My friends are doubtless tired of hearing me whine about the ridiculous amount of power that the content providers and their muscle, the RIAA & MPAA, have over us, the consumers.
We seem to be heading down a path where our use of content that we have purchased is being more and more tightly constrained and any concept of "fair use" seems to be going out the window.
Look at DVDs, until "DVD Jon" and friends brought out DeCSS, if you were using Linux and had a DVD drive in your machine then you were shit out of luck because there was no software on Linux that would allow the playback of DVD content.
Now, you have presumably purchased the DVD and a DVD drive, but, due to licensing issues you could not legally make use of the disc….
Now with the next-gen HD formats we have HDCP, which mandates that a secure, encrypted path must exist between the "player" and the "display device" in order to play full high-definition content. Too friggin’ bad if you own a high-def TV that doesn’t support HDCP, too bad if your computer has a graphics card that doesn’t support HDCP (mind you HDCP video cards are only just coming out now).
All of this crap is due to the absolute, gut wrenching, paranoia that the content companies have over piracy.
I just read a story about 32bit Windows Vista being forced to disable full HD playback due to concerns by our content overlords that there are too many security holes in 32bit windows to be sure that no program is sniffing the video stream on its way to the display.
Now Microsoft have gone to great lengths to implement HDCP in windows and even then that is not good enough!!!!!
So what will happen is that people wanting to use Vista to play HD content will have to use 64bit Windows which means they need to buy a new 64bit CPU, say a Core 2 Duo or AMD64 and of course a new motherboard, maybe new RAM depending on their current system, perhaps a new power supply…
Screw it, just buy a whole new PC.
All in the name of Piracy!!!!
The scary thing is that Piracy seems to justify anything in the consumer space in much the same way as Terrorism is used to justify anything in the legal/political sphere…… Think about it….
NOTE: For the less internet savvy readers, Pwned is not a typo…
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Reactionary assumptions based on untruths! 🙂
A little bird (Microsoft’s Amir Majidimehr, corporate vice-president of Windows Digital Media devision who is in charge of the VC-1 codec and is an HD DVD industry heavyweight) who frequents a forum I regularly visit said this “rumour” was flat out wrong. 32-bit Windows Vista will be able to play HD DVD.
Here’s another story about it:
http://news.com.com/2061-10794_3-6109427.html?part=rss&tag=6109427&subj=news
Of course, since the information was coming from a Microsoft Employee at a Microsoft Event…
“The surprising disclosure was made by Senior Program Manager Steve Riley during a presentation on Windows Vista security at Tech.Ed 2006 Sydney today.”
One could be forgiven for thinking it might be legit.
Also the journalist who wrote the article spoke to Steve Riley and confirmed the information with someone he describes as “Microsoft Australia’s Security Chief”.
So, either the APC journalist mis-understood the information, or Microsoft have since “Clarified” their position. Either way, the text of my post, which is generally about the content owners trying to lock down content to an unreasonable degree, remains valid, even if the Microsoft situation seems to be a non-issue.