the user base and it must move forward locking out any possible competitor. So they chase the chimera of secure distribution. At some point we can only hope linux's usability and market share provides a real challenge.

Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood

> So is every future advance in computer security and/or usability going to be held hostage to the gods of Hollywood
> and Digital Restrictions Management?

Microsoft has nothing to do with Hollywood. There are waiters in Hollywood who have forgotten more about movies than anyone at Microsoft will ever know. Even the accountants use Macs here in California.

Microsoft does not even make a movie player that plays the standard format. Calling Windows Media Player or Zune a movie player is like saying Microsoft Word is a Web browser because it can also display text and images. That is a very unsophisticated view that you can't sell to someone who actually knows how the Web works. Well, in Hollywood, they know how movies work. MPEG-4 was coming for many years, then it was standardized, then it became the format in iTunes+iPod, then the iPod took off. MPEG-4 is also HD DVD and Blu-Ray and AppleTV and iPhone and PSP. MPEG-4 is also the standardization of the QuickTime format which all the content creation tools are built around, even those like Avid that compete with Apple, so it arrived already having mature development tools. One day there was a QuickTime update and all of my tools could now generate MPEG-4 H.264 as if they had always known what it was. Further there is a free open source MPEG-4 streaming server that runs on every Unix and also Windows, it also has no streaming tax. Finally, most of all, MPEG-4 has no "content tax" while Microsoft's Windows Media business model depends on a content tax and everybody in both music and movie industry already knows better than that. All this happened already with sheet music and player pianos 100 years ago. Nobody is going to use an encoder that spits out a file which you can't copy or share without paying a tax to Microsoft, because everybody wants their movie or album to sell 100 million copies (even if it actually has no chance) so when Microsoft says aw it's only a penny per copy, people do the math and say no you are raping me with that, I can buy an MPEG-4 encoder for $20 and use it to make all the copies I want and not owe anybody anything why don't I just do that? And MPEG-4 just happens to already be integrated into all my tools and integrated into the hardware of consumer video playback so there was never any there there with Microsoft and movies. Even if they built a technically sound system or one that had a cost advantage, they would have to overcome the fact that nobody wants to work with the evil typewriter company.

All you are seeing here is another way that Windows sucks. Core computing functionality that customers use and want and even need to stabilize their Windows software on a real operating system is falling victim to Microsoft's lack of focus and hopeless star fucking. Why isn't Windows ready to be a good typewriter today? Because of its magic DRM.

BZZZT!

Saying it's because of what the MAFIAA will say is a fucking cop-out. Why would you want anyone to virtualize your $100 - $400 operating system when they can just buy a new one? Especially with their Draconian licensing agreements. They want to pass the buck, plain and simple, and the MPAA/RIAA are more than willing to take that buck and run with it.

"Content provider revolt" is a pitiful excuse that no one with a brain really buys.

What about Vista Business or Vista Ultimate?

Apparently Vista Business and Vista Ultimate are immune to DRM issue, as their EULA does allow them to be run under VM. I smell a fish here.

AH HAH! More hardware

I was originally floored by the amount of hardware required to run Vista. So now with all the eye candy brought on in Vista, I was wondering...

"What could MSFT do next to require me to once again throw out my computer and buy the latest and greatest hardware in 2008 or 2009?"

Virtualization. MSFT Vista 4.0 or 3.51 or 95/98 or 2009... Would require:

Min of 1GB of RAM.
1TB HD (supplied by FibreChannel disk).
Quad Core CPU
Dual Core GPU.

All I wanted was to be able to surf the web and play Civ. I now require the computational power of an IBM p590.

Disappointing

I thought the article might have something to do with virtualizing HDCP to fool Vista-VM into thinking the DVR connected to it was a proper protected video path. Now that would have been interesting.

Come On...

Ok, I know we bash Microsoft all the time, but...

"that problem can be partly overcome with .zip and compression tools -- some, ironically, even supplied by Microsoft itself" ???

Come on, that's the most worthless statement I've heard in like a month. What the fuck was the point of that little jab? Microsoft makes compression tools... that can be used to compress something that Microsoft doesn't like! And some compression tools... run on WINDOWS, a Microsoft PRODUCT even! Holy crap they must be so pissed at themselves right now for going along with that whole compression thing. How blind could they have been!?

In other news, people can use their brains to think of shit they don't wanna think about! They don't want to think about it and yet their brains are being used to think of it anyway! That's just so ironic...

DeGroot?

Who is DeGroot? His name appeared in the article without ever mentioning who he was.

