Peter Gutmans, a noted security expert talks about Windows Vista Content Protection. Quite disturbing and saddening. I’m about to buy a notebook for my mum, and all the one’s I’m looking at have Vista preinstalled. Pfutt.
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. Vista’s content-protection means that video images of premium content can be subtly altered, and there’s no safe 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.