Violate the laws of physics:Windows Vista DRM

SpoonMuffin · Jan 11, 2007

A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection
===================================================

Peter Gutmann, pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt
Last updated 8 January 2007
Distributed under the Creative Commons license (see Appendix)

(A note to readers: The reaction to what started out as an obscure
technical post to a security mailing list has been rather unexpected
and overwhelming, so I'm totally buried in Vista email at the moment.
Please be patient when expecting replies, and apologies if I can't
reply to all messages.

A second note, this was originally posted as a text file, which is
why it's not in HTML format. For technical reasons it's not easy
to transparently redirect accesses to this file to an HTML equivalent
because of the way this server is configured, and I don't want to
just move it because there are about 4.2 million links to it. Once I
figure out the appropriate mod_alias hack I'll replace it with an
HTML version).

Executive Summary
-----------------

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 hardware 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.

Executive Executive Summary
---------------------------

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the
longest suicide note in history [Note A].

Introduction
------------

This document looks purely at the cost of the technical portions of Vista's
content protection [Note B]. The political issues (under the heading of DRM)
have been examined in exhaustive detail elsewhere and won't be commented on
further, unless it's relevant to the cost analysis. However, one important
point that must be kept in mind when reading this document is that in order to
work, Vista's content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics,
something that's unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry
wishes it were possible [Note C]. This conundrum is displayed over and over
again in the Windows content-protection requirements, with manufacturers being
given no hard-and-fast guidelines but instead being instructed that they need
to display as much dedication as possible to the party line. The
documentation is peppered with sentences like:

"It is recommended that a graphics manufacturer go beyond the strict letter
of the specification and provide additional content-protection features,
because this demonstrates their strong intent to protect premium content".

This is an exceedingly strange way to write technical specifications, but is
dictated by the fact that what the spec is trying to achieve is fundamentally
impossible. Readers should keep this requirement to display appropriate
levels of dedication in mind when reading the following analysis [Note D].

Disabling of Functionality
--------------------------

Vista's content protection mechanism only allows protected content to be sent
over interfaces that also have content-protection facilities built in.
Currently the most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF
(Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format). Most newer audio cards, for example,
feature TOSlink digital optical output for high-quality sound reproduction,
and even the latest crop of motherboards with integrated audio provide at
least coax (and often optical) digital output. Since S/PDIF doesn't provide
any content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled when playing
protected content [Note E]. In other words if you've sunk a pile of money
into a high-end audio setup fed from an S/PDIF digital output, you won't be
able to use it with protected content.

Say you've just bought Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon", released as a
Super Audio CD (SACD) in its 30th anniversary edition in 2003, and you want to
play it under Vista. Since the S/PDIF link to your amplifier/speakers is
regarded as insecure for playing the SA content, Vista disables it, and you
end up hearing a performance by Marcel Marceau instead of Pink Floyd.

Similarly, component (YPbPr) video will be disabled by Vista's content
protection, so the same applies to a high-end video setup fed from component
video. What if you're lucky enough to have bought a video card that supports
HDMI digital video with HDCP content-protection? There's a good chance that
you'll have to go out and buy another video card that really *does* support
HDCP, because until quite recently no video card on the market actually
supported it even if the vendor's advertising claimed that it did. As the
site that first broke the story put it in their article "The Great HDCP
Fiasco" (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_nvidia_hdcp_support/) puts
it:

"None of the AGP or PCI-E graphics cards that you can buy today support HDCP
[...] If you've just spent $1000 on a pair of Radeon X1900 XT graphics cards
expecting to be able to playback HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies at 1920x1080
resolution in the future, you've just wasted your money [...] If you just
spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs expecting to be able to play
1920x1080 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies in the future, you've just wasted your
money".

(The two devices mentioned above are the premium supposedly-HDCP-enabled cards
made by the two major graphics chipset manufacturers ATI and nVidia). ATI was
later subject to a class-action lawsuit by its customers over this deception.
As late as August of 2006, when Sony announced its Blu-Ray drive for PCs, it
had to face the embarrassing fact that its Blu-Ray drive couldn't actually
play Blu-Ray disks in HD format ("First Blu-ray disc drive won't play Blu-ray
movies",
http://www.cnet.com.au/desktops/dvdburners/0,239029405,240091720,00.htm):

"Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that
support HDCP, this isn't yet possible".

In order to appropriately protect content, Vista will probably have to disable
any special device features that it can't directly control. For example many
sound cards built on C-Media chipsets (which in practice is the vast majority
of them) support Steinberg's ASIO (Audio Stream I/O), a digital audio
interface that completely bypasses the Windows audio mixer and other audio-
related driver software to provide more flexibility and much lower latency
than the Windows ones. ASIO support is standard for newer C-Media hardware,
see for example http://www.cmedia.com.tw/?q=en/PCI/CMI8788. Since ASIO
bypasses Windows' audio handling, it would probably have to be disabled, which
is problematic because audiophiles and professional musicians require ASIO
support specifically because of its much higher quality than the standard
Windows channels.

Indirect Disabling of Functionality
-----------------------------------

As well as overt disabling of functionality, there's also covert disabling of
functionality. For example PC voice communications rely on automatic echo
cancellation (AEC) in order to work. AEC requires feeding back a sample of
the audio mix into the echo cancellation subsystem, but with Vista's content
protection this isn't permitted any more because this might allow access to
premium content. What is permitted is a highly-degraded form of feedback that
might possibly still sort-of be enough for some sort of minimal echo
cancellation purposes.

The requirement to disable audio and video output plays havoc with standard
system operations, because the security policy used is a so-called "system
high" policy: The overall sensitivity level is that of the most sensitive data
present in the system. So the instant any audio derived from premium content
appears on your system, signal degradation and disabling of outputs will
occur. What makes this particularly entertaining is the fact that the
downgrading/disabling is dynamic, so if the premium-content signal is
intermittent or varies (for example music that fades out), various outputs and
output quality will fade in and out, or turn on and off, in sync. Normally
this behaviour would be a trigger for reinstalling device drivers or even a
warranty return of the affected hardware, but in this case it's just a signal
that everything is functioning as intended.

Decreased Playback Quality
--------------------------

Alongside the all-or-nothing approach of disabling output, Vista requires that
any interface that provides high-quality output degrade the signal quality
that passes through it if premium content is present. This is done through a
"constrictor" that downgrades the signal to a much lower-quality one, then up-
scales it again back to the original spec, but with a significant loss in
quality. So if you're using an expensive new LCD display fed from a high-
quality DVI signal on your video card and there's protected content present,
the picture you're going to see will be, as the spec puts it, "slightly
fuzzy", a bit like a 10-year-old CRT monitor that you picked up for $2 at a
yard sale [Note F]. In fact the specification specifically still allows for
old VGA analog outputs, but even that's only because disallowing them would
upset too many existing owners of analog monitors. In the future even analog
VGA output will probably have to be disabled. The only thing that seems to be
explicitly allowed is the extremely low-quality TV-out, provided that
Macrovision is applied to it.

The same deliberate degrading of playback quality applies to audio, with the
audio being downgraded to sound (from the spec) "fuzzy with less detail"
[Note G].

Amusingly, the Vista content protection docs say that it'll be left to
graphics chip manufacturers to differentiate their product based on
(deliberately degraded) video quality. This seems a bit like breaking the
legs of Olympic athletes and then rating them based on how fast they can
hobble on crutches.