Choose something else

Ok, you've got many PCs most of which run Windows XP [nytimes.com]. They've been crashing every Exploit Wednesday [windowsitpro.com] since October. Every one has a license that was paid for three times (six times under Software Assurance [microsoft.com]). You have seventeen core apps. Some of them are paid for several times. Some have a licensing server so that some people can use them when other people aren't, and come with a utility so that priority users can kick off nonpriority users. A couple of them are free. Four of them are nagware that came with your PCs or that you thought were a good idea at the time. One is an in-house app that only runs in a DOS box and accesses dBase files stored on your server. Every month a couple get pwned [theregister.co.uk] for no detectable reason.

Even if they don't run Windows [theregister.co.uk] you've paid over and over. You have to because they've made it happen what "enforcement" will happen if you don't. [microsoft.com]

Every software vendor you buy from makes it clear the software you bought is being split [symantecstore.com] into "basic" versions that include most of the features you use, and an "Enterprise" version that includes must have features you can't live without. Both new versions will be annual subscriptions instead of purchases. Naturally, the Premium version you require will cost many times what you already paid and the cost will be annual rather than once each. Of course they're entitled to this conversion of your purchase into a "revenue stream" because they've upgraded their product from an application to a "platform framework" that "optimizes" your "TCO".

You're thinking about investigating this multicore thing that people are talking about, but it seems impossible to reconcile the software licenses with multiple "cores" on one or more CPUs. You want to do server consolidation, but every server app has to be evaluated both by a professional enginner and by a hideously expensive team of lawyers who also want to audit every piece of software you've purchased since 1974. Your CPA wants to know why you licensed the same software 3-6 times for each PC, and why you're buying licenses for software that won't run on the PCs they're purchased for. And what's this entry for "SCO Linux licenses"? You live in dread of being audited [com.com] by jack-booted thugs, [bsa.org] not because you're pirating but because the danger of a paperwork snafu that destroys your budget is nearly certain and the slightest discrepancy is going to get you canned.

I have one question: What the hell are you thinking? Get off the train to crazy town. The free stuff [ubuntu.com] isn't just good, it's better. So much better that you're not going to believe you put up with this crap. If it's truly free you don't have to account for each copy/user/use/year/processor/incidence. It's not free because it's less worthy: it's free because you're not the first person to be disgusted by the experience you're having. Pay for support. Nobody ever got sued for terminating their support contract. Figure it out. The world has changed. The future is open.

Windows? Isn't that for flabby old men?

who cares.

Can not figure why Microsoft forbids VM

Virtualization May Break Vista DRM I can not figure out why Microsoft forbids having a Virtual Machine running some versions of Vista, but permits other versions of Vista to indeed be run by a VM. All of the anti-virus companies ( Symantec, Mcaffee, ZoneAlarm ) are working on VM anti-virus. This is because Microsoft has locked them out of modifiying the "kernel" of "Windows Vista 64-bit" . The process will be: turn on machine boot bios boot Super Norton Anti-virus Virtual Machine boot Windows Vista It is not clear to me that using a VM makes the defeat of DRM any easier than the current approach of defeating DRM. DRM hacks are in the news weekly. The hackers do not need a VM for anything. The real organized state (with an army and airforce and everything) has more than enough resources to copy and counterfeit any DRM protected software. If this cost is millions of dollars then that is just spent in the research and development budget. DRM only defeats home users in North America and Europe. The rest of the world would find the concept of paying full price for movies (or software) a silly joke. The obvious use of a Vista VM would be as a sandbox for safe internet browsing. This would be a tremendous benefit to users, from beginners to experts. Why forbid running some versions of Vista in a Virtual Machine and then not explain the reason?

Its about content path, no VM images

Gah.

Is stupidity abound or something? The comment from the article about copying multi gigabyte images is ludicrous and makes one ask if the guy has ever used a VM let alone knows anything about the basics of DRM.

First things firsts. Virtualization means that the physical hardware and virtual hardware are not linked. That means, in no simpler language, if you want to use a TV, monitor recording device or whatnot to view your VM: you can, and the VM doesn't know. This is a technological threat to DRM implementations inside a VM, because they cant guarentee the path outside the VM.

Why you would copy potentially dangerous VM images from one PC to another when you could simple capture the output, i don't know.

Once upon a time NES ROM carts implemented their own I/O multiplexing - the vast majority still aren't emulated today because it's tedious work. Guest OSes inside VMs will continue to find ways of obfuscating their data (after all the guest inside a VM doesn't even have to be the same architecture as the host!)... its anybody's game once you're outside of the Guest.

MS don't want people to virtualize their software for the same reason DRM is a CEOs best friend: they can charge more for less restrictions.

If you have to pay $100 extra for the Ultimate or Pro versions of Vista to get virtualization, and people want virtualization, it can be seen as a valuable extra. Extras, not to be confused with added value, increase price premiums through added cost to the purchasing party.

