My Vista AACS Rant, posted on TWiT SecurityNow

[iansl]

SecurityNow (twit.tv/sn) just did a podcast about Peter Guteman's (I think that's howya spellit) article on the costs of Vista copy protection. My comment on this particularly great piodcast below...and what I'd like to see and what I didn't like when I saw what Vista did...er does...I'm running RC2 right now...

I concur, that was a great episode. It was aprt of my run-my-Zen-battery-completely-dead-because-it's-not-a-school-day podcast marathon and it gave me a satisfactory sense of rage at the big M$. So THAT is why you can't get a Dell laptop for cheap anymore...maybe...which is annoying since I'm trying to find a sub-$500 laptop that still works well for a friend.

Bu anyway, I'm dual-booting Vista (RC2) and XP and even though Vista is annoyingly cramped on a 12GB partition heretofore reserved by Dell for a Norton Ghost (trial!?!) recovery image, I think I'll be dual-booting for awhile yet between XP and Vista, even if M$ does give me a copy of Vista along with the copy of Office 2K7 Pro that they're having out to everyone who comes to their launch event in San Antonio, TX February 27th.

Why?

Content protection. First off, it seems that the DVD codec isn't available for RC2 Vista...so I have to boot back into WinXP to get DVDs to play. And since Vista mucked with my MBR I'm thinking Dell MediaDirect is now inaccessible...need to call 'em on that (Dell prob'ly)...oy...

Second, my "HD" SigmaTel audio, which IIRC did go happily along with M$ DRM stuff...>:(...is now relegated to having no selectable inputs on Vista. Audacity's input selection box, I repeat, is GREYED OUT. I an and have used a mc on Vista and it works well, but the sound subsystem is much more locked down than XP. I have to reboot to use Tunebite so I can put my Yahoo Unlimited (fair use! I bought a 2-year subscription to their To Go service!) tracks onto my other family members' lesser MP3 players (among them a MuVo Mix by Creative). Because the audio driver is even more locked down than before. Ahhh, when Stereo Out was actually available...those were the good old days when I used my RealTek-powered HP media center...er hp media center.

The third thing relates to performance. In XP my laptop (GMA 950, Core Duo T2050, 1GB RAM, not shabby at all for a fairly budget box) runs a DX9 game called Bandits: Phoenix Rising perfectly at native resolution. On Vista the game is relatively unstable and runs at maybe 10-15 fps. ECH! My media center, with a GeForce4 Ti4200 64MB runs the game perfectly at 1600x1200!

Similar but different on Need For Speed Undergound 2's demo: XP runs it much, MUCH better than Vista.

Now maybe the performance issues are due to not-quite-ready drivers, but I'd think it'd be more due to those onerous CPU\graphics-hogging crypto computations. Or am I being as paranoid as M$? But I'm not...the audio interface change proves that.

Sorry for the long post but in a nutshell, all agreed on the SN 'casts these last two weeks. I hope Ubuntu becomes easy-to-use even for file sharing...the network kind... (it was BAD on Breezy Badger IIRC...you had to mantually edit the SAMBA config file and access it via su etc...I switched to Win2K, then XP, because of this) and has an accessory program that plays DVDs for like $20 and supports high-capacity DD-burning (Blu-Ray makes a nice storage medium...) but TOTALLY eschews AACS and maybe even eye candy and suchlike in favor of being able to run on the same class of ocmputer that ran Windows 2000 well. In other words, if someone (Ubuntu or...better...Google!) put out a 2007-class OS that would run well on an Athlon 750 with 128MB of memory, I'd be totally behind 'em.Wonder if anyone realized how many PCs are now made obsolete by the upgrade, which is quite steep system-requirement-wise, to Vista?

To be continued...now to bed...