The Microsoft specs say that only display devices with more than 520K pixels
will have their images degraded, but conveniently omit to mention that this
resolution, roughly 800x600, covers pretty much every output device that will
ever be used with Vista. The abolute minimum requirement for Vista Basic are
listed as 800x600 resolution (and an 800MHz Pentium III CPU with 512MB of RAM,
which seems, well, "wildly optimistic" is one term that springs to mind).
However that won't get you the Vista Aero interface, which makes a move to
Vista from XP more or less pointless. The minimum requirements for running
Aero on a Vista Premium PC are "a DX9 GPU, 128 MB of VRAM, Pixel Shader 2.0,
and minimum resolution 1024x768x32", and for Aero Glass it's even higher than
that. In addition the minimum resolution supported by a standard LCD panel is
1024x768 for a 15" LCD, and to get 800x600 you'd have to go back to a 10-year-
old 14" CRT monitor or something similar. So in practice the 520K pixel
requirement means that everything will fall into the degraded-image category.

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. For example the field of
medical imaging either bans outright or strongly frowns on any form of lossy
compression because artefacts introduced by the compression process can cause
mis-diagnoses and in extreme cases even become life-threatening. Consider a
medical IT worker who's using a medical imaging PC while listening to
audio/video played back by the computer. This scenario is already very
common, the CDROM drives installed in workplace PCs inevitably spend most of
their working lives playing music or MP3 CDs to drown out workplace noise.

Now obviously CDs aren't (yet) regarded as premium content and so won't
trigger Vista's content-protection measures, that's merely an example to
illustrate how common it is for users to play back audio/video content while
working. Let's say that instead of listening to music while they work, the
user may have a humorous video that a workmate sent them, or that they grabbed
from YouTube, playing in the background that, and that unbeknownst to them
this video is protected premium content. As a result, the video image will be
subtly altered by Vista's content protection, potentially creating exactly the
life-threatening situation that the medical industry has worked so hard to
avoid. The scary thing is that there's no easy 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 [Note H][Note I].

Elimination of Open-source Hardware Support
-------------------------------------------

In order to prevent the creation of hardware emulators of protected output
devices, Vista requires a Hardware Functionality Scan (HFS) that can be used
to uniquely fingerprint a hardware device to ensure that it's (probably)
genuine. In order to do this, the driver on the host PC performs an operation
in the hardware (for example rendering 3D content in a graphics card) that
produces a result that's unique to that device type.

In order for this to work, the spec requires that the operational details of
the device be kept confidential. Obviously anyone who knows enough about the
workings of a device to operate it and to write a third-party driver for it
(for example one for an open-source OS, or in general just any non-Windows OS)
will also know enough to fake the HFS process. The only way to protect the
HFS process therefore is to not release any technical details on the device
beyond a minimum required for web site reviews and comparison with other
products.

This potential "closing" of the PC's historically open platform is an
extremely worrying trend. A quarter of a century ago, IBM made the momentous
decision to make their PC an open platform by publishing complete hardware
details and allowing anyone to compete on the open market. Many small
companies, the traditional garage startup, got their start through this. This
openness is what created the PC industry, and the reason why most homes
(rather than just a few offices, as had been the case until then) have one or
more PCs sitting in a corner somewhere. This seems to be a return to the bad
old days of 25 years ago when only privileged insiders were able to
participate.

Elimination of Unified Drivers
------------------------------

The HFS process has another cost involved with it. Most hardware vendors have
(thankfully) moved to unified driver models instead of the plethora of
individual drivers that abounded some years ago. Since HFS requires unique
identification and handling of not just each device type (for example each
graphics chip) but each variant of each device type (for example each stepping
of each graphics chip) to handle the situation where a problem is found with
one variation of a device, it's no longer possible to create one-size-fits-all
drivers for an entire range of devices like the current
Catalyst/Detonator/ForceWare drivers. Every little variation of every device
type out there must now be individually accommodated in custom code in order
for the HFS process to be fully effective.

If a graphics chip is integrated directly into the motherboard and there's no
easy access to the device bus then the need for bus encryption (see
"Unnecessary CPU Resource Consumption" below) is removed. Because the
encryption requirement is so onerous, it's quite possible that this means of
providing graphics capabilities will suddenly become more popular after the
release of Vista. However, this leads to a problem: It's no longer possible
to tell if a graphics chip is situated on a plug-in card or attached to the
motherboard, since as far as the system is concerned they're both just devices
sitting on the AGP/PCIe bus. The solution to this problem is to make the two
deliberately incompatible, so that HFS can detect a chip on a plug-in card vs.
one on the motherboard. Again, this does nothing more than increase costs and
driver complexity.

Further problems occur with audio drivers. To the system, HDMI audio looks
like S/PDIF, a deliberate design decision to make handling of drivers easier.
In order to provide the ability to disable output, it's necessary to make HDMI
codecs deliberately incompatible with S/PDIF codecs, despite the fact that
they were specifically designed to appear identical in order to ease driver
support and reduce development costs.

Denial-of-Service via Driver/Device Revocation
----------------------------------------------

Once a weakness is found in a particular driver or device, that driver will
have its signature revoked by Microsoft, which means that it will cease to
function. Details on exactly what happens are a bit vague here, the specs
contain sentences like "the related driver would have to be revoked and a new
driver would have to be deployed", however presumably some minimum
functionality like generic 640x480 VGA support will still be available in
order for the system to boot.

What this means is that a report of a compromise of a particular driver or
device will cause all support for that device worldwide to be turned off until
a fix can be found [Note J]. Again, details are sketchy, but if it's a device
problem then presumably the device turns into a paperweight once it's revoked.
If it's an older device for which the vendor isn't interested in rewriting
their drivers (and in the fast-moving hardware market most devices enter
"legacy" status within a year or two of their replacement models becoming
available), all devices of that type worldwide become permanently unusable.

An example of this might be nVidia TNT2 video cards, which are still very
widely deployed in business environments where they're all that you need to
run Word or Outlook or Excel (or, for that matter, pretty much any non-gaming
application). The drivers for these cards haven't been updated for quite some
time for exactly that reason: You don't need the latest drivers for them
because they're not useful with current games any more (if you go to the
nVidia site and try and install any recent drivers, the installer will tell
you to go back and download much older drivers instead). If a TNT2 device
were found to be leaking content, it seems unlikely that nVidia would be
interested in reviving discontinued drivers that it hasn't touched for several
years, creating instant orphanware of the installed user base.

The threat of driver revocation is the ultimate nuclear option, the crack of
the commissars' pistols reminding the faithful of their duty [Note K]. The
exact details of the hammer that vendors will be hit with is buried in
confidential licensing agreements, but I've heard mention of multi-million
dollar fines and embargoes on further shipment of devices alongside the driver
revocation mentioned above.

This revocation can have unforeseen carry-on costs. Windows' anti-piracy
component, WGA, is tied to system hardware components. Windows allows you to
make a small number of system hardware changes after which you need to renew
your Windows license (the exact details of what you can and can't get away
with changing has been the subject of much debate). If a particular piece of
hardware is deactivated (even just temporarily while waiting for an updated
driver to work around a content leak) and you swap in a different video card
or sound card to avoid the problem, you risk triggering Windows' anti-piracy
measures, landing you in even more hot water. If you're forced to swap out a
major system component like a motherboard, you've instantly failed WGA
validation. Revocation of any kind of motherboard-integrated device
(practically every motherboard has some form of onboard audio, and all of the
cheaper ones have integrated video) would appear to have a serious negative
interaction with Windows' anti-piracy measures.