However, the meat of the issue is not that people spoke out about DRM in such obvious and clear cut language, touting the anti-competitive stance MS has taken, but bloggers and writers are steering the focus to Linux which is offering a mirad of virtualizations for free. The only sensible stance is to do the same - just like MS did with VirtualPC... MS can't afford to be completely leapfrogged in any area.

The thing the irks me is that people are constantly barking up the wrong tree with regards to industry ties with companies and DRM. The "MAFIAA" (as it's been put) is convincing companies to make DRM provisions, but they can't force the implementation on to end users if companies can't/don't want to/disagree. MS allowing virtualization is nothing more than a technology response to Linux. No one is warming to DRM, DRM is not dying any time soon. This is market forces at work. Granted market forces are slow, and cause no end of problems for us now...

Only need the VMs once...

The reasoning "It's not feasible to copy and distribute media that way because you need to distribute the VMs too" is flawed. If you wanted to re-emulate the entire viewing, then yes, you'd need the VMs etc. But what you want is the media - and since you already have that data sitting inside your VM plus the snapshop (remember that the VM needs to simulate everything) it should be possible to either record the thing with an authentic (read simulated hardware behaves as if it had DRM) VM and then use a modified VM (which is nearly identical in behaviour, when it comes to input from the Guest OS, but lacks the DRM protection) or use an already "misbehaving" VM (which pretends to have DRM protection, but does not) to run the Gues OS in the first place - and then extract the media from the snapshop/running system. More complex? Yes. Impossible to do for us geeks. Hell, no!

So what?

Will encouraging consumer virtualization result in a major uptick in piracy?

No, because DRM doesn't hinder piracy in the first place.

Dont forget Application Virtualization

SVS and Softgrid can also be used to get around a lot of the DRM and registration nonsence.

I've done this

Wanting a VM of Vista, I've installed it on a 15gb vm then changed to the disk to a dynamic
disk, compressed it, then compressed it again to a .sfx to an overall size of just over 3Gb.

Small enough to fit on a dvd-r for a portable vm of vista.

Now I have to extract it onto the host computer but it doesn't extract to over 5Gb.

An 8Gb memory stick would be even better.

Better alternative to virtualization

I use virtual machines regularly, but I use them to compensate for bad software uninstallation process. And that some software requires manual changes at the system-level (IIS or database settings). Hopefully, VMs will be limited to very specialized cases (server software farms? QA testing?) in the future instead of desktop environments.

I always thought a better solution is some sort of option where a process got an set of directories. For example, it think it is writing files to c:\windows and registry entries to wherever -- but they would really go into a local registry and directory tree just for that application. The OS would merge the two at runtime, so I could just delete one directory and the application would be gone. Or I could have the application think that a system-level configuration was set to whatever way it liked.

Irony

I will call this irony.I have no other word at the moment because I am not privy to the decision makers at MS. I run Mac OSX and I just want the Basic version in Parallells. Aero, I have Aqua. Sidebar- I have Dashboard. Security- I have obscurity. I just want basic windows compatibility and nothing else. Moreover, since I am running one OS already, I want the version with smallest footprint to dedicate more resources to that pesky program that has no OS X port.

But is it illegal

I feel the need to check my local legislation to see if doing this counts as circumvention and if so in what ways? Especially if you have a license for each item of software used and they are the only instances of each that you use.

you say "break DRM" like it was a bad thing

when in fact there is no higher calling.

Re:Huh??

A remedial lesson in file compression is in order for you.

Re:Whats more likely

computerworld is trolling slashdot with rediculous reasoning to drum up hits and ad revenue [...] DRM does not kill babies. DRM was not responsible for the holocaust

Personally, I thought the bit about the Holocaust and the baby-killing was the best part of TFA.

Re:Huh??

You're probably right, but "zip" might do a stellar job on the patch file which is the binary difference of the VM vs. a vanilla VM immediately before installing the media.

bsdiff [daemonology.net] (yes, that is the correct link, I didn't pick the domain name, just Google "binary diff" to check) doesn't seem quite right for creating the patch file, considering its memory requirements, but I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to work something up...

Re:Whats more likely

no, but DRM is the reason my $7000 has a broken hdmi port - firmware error because of an errornous signal sent by a digital TV channel and hdcp shit itself and disabled my port. so i've got 7000 reasons to be pissed off over having to wait 2 months for a new board to be sent from japan to fix it.

JVC hdtv, name and shame.

Re:REPLY TO THIS COMMENT WITH A TROLL, PLEASE!!!

Ron Paul isn't a troll. Necromancer maybe, or Icke style Reptoid or something, but no troll. Probably a necromancer.

Honestly though, doesn't Michael Chertoff look like a necromancer? Google him and find a picture (the first one on wiki is nice) and picture him holding up a skull commanding the zombie hoards. Makes me giddy like a schoolgirl, but I have issues. ;-)

Re:Whats more likely

DRM was not responsible for the holocaust

Digital Race Management?