The details of what will happen if a motherboard contains unused onboard audio
capabilities and an additional sound card alongside it, and the motherboard
drivers are revoked, is unknown. Windows can't tell that there's nothing
connected to the onboard audio because the user prefers to use their M-Audio
Revolution 7.1 Surround Sound card instead, so it'll probably have to revoke
the motherboard drivers even though they're not used for anything. Since
virtually all motherboards contain onboard audio, this could prove quite
problematic.

An entirely different DoS problem that applies more to HDMI-enabled devices in
general has already surfaced in the form of, uhh, "DVI amplifiers", which take
as input an HDMI signal and output a DVI signal, amplifying it in the process.
Oh, and as a side-effect they forget to re-apply the HDCP protection to the
output. These devices are relatively simple to design and build using off-
the-shelf HDMI chips. Beyond the commercially-available models, individual
hardware hackers have built their own protection-strippers using chip samples
obtained from chip vendors. If you have the right credentials you can even
get hardware evaluation boards designed for testing and development that do
this sort of thing. And I won't even get into the territory of HD players
with non-HDMI digital outputs, for example ones that contain an HD-SDI (SMPTE
292M) interface. HD-SDI is an unencrypted digital link typically used in TV
studios but also available from various non-US sources as after-market
sidegrades for standard HD players, providing better-than-HDMI image quality
without the hassle of HDCP.

Now assume that the "DVI amplifier" manufacturer buys a truckload of HDMI
chips (they'll want to get as many as they can in one go because they probably
won't be able to go back and buy more when the chip vendor discovers what
they're being used for). Since this is a rogue device, it can be revoked...
along with hundreds of thousands or even millions of other consumer devices
that use the same chip. If they're feeling particularly nasty, they can
recycle the HDMI chips from junked TVs to ensure that the maximum possible
damage to the consumer base occurs. Engadget have a good overview of this
scenario at
http://www.engadget.com/2005/07/21/the-clicker-hdcps-shiny-red-button/.

(Exactly what will happen when a key is leaked depends on how the attackers
handle it. The way HD-DVD/Blu-Ray keying works is that a per-device key is
used to decrypt the title key on the disk, and the title key is then in turn
used to decrypt the content. So the chain of custody is Device key -> Title
key -> Content. This level of indirection allows an individual device to be
disabled by revoking the device key without making the disk unplayable on all
devices, since other device keys can still decrypt the title key and thus the
content (I've simplified this a bit to cut down the length of the explanation,
see the AACS specification for more details).

The device key is tied to a particular device/player/vendor, but the title key
is only tied to the content on disk. You can probably see where this is
going... by publishing the device key, the attacker can cause general mayhem
by forcing device revocation. On the other hand by publishing the title key
the attacker can release the content in an untraceable manner, since it's not
known which device key was used to leak the title key. In addition since
there's no way to un-publish the title key (encrypted content + title key =
unencrypted content), at that point it's game over for the content).

Decreased System Reliability
----------------------------

"Drivers must be extra-robust. Requires additional driver development to
isolate and protect sensitive code paths" -- ATI.

Vista's content protection requires that devices (hardware and software
drivers) set so-called "tilt bits" if they detect anything unusual. For
example if there are unusual voltage fluctuations, maybe some jitter on bus
signals, a slightly funny return code from a function call, a device register
that doesn't contain quite the value that was expected, or anything similar, a
tilt bit gets set. Such occurrences aren't too uncommon in a typical
computer. For example starting up or plugging in a bus-powered device may
cause a small glitch in power supply voltages, or drivers may not quite manage
device state as precisely as they think. Previously this was no problem - the
system was designed with a bit of resilience, and things will function as
normal. In other words small variances in performance are a normal part of
system functioning. Furthermore, the degree of variance can differ widely
across systems, with some handling large changes in system parameters and
others only small ones. One very obvious way to observe this is what happens
when a bunch of PCs get hit by a momentary power outage. Effects will vary
from powering down, to various types of crash, to nothing at all, all
triggered by exactly the same external event.

With the introduction of tilt bits, all of this designed-in resilience is
gone. Every little (normally unnoticeable) glitch is suddenly surfaced
because it could be a sign of a hack attack, with the required reaction being
that "Windows Vista will initiate a full reset of the graphics subsystem, so
everything will restart". The effect that these tilt bits will have on system
reliability should require no further explanation.

Content-protection "features" like tilt bits also have worrying denial-of-
service (DoS) implications. It's probably a good thing that modern malware is
created by programmers with the commercial interests of the phishing and spam
industries in mind rather than just creating as much havoc as possible. With
the number of easily-accessible grenade pins that Vista's content protection
provides, any piece of malware that decides to pull a few of them will cause
considerable damage. The homeland security implications of this seem quite
serious, since a tiny, easily-hidden piece of malware would be enough to
render a machine unusable, while the very nature of Vista's content protection
would make it almost impossible to determine why the denial-of-service is
occurring. Furthermore, the malware authors, who are taking advantage of
"content-protection" features, would be protected by the DMCA against any
attempts to reverse-engineer or disable the content-protection "features" that
they're abusing.

Even without deliberate abuse by malware, the homeland security implications
of an external agent being empowered to turn off your IT infrastructure in
response to a content leak discovered in some chipset that you coincidentally
happen to be using is a serious concern for potential Vista users. Non-US
governments are already nervous enough about using a US-supplied operating
system without having this remote DoS capability built into the operating
system. And like the medical-image-degradation issue, you won't find out
about this until it's too late, turning Vista PCs into ticking time bombs if
the revocation functionality is ever employed.

Like the medical-imaging degradation example given earlier, it's possible to
imagine all sorts of scenarios in which the tilt bits end up biting users.
Consider a warship operating in a combat zone and equipped with Vista PCs for
management of the vessel's critical functions which does nothing more wrong
that to suffer a severe jolt from a near miss, scrambling the bus just enough
to activate the tilt bits (without causing any other real damage). In one
famous incident in September 1997, Windows NT managed to disable the Aegis
missile cruiser USS Yorktown ("NT Leaves Navy "Smart Ship" dead in the water",
Government Computer News, 13 July 1998). Now Windows Vista can do the same
thing via a by-design feature of the OS [Note L]. This issue, unless it can
be clearly resolved, would make the use of Vista PCs unacceptable for any
applications that have any hint of unusual environmental conditions such as
high altitude, environmental variations, shock, and so on.

Increased Hardware Costs
------------------------

"Cannot go to market until it works to specification... potentially more
respins of hardware" -- ATI.

"This increases motherboard design costs, increases lead times, and reduces
OEM configuration flexibility. This cost is passed on to purchasers of
multimedia PCs and may delay availability of high-performance platforms" --
ATI.

Vista includes various requirements for "robustness" in which the content
industry, through "hardware robustness rules", dictates design requirements to
hardware manufacturers. The level of control the content producers have over
technical design details is nothing short of amazing. As security researcher
Ed Felten quoted from Microsoft documents on his freedom-to-tinker web site
about a year ago (http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=882):

"The evidence [of security] must be presented to Hollywood and other content
owners, and they must agree that it provides the required level of security.
Written proof from at least three of the major Hollywood studios is
required".

So if you design a new security system, you can't get it supported in Windows
Vista until well-known computer security experts like MGM, 20th Century-Fox,
and Disney give you the go-ahead (this gives a whole new meaning to the term
"Mickey-Mouse security"). It's absolutely astonishing to find paragraphs like
that in what are supposed to be Windows technical documents, since it gives
Hollywood studios veto rights over Windows security mechanisms.

As an example of these "robustness rules", only certain layouts of a board are
allowed in order to make it harder for outsiders to access parts of the board.
Possibly for the first time ever, computer design is being dictated not by
electronic design rules, physical layout requirements, and thermal issues, but
by the wishes of the content industry. Apart from the massive headache that
this poses to device manufacturers, it also imposes additional increased costs
beyond the ones incurred simply by having to lay out board designs in a
suboptimal manner. Video card manufacturers typically produce a one-size-
fits-all design (often a minimally-altered copy of the chipset vendor's
reference design, as illustrated by
http://www.trustedreviews.com/images/article/inline/2685-2.jpg, which shows
five virtually identical cards from different vendors with the only noticeable
difference being the logo on the heatsink), and then populate different
classes and price levels of cards in different ways. For example a low-end
card will have low-cost, minimal or absent TV-out encoders, DVI circuitry,
RAMDACs, and various other add-ons used to differentiate budget from premium
video cards. You can see this on the cheaper cards by observing the
unpopulated bond pads on circuit boards, and gamers and the like will be
familiar with cut-a- trace/resolder-a-resistor sidegrades of video cards.

An example of omitting components from a high-end card to create a mid-range
card is shown at
http://images.infoteldistributors.com/itemDetails/C261-3053/C261-3053-out3-hl.jpg.
Note the large red rectangular area to the far left of the card, this is where
the manufacturer has omitted a component to produce a lower-cost model. The
same thing is visible in the card at
http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q4/radeon-x1650xt/card.jpg. Conversely,
http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/video/radeon-8500/card-front.jpg shows an (at
the time it was released) top-of-the-line card with optional components
fitted, the chip to the left of the large square heatsink+fan handles video
encoding and can be added or removed (along with other optional components) to
create different levels of cards at different price points. The automotive
industry does the same thing, you have one basic model of each car type and
10,000 extras and options to suit everyone's needs and pockets.

Vista's content-protection requirements eliminate this one-size-fits-all
design, banning the use of separate TV-out encoders, DVI circuitry, RAMDACs,
and other discretionary add-ons because feeding unprotected video to these
optional external components would make it too easy to lift the signal off the
bus leading to the external component. So everything has to be custom-
designed and laid out so that there are no unnecessary accessible signal links
on the board. This means that a low-cost card isn't just a high-cost card
with components omitted, and conversely a high-cost card isn't just a low-cost
card with additional discretionary components added, each one has to be a
completely custom design created to ensure that no signal on the board is
accessible.

This extends beyond simple board design all the way down to chip design.
Instead of adding an external DVI chip, it now has to be integrated into the
graphics chip, along with any other functionality normally supplied by an
external chip. So instead of varying video card cost based on optional
components, the chipset vendor now has to integrate everything into a one-
size-fits-all premium-featured graphics chip, even if all the user wants is a
budget card for their kid's PC.

Increased Cost due to Requirement to License Unnecessary Third-party IP
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

"We've taken on more legal costs in copyright protection in the last six to
eight months than we have in any previous engagement. Each legal contract
sets a new precedent, and each new one builds on the previous one" -- ATI.

Protecting all of this precious premium content requires a lot of additional
technology. Unfortunately much of this is owned by third parties and requires
additional licensing. For example HDCP for HDMI is owned by Intel, so in
order to send a signal over HDMI you have to pay royalties to Intel, even
though you could do exactly the same thing for free over DVI. Similarly,
since even AES-128 on a modern CPU isn't fast enough to encrypt high-bandwidth
content, companies are required to license the Intel-owned Cascaded Cipher, an
AES-128-based transform that's designed to offer a generally similar level of
security but with less processing overhead.

The need to obtain unnecessary technology licenses extends beyond basic
hardware IP. In order to demonstrate their commitment to the cause, Microsoft
have recommended as part of their "robustness rules" that vendors license
third-party code obfuscation tools to provide virus-like stealth capabilities
for their device drivers in order to make it difficult to interfere with their
operations or reverse-engineer them. Vendors like Cloakware and Arxan have
actually added "robustness solutions" web pages to their sites in anticipation
of this lucrative market. This must be a nightmare for device vendors, for
whom it's already enough of a task getting fully functional drivers deployed
without having to deal with adding stealth-virus-like technology on top of the
basic driver functionality.

The robustness rules further complicate driver support by disallowing features
such as driver debugging facilities in shipping drivers. Most Windows XP
users will at one time or another have encountered a Windows crash message
indicating that some application that they were using has terminated
unexpectedly, and would they like to send debugging information to Microsoft
to help fix the problem. Some device vendors even implement their own custom
versions of this debugging support in their drivers, an example being ATI's
VPU Recover, which captures graphics diagnostic and debugging information to
send to ATI when a graphics device problem occurs. Since this debugging
functionality could leak content or content-related security information, it
can no longer be used with audio or video components, considerably
complicating vendors' driver support and software enhancement processes (the
ATI product manager referenced in the "Sources" section lists these additional
testing and support costs as "potentially the highest cost of all").

Unnecessary CPU Resource Consumption
------------------------------------

"Since [encryption] uses CPU cycles, an OEM may have to bump the speed grade
on the CPU to maintain equivalent multimedia performance. This cost is
passed on to purchasers of multimedia PCs" -- ATI.

In order to prevent tampering with in-system communications, all communication
flows have to be encrypted and/or authenticated. For example content sent to
video devices has to be encrypted with AES-128. This requirement for
cryptography extends beyond basic content encryption to encompass not just
data flowing over various buses but also command and control data flowing
between software components. For example communications between user-mode and
kernel-mode components are authenticated with OMAC message authentication-code
tags, at considerable cost to both ends of the connection. Needless to say,
this extremely CPU-intensive mechanism is a very painful way to provide
protection for content, and this fact has been known for many years. Twenty
years ago, in their work on the ABYSS security module, IBM researchers
concluded that the use of encrypted buses as a protection mechanism was
impractical (see their paper from the 1987 IEEE Symposium on Security and
Privacy).

In order to prevent active attacks, device drivers are required to poll the
underlying hardware every 30ms to ensure that everything appears kosher. This
means that even with nothing else happening in the system, a mass of assorted
drivers has to wake up thirty times a second just to ensure that... nothing
continues to happen. In addition to this polling, further device-specific
polling is also done, for example Vista polls video devices on each video
frame displayed in order to check that all of the grenade pins (tilt bits) are
still as they should be. We already have multiple reports from Vista
reviewers of playback problems with video and audio content, with video frames
dropped and audio stuttering even on high-end systems [Note M]. Time will
tell whether this problem is due to immature drivers or has been caused by the
overhead imposed by Vista's content protection mechanisms interfering with
playback. An indication of the level of complexity added to the software can
be seen by looking at a block diagram of Vista's Media Interoperability
Gateway (MIG). Of the eleven components that make up the MIG, only two (the
audio and video decoders) are actually used to render content. The remaining
nine are used to apply content-protection measures.

On-board graphics create an additional problem in that blocks of precious
content will end up stored in system memory, from where they could be paged to
disk. In order to avoid this, Vista tags such pages with a special protection
bit indicating that they need to be encrypted before being paged out and
decrypted again after being paged in. Vista doesn't provide any other
pagefile encryption, and will quite happily page banking PINs, credit card
details, private, personal data, and other sensitive information, in
plaintext. The content-protection requirements make it fairly clear that in
Microsoft's eyes a frame of premium content is worth more than (say) a user's
medical records or their banking PIN [Note N].

In addition to the CPU costs, the desire to render data inaccessible at any
level means that video decompression can't be done in the CPU any more, since
there isn't sufficient CPU power available to both decompress the video and
encrypt the resulting uncompressed data stream to the video card. As a
result, much of the decompression has to be integrated into the graphics chip.
At a minimum this includes IDCT, MPEG motion compensation, and the Windows
Media VC-1 codec (which is also DCT-based, so support via an IDCT core is
fairly easy). As a corollary to the "Increased Hardware Costs" problem above,
this means that you can't ship a low-end graphics chip without video codec
support any more.

The inability to perform decoding in software also means that any premium-
content compression scheme not supported by the graphics hardware can't be
implemented. If things like the Ogg video codec ever eventuate and get used
for premium content, they had better be done using something like Windows
Media VC-1 or they'll be a non-starter under Vista or Vista-approved hardware.
This is particularly troubling for the high-quality digital cinema (D-Cinema)
specification, which uses Motion JPEG2000 (MJ2K) because standard MPEG and
equivalents don't provide sufficient image quality. Since JPEG2000 uses
wavelet-based compression rather than MPEG's DCT-based compression, and
wavelet-based compression isn't on the hardware codec list, it's not possible
to play back D-Cinema premium content (the moribund Ogg Tarkin codec also used
wavelet-based compression). Because *all* D-Cinema content will (presumably)
be premium content, the result is no playback at all until the hardware
support appears in PCs at some indeterminate point in the future. Compare
this to the situation with MPEG video, where early software codecs like the
XingMPEG en/decoder practically created the market for PC video. Today,
thanks to Vista's content protection, the opening up of new markets in this
manner would be impossible.

The high-end graphics and audio market are dominated entirely by gamers, who
will do anything to gain the tiniest bit of extra performance, like buying
Bigfoot Networks' $250 "Killer NIC" ethernet card in the hope that it'll help
reduce their network latency by a few milliseconds. These are people buying
$500-$1000 graphics and sound cards for which one single sale brings the
device vendors more than the few cents they get from the video/audio portion
of an entire roomful of integrated-graphics-and-sound PCs. I wonder how this
market segment will react to knowing that their top-of-the-line hardware is
being hamstrung by all of the content-protection "features" that Vista hogties
it with?

Unnecessary Device Resource Consumption
---------------------------------------

"Compliance rules require [content] to be encrypted. This requires
additional encryption/decryption logic thus adding to VPU costs. This cost
is passed on to all consumers" -- ATI.

As part of the bus-protection scheme, devices are required to implement
AES-128 encryption in order to receive content from Vista. This has to be
done via a hardware decryption engine on the graphics chip, which would
typically be implemented by throwing away a GPU rendering pipeline or two to
make room for the AES engine.

Establishing the AES key with the device hardware requires further
cryptographic overhead, in this case a 2048-bit Diffie-Hellman key exchange
whose 2K-bit output is converted to a 128-bit AES key via a Davies-Meyer hash
with AES as its block transformation component. In programmable devices this
can be done (with considerable effort) in the device (for example in
programmable shader hardware), or more simply by throwing out a few more
rendering pipelines and implementing a public-key-cryptography engine in the
freed-up space.

Needless to say, the need to develop, test, and integrate encryption engines
into audio/video devices will only add to their cost, as covered in "Increased
Hardware Costs" above, and the fact that they're losing precious performance
in order to accommodate Vista's content protection will make gamers less than
happy.

Final Thoughts
--------------

"No amount of coordination will be successful unless it's designed with the
needs of the customer in mind. Microsoft believes that a good user
experience is a requirement for adoption" -- Microsoft.

"The PC industry is committed to providing content protection on the PC, but
nothing comes for free. These costs are passed on to the consumer" -- ATI.

At the end of all this, the question remains: Why is Microsoft going to this
much trouble? Ask most people what they picture when you use the term
"premium-content media player" and they'll respond with "A PVR" or "A DVD
player" and not "A Windows PC". So why go to this much effort to try and turn
the PC into something that it's not?

In July 2006, Cory Doctorow published an analysis of the anti-competitive
nature of Apple's iTunes copy-restriction system ("Apple's Copy Protection
Isn't Just Bad For Consumers, It's Bad For Business", Cory Doctorow,
Information Week, 31 July 2006). The only reason I can imagine why Microsoft
would put its programmers, device vendors, third-party developers, and
ultimately its customers, through this much pain is because once this copy
protection is entrenched, Microsoft will completely own the distribution
channel. In the same way that Apple has managed to acquire a monopolistic
lock-in on their music distribution channel (an example being the Motorola
ROKR fiasco, which was so crippled by Apple-imposed restrictions that it was
dead the moment it appeared), so Microsoft will totally control the premium-
content distribution channel. Not only will they be able to lock out any
competitors, but because they will then represent the only available
distribution channel they'll be able to dictate terms back to the content
providers whose needs they are nominally serving in the same way that Apple
has already dictated terms back to the music industry: Play by Apple's rules,
or we won't carry your content. The result will be a technologically enforced
monopoly that makes their current de-facto Windows monopoly seem like a velvet
glove in comparison.

The onerous nature of Vista's content protection also provides a perverse
incentive to remove the protection measures from the content, since for many
consumers that'll be the only way that they can enjoy their legally-acquired
content without Vista's DRM getting in the way. This is already illustrated
in the "Quotes" and "Footnotes" sections, where the people bypassing HD-DVD
protection measures aren't hardcore video pirates but ordinary consumers who
can't even play their own legitimately-acquired content. The sheer
obnoxiousness of Vista's content protection may end up being the biggest
incentive to piracy yet created. Even without overt "piracy" (meaning
bypassing restrictions in order to play legally-purchased media), it makes
very sound business sense for companies to produce hardware that bypasses the
problem, just as they have already with region-free play-anything DVD players.
Perhaps Hollywood should heed the advice given in one of their most famous
productions: "The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip
through your fingers".

Overall, Vista's content-protection functionality seems like an astonishingly
short-sighted piece of engineering, concentrating entirely on content
protection with no consideration given to the enormous repercussions of the
measures employed. It's something like the PC equivalent of the (hastily
dropped) proposal mooted in Europe to put RFID tags into high-value banknotes
as an anti-counterfeiting measure, completely ignoring the fact that the major
users of this technology would end up being criminals who would use it to
remotely identify the most lucrative robbery targets.

To add insult to injury, consider what this enormous but ultimately wasted
effort could have been put towards. Microsoft is saying that Vista will be
the most secure version of Windows yet, but they've been saying that for every
new Windows release since OS security became a selling point. I don't think
anyone's under any illusions that Vista PCs won't be crawling with malware
shortly after the bad guys get their hands on them. But what if the Vista
content-protection technology had instead been applied towards malware
protection? Instead of a separate protection domain for video playback, we
might have a separate protection domain for banking and credit card details.
Instead of specialised anti-debugging technigues to stop users getting at even
one frame of protected content, we could have those same techniques combatting
malware hooking itself into the OS. The list goes on and on, with all of the
effort being misapplied to DRM when it could have been used to combat malware
instead. What a waste. What a waste.

The worst thing about all of this is that there's no escape. Hardware
manufacturers will have to drink the kool-aid (and the reference to mass
suicide here is deliberate [Note O]) in order to work with Vista: "There is no
requirement to sign the [content-protection] license; but without a
certificate, no premium content will be passed to the driver". Of course as a
device manufacturer you can choose to opt out, if you don't mind your device
only ever being able to display low-quality, fuzzy, blurry video and audio
when premium content is present, while your competitors don't have this
(artificially-created) problem.

As a user, there is simply no escape. Whether you use Windows Vista, Windows
XP, Windows 95, Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, Solaris (on x86), or almost any other
OS, Windows content protection will make your hardware more expensive, less
reliable, more difficult to program for, more difficult to support, more
vulnerable to hostile code, and with more compatibility problems. Because
Windows dominates the market and device vendors are unlikely to design and
manufacture two different versions of their products, non-Windows users will
be paying for Windows Vista content-protection measures in products even if
they never run Windows on them.

Here's an offer to Microsoft: If we, the consumers, promise to never, ever,
ever buy a single HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc containing any precious premium
content [Note P], will you in exchange withhold this poison from the computer
industry? Please?

Acknowledgements
----------------

This document was put together with input from various sources, including a
number that requested that I keep their contributions anonymous (in some cases
I've simplified or rewritten some details to ensure that the original,
potentially traceable wording of non-public requirements docs isn't used).
Because it wasn't always possible to go back to the sources and verify exact
details, it's possible that there may be some inaccuracies present, which I'm
sure I'll hear about fairly quickly. No doubt Microsoft (who won't want a
view of Vista as being broken by design to take root) will also provide their
spin on the details.

In addition to the material present here, I'd be interested in getting further
input both from people at Microsoft involved in implementing the content
protection measures and from device vendors who are required to implement the
hardware and driver software measures. I know from the Microsoft sources that
contributed that many of them care deeply about providing the best possible
audio/video user experience for Vista users and are quite distressed about
having to spend time implementing large amounts of anti-functionality when
it's already hard enough to get things running smoothly without the
intentional crippling. I'm always open to further input, and will keep all
contributions confidential unless you give me permission to repeat something.
If you're concerned about traceability, grab a disposable account at Yahoo,
Gmail, or some similar provider and contact me through that. If you're
worried about being identified via the machine you connect to the email
provider with, use an Internet cafe to send the message - just use standard
common-sense precautions. If you want to encrypt things, my PGP key is linked
from my home page, http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001.

(In case the above hints aren't obvious enough, if you work for nVidia, ATI,
VIA, SiS, Intel, ..., I'd *really* like to get your comments on how all of
this is affecting you).

Sources
-------

Because this writeup started out as a private discussion in email, a number of
the sources used were non-public. The best public sources that I know of are:

"Output Content Protection and Windows Vista",
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/stream/output_protect.mspx, from WHDC.

"Windows Longhorn Output Content Protection",
http://download.microsoft.com/downl...4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWEN05006_WinHEC05.ppt,
from WinHEC.

"How to Implement Windows Vista Content Output Protection",
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/5b97017b-e28a-4bae-ba48-174cf47d23cd/MED038_WH06.ppt,
from WinHEC.

"Protected Media Path and Driver Interoperability Requirements",
http://download.microsoft.com/downl...4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWEN05005_WinHEC05.ppt,
from WinHEC.

(Note that the cryptography requirements have changed since some of the
information above was published. SHA-1 has been deprecated in favour of
SHA-256 and SHA-512, and public keys seem to be uniformly set at 2048 bits in
place of the mixture of 1024 bits and 2048 bits mentioned in the
presentations).

An excellent analysis from one of the hardware vendors involved in this comes
from ATI, in the form of "Digital Media Content Protection",
http://download.microsoft.com/downl...4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWEN05002_WinHEC05.ppt,
from WinHEC. This points out (in the form of PowerPoint bullet-points) the
manifold problems associated with Vista's content-protection measures, with
repeated mention of increased development costs, degraded performance and the
phrase "increased costs passed on to consumers" pervading the entire
presentation like a mantra.

In addition there have been quite a few writeups on this (although not going
into quite as much detail as this document) in magazines both online and in
print, one example being PC World's feature article "Will your PC run Windows
Vista?", http://www.pcw.co.uk/articles/print/2154785, which covers this in the
appropriately-titled section "Multimedia in chains". Audience reactions to
these proposals at WinHEC are covered in "Longhorn: tough trail to PC digital
media" published in EE Times
(http://www.eetimes.com/issue/fp/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=162100180),
unfortunately you need to be a subscriber to read this but you may be able to
find accessible cached copies using your favourite search engine. The EFF has
an overview of the effects of Vista's revocation mechanisms in "Protected
Media Path, Component Revocation, Windows Driver Lockdown",
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003806.php.

Use, Modification, and Redistribution
-------------------------------------

This document is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License,
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/. This means that you can copy,
distribute, display, and perform the work, and make derivative works, provided
that you credit the original author and provide a link back to the original
work (at the URL given in the title). To quote the Creative Commons site,
"This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work,
even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This
is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do
with your works".

Appendices and Footnotes
========================

The more formal section of the document ends here. The following sections
contain various informal comments, thoughts, and other odds and ends. For
people doing translations of this document, it's probably not worth trying to
translate these sections.

Mini-FAQ
--------

This document seems to produce various reactions that come up repeatedly. To
respond to the more frequently-expressed views, I've added this mini-FAQ.

1. This is just Microsoft-bashing.

It's bad-technology bashing. If this had been done by Linus Torvalds, Steve
Jobs, Alan Cox, or Theo de Raadt, I'd have said the same thing about it. As
far as I'm concerned computers are tools to get a job done and not a platform
for religious wars, and if something's bad I'll say so regardless of who's
doing it. Just for the record I run various versions of Windows on ...
[counting] ... seven of my machines (the rest are a mixture of Linux, FreeBSD,
and occasionally Solaris), so I'd be a rather unlikely Microsoft detractor if
I have their software all over my machines.

2. This is a biased writeup.

Perhaps, but then I challenge anyone to read the specifications given in the
"Sources" section above and write a positive analysis of Vista's content
protection. Someone has to point out these problems, and it happened to be me
in this case, but I think anyone with technical skills who reads the relevant
documents would come to a similar conclusion.

3. This is all a pile of FUD.

The process that leads to comments like this tends to be (1) Quickly skim
through this document, (2) Decide that it sounds a bit implausible (possibly
even before performing step 1), (3) Post a rant saying it's FUD. To pick one
particular example, a Digg reader's reaction to the section of text that
states there isn't sufficient CPU power available for both decompression and
encryption was:

I'm sorry, where does this come from? You do realize that this is completely
uncited, and very likely wrong? Entire paragraphs that follow are based on
this magical detail pulled out of thin air. [...] I'm no fan of this
asinine DRM bullshit, but the scenarios and postulates put forth in this
article are complete rubbish.

Referring to the very first source listed in the "Sources" section shows that
this is picked not from thin air but from Microsoft's own documentation:

The problem with regular AES is that it takes about 20 CPU clocks to encrypt
each byte. This is OK for compressed or semi-compressed video, but for the
multiple HD uncompressed case, it is too much even for a 2006 processor.

and then again:

In the case of premium content, whether video can play back smoothly when
using regular AES with uncompressed video will be a function of the
resolution of the uncompressed video and the power of the processor. It is
unlikely to work well in 2006 for uncompressed HD premium content

If you don't believe what you've read here, go back to Microsoft's own
documentation and read that (in fact read the Microsoft documents no matter
what you believe, because they're quite scary). If you still think it's FUD
then you can at least post informed comments about it.

4. Microsoft is only doing this because Hollywood/the music industry is
forcing them to.

"We were only following orders" has historically worked rather poorly as an
excuse, and it doesn't work too well here either. While it's convenient to
paint an industry that sues 12-year-old kids and 80-year-old grandmothers as
the scapegoat, no-one's holding a gun to Microsoft's head to force them do
this. The content industry is desperate to get its content onto PCs, and it
would have quite easy for Microsoft to say "Here's what we'll do with Vista,
take it or leave it. We won't seriously cripple our own and our business
partners' products just to suit your whims". In other words they could make
it clear to Hollywood who's the tail and who's the dog.

Here's an illustrative story about what can happen when the content-industry
tail tries to wag the dog. About 10-15 years ago, music companies told a
bunch of NZ TV stations that they had to pay fees in order to screen music
videos. The TV stations disagreed, saying that they were providing free
advertising for the music companies, and if they didn't like that then they'd
simply stop playing music videos. So they stopped playing all music videos.

After a few weeks, cracks stated to appear as the music companies realised
just how badly they needed the TV channels. One of the music companies bought
an entire prime-time advertising block (at phenomenal cost, this wasn't a
single 30-second slot but every slot in an entire prime-time ad break) just to
play one single new music video.

Shortly afterwards, music videos reappeared on TV. The details of the
settlement were never made public, but I imagine it consisted of a bunch of
music company execs on their knees begging the TV stations to start playing
music videos again and let's please never bring this matter up again.

It's the same with Microsoft, the content industry needs them as badly (or
more badly) than Microsoft needs the content industry. Claiming that they're
only following orders from Hollywood is a red herring - if Microsoft declined
to implement this stuff, Hollywood would have to give in because they can't
afford to lock themselves out of 95% of the market, in the same way that the
music companies couldn't afford to cut out their primary advertising channel.

5. You're just upset because you can no longer steal content under Vista.

Yes, someone really did send me email with this claim in it. It's silly
enough that I just had to include it for the amusement value .

Open Questions
--------------

There are a number of open questions about Vista's content protection that
probably won't be able to be answered until some months after its wide
deployment when user can report on real-life experiences, because no-one seems
to know how certain things will work.

Question 1.

How easy is it to get HD content around the outside of Vista's content-
protection? Looking at the block diagrams in the sources, the layering
appears to be:

User-space application
--------
Vista content-protection interface
--------
Vista content playback subsystem
--------
Vista device drivers
--------
Device hardware

Reading the specs, user-space applications are expected to call down into the
Vista content-protection interface to play back content (one document actually
uses the metaphor of the user-space application simply acting as a remote
control for the Vista content-protection and playback subsystem). The
question is, can a user-space application that chooses to opt out perform and
end-run around the higher-level Vista interface and go directly to the low-
level interface to get its content out without Vista's content-protection
getting in the way? User feedback on Microsoft's own forums,
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/co...nter&tid=8a5ff7ac-c446-4f54-8d77-7cf533b7ff53,
indicate that even using third-party playback software like the nVidia or
Cyberlink decoders instead of the Vista one will result in playback being
disabled when (in this case) the Vista Media Centre trial license expired.

Question 2.

How will all of this affect users who want to prepare HD content, protected or
not? Given that the intent of Vista's content-protection is to ensure that no
HD content ever leaves the system in usable form, how do you prepare the HD
content? More importantly, since Vista happens to be a multitasking OS, how
do you guarantee that as your HD content is being prepared, the presence of
some other protected content somewhere in the system doesn't cause it to be
silently degraded for "protection" purposes? Just how deep does the
protection extend? If it's on a per-task or even per-thread level then any
cross-task or cross-thread mechanism (e.g. process thread injection) can be
used to compromise the content protection. On the other hand if it's "all
your content are belong to us" whenever protected content is present then
innocent content will be degraded along with protected content.

Question 3.

If you build it, they will come. Once the DRM mechanisms are in place,
there's every reason to believe that any kind of content subject to any kind
of copyright will try and take advantage of it. After all, why not? The
tools are there, there's no reason not to use them. We already have so-called
Enterprise DRM (E-DRM) that's intended to control access to documents like
Microsoft Word, PDF documents, CAD files, and so on (about 20 years ago during
the heyday of the DoD Orange Book this stuff was known as ORCON, originator-
controlled access control). Now that DRM is integrated into Vista as a core
technology there's no knowing how far this can be taken in the future. What
will computing be like in a few years time?

Question 4.

I've both read on the web and received via email endless reports of people
unable to play HD-DVD and Blu-Ray content on Windows PCs, both Vista (beta)
and XP. Has anyone actually been able to *play* HD-DVD or Blu-Ray content
(i.e. the material that Vista classes as premium content) under Windows? If
so, what HD drive, player software, graphics card, and monitor did you use?

Glossary
--------

This document was originally written for a technical audience and so used a
number of technical terms that would have been familiar to its target audience
but not to the general public. This glossary provides a few basic
definitions, for more details see your favourite online source, for example
Wikipedia.

DRM

"Digital Rights Management" or "Digital Restrictions Management" or "Defective
Recorded Media". Combine all three and you have a general idea of what DRM
is.

HD

High definition, technically meaning video content of 1920 x 1080 (1080p)
resolution, but more generally anything with better than generic TV-quality
resolution. In their specs, Microsoft regard anything with more than 520K
pixels or 800 x 600 resolution as premium content that needs to be downgraded
before displaying it to the user.

HD-DVD

One of the proposed successors to DVDs, capable of storing HD content.

(More definitions to come).

AEC (automatic echo cancellation)

AES-128

AGP

CRT

DVI

DMCA

HDCP

HDMI

HFS (hardware functionality scan)

IDCT

IP (intellectual property)

JPEG2000

MPEG

OMAC

PCIe

RAMDAC

S/PDIF

TOSlink

VGA

VPU

WGA

Quotes
------

A few fun quotes, included for amusement value.

"I propose that each copy of the OS should ship with an orange jumpsuit and
sensory deprivation goggles, since all Vista users have been unilaterally
declared 'enemy combatants' by the content apparatchiki" - Daniel Nevin.

"Windows Vista? And what a vista! All you see as you look around your garden
is a 60foot high brick wall" - Crosbie Fitch.

"welcome to the new world of DRM where expensive pieces of hardware across the
world could potentially be remotely rendered useless by over-zealous
copyright holders. Way to go, Hollywood!" - Chip Mulligan.

"I can not only say that the idea [of tilt bits] is basically insane, but I
can also see hardware manufacturers refusing to implement tilt bits, or more
likely, faking their functionality" - Dave Walker.

"I purchased a new DVD/SACD player (w/HDMI out), surround-sound receiver/amp
(non-HDMI i/o - they're still too expensive for me), & LCD TV with HDMI
input. My DVD/SACD player was connected to the SSamp via a nice single simple
optical cable (& HDMI cable to the TV). I figured that would be all I need,
keeping a digital path all the way to the SSamp (& TV). Wrong! It worked
beautifully until I played my one & only SACD. No sound came forth! Huh? I
read the DVD/SACD player manual: in brief small print, "When playing SACDs,
audio is output only from the 5.1ch RCA analogue outputs" - Anthony May.

"I can't playback HD because I need to upgrade my 2 (SLI'd) Nvidia Quadro
4500's (~$2000) to a $200 FX7600GT because it supports HDCP. I can't wait
till someone cracks this DRM/HDCP/AACS crap" - "Sy".

"Thanks alot, Muslix64 [the author of the purported HD-DVD crack] you're not
the only one with a monitor/vid card that doesn't support hdcp, your work is
greatly appreciated" - "yodoso".

"The funny thing is that I cant see how HDCP will actually even prevent
piracy. In fact the only thing I can see it doing is encouraging piracy
because everyone whose bought a new computer/monitor/HDTV in the last few
years which don't have HDCP are now screwed out of the several thousand
dollar purchases. So instead of buying new products they will turn to
pirated/cracked Blu-ray/HD-DVDs which will work without the HDCP" - "Gizza".

"The HDCP (high-definition content protection) overlords are coming to get us.
They are basically saying you can't watch video unless you have a digital
monitor and a special video card that supports the end-to-end content
protection they have built; So that you, the un-trusted-consumer-who-bought-
their-expensive-product, can't possibly make backup copies or anything else
with that fancy new HD-DVD or Blu-ray disc you have" - "verifex".

"Digital rights management technology will still fail to prevent widespread
infringement. In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly. I
predict that every year, and it turns out to be true every year" - Ed Felten.

"Microsoft wasted no time; it issued a patch three days after learning about
the hack. There's no month-long wait for copyright holders who rely on
Microsoft's DRM. This clearly demonstrates that economics is a much more
powerful motivator than security" - Bruce Schneier on Microsoft's DRM re-
enabling patch for FairUse4WM.

"As a not-so-long-ago electronics design engineer, I can imagine the rage &
pain felt by engineers & their employers [...] This is total insanity from
anyone's perspective except the content providers, and they don't care
because it's everyone else who's picking up the tab for it!" - Anthony May.

"The HDCP scheme will serve to make the illegal product the most full featured
and least restrictive, and thus the most attractive to the consumer. Add in
the expense of buying new equipment to view the legal content (when existing
equipment is perfectly capable) and the performance drain imposed by in-line
encryption/decryption and they've put out the biggest incentive to piracy
yet" - "Greg".

"Good job, industry! Spend an incredible amount of time and effort developing
the next generation of video quality only to step on it BEFORE THERE'S EVEN A
DECIDED UPON STANDARD in the name of Copy Protection which will just be
outflanked by a couple of 14 year old hackers and distributed over BitTorrent
anyway" - "SweetMercury".

"Sony, MS, movie studios... here's the deal. You've screwed up so bad that i'm
not buying either HD drive option until they're so cheap that I end up
getting one included with my computer because it was the minimum optical
drive" - "zweben".

"There has to be a whole new division at Microsoft. The "Office of Consumer
Apology" or something. Responsible for "I'm sorry your content didn't
PlayForSure. That isn't meant to be literal you know" and "yes, I know you're
supposed to be able to play HD at full resolution, but you see, your cable
has a kink in it, which changed the electrical characteristics slightly and,
well, I guess I'm just sorry" - Blake Ramsdell.

"your latest girly moan bitch rant is making the rounds on every news site
just about isn't it? are you on cnn yet? are women throwing their panties at
you?" - A friend (who requested anonymity).

Footnotes
---------

Note A: This comment was inspired by Sir Gerald Kaufman's similar comment
about the British Labour Party's 1983 election manifesto, which resulted in
Labour turning in its worst election results since its founding (it was so bad
that Labour's opponents in the election reprinted and distributed it
themselves. Maybe Apple could take a hint from this and use Microsoft's
content-protection details in their advertising for OS X). At 44 pages,
Microsoft's "Output Content Protection and Windows Vista" squeezes out
Labour's 37-page manifesto to take the crown.

Note B: This document uses "cost" in the sense of "penalty", "damage", "harm",
"injury" and "loss" rather than the more financial "expense", "outlay", and
"price". A full financial analysis would require a top-to-bottom internal
audit of the design, development, production, distribution, support, and legal
costs for each vendor involved, something for which even the vendors
themselves would have difficulty producing a precise figure.

Note C: I'll make a prediction at this point that, given that it's trying to
do the impossible, the Vista content protection will take less than a day to
bypass if the bypass mechanism is something like a driver bug or a simple
security hole that applies only to one piece of code (and can therefore be
quickly patched), and less than a week to comprehensively bypass in a
driver/hardware-independent manner. This doesn't mean it'll be broken the day
or week that it appears, but simply that once a sufficiently skilled attacker
is motivated to bypass the protection, it'll take them less than a day or a
week to do so.

(In a recent development which is still subject to change as more reports come
in, a sort of re-run of the DeCSS/Xing player story from a few years ago has
occurred when someone appeared to have figured out how to extract HD-DVD and
Blu-Ray keys from the PowerDVD player software, allowing all(?) HD disk
content to be decrypted and played back on any HD display, without content-
protection measures getting in the way (although the manufacturers of PowerDVD
claim they've done nothing wrong and won't be updating the player, see
http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/archive/2007/01/02/463980.aspx). The fact that
the legally-purchased content wouldn't play on a legally-purchased player
because the content protection got in the way appears to have been the
motivating factor for the crack. The time taken was about a week, that
information wasn't revealed until after I made my prediction above).

Note D: In order for content to be displayed to users, it has to be copied
numerous times. For example if you're reading this document on the web then
it's been copied from the web server's disk drive to server memory, copied to
the server's network buffers, copied across the Internet, copied to your PC's
network buffers, copied into main memory, copied to your browser's disk cache,
copied to the browser's rendering engine, copied to the render/screen cache,
and finally copied to your screen. If you've printed it out to read, several
further rounds of copying have occurred. Windows Vista's content protection
(and DRM in general) assume that all of this copying can occur without any
copying actually occurring, since the whole intent of DRM is to prevent
copying. If you're not versed in DRM doublethink this concept gets quite
tricky to explain, but in terms of quantum mechanics the content enters a
superposition of simultaneously copied and uncopied states until a user
collapses its wave function by observing the content (in physics this is
called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox). Depending on whether
you follow the Copenhagen or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics,
things then either get weird or very weird. So in order for Windows Vista's
content protection to work, it has to be able to violate the laws of physics
and create numerous copies that are simultaneously not copies.

(Someone has pointed out that Microsoft is trying to implement a quantum
encryption channel in software that attempts to make premium content non-
observable, detecting problem states and discontinuing transmission if any are
observed).

Note E: There is SCMS, but that has all the effectiveness of a "Keep out"
sign.

Note F: As an example of an experience that's likely to become commonplace
once more "premium content" is rolled out, Roger Strong reports from Canada
that "I've just had my first experience with HD content being blocked. I
purchased an HP Media Center PC with a built-in HD DVD player, together with a
24" 'high definition' 1920 x 1200 HP flat panel display (HP LP2465). They
even included an HD movie, 'The Bourne Supremacy'. Sure enough, the movie
won't play because while the video card supports HDCP content protection, the
monitor doesn't. (It plays if I connect an old 14" VGA CRT using a DVI-to-VGA
connector)". "muslix64" tells a similar tale: "when I disable my HD monitor,
I can watch the movie, on my old VGA screen, but, what is the point of having
a HD monitor and not being able to watch a HD movie on it". muslix64 was so
upset at not being able to play his legitimately-purchased movies on his
legitimately-purchased monitor attached to his legitimately-purchased player
that he broke the AACS protection just to be able to see his own movies, see
Note C above.

Note G: The question of how content producers other than the major studios who
can afford expensive custom equipment are supposed to create and manipulate
high-definition content has been raised by a number of readers. For example
one contributor who works with people in the content industry comments that "I
have seen [smaller content producers] going from just recording weddings and
the like, to ones that have gone all the way to make a full featured movie.
They have gone through problems like where to edit HD material, which cameras
to use, which format, etc. Their decisions have been based on availability of
equipment to make their projects, not really costs". It has been suggested
that the large content producers are quite happy with this situation, since it
prevents any competition from more innovative, creative, and agile newcomers.

Note H: Philip Dorrell has a neat cartoon that illustrates this problem at
http://www.1729.com/blog/LookingForAWinWin.html.

Note I: An interesting potential security threat, suggested by Karl Siegemund,
occurs when Vista is being used to run a security monitoring system such as a
video surveillance system. If it's possible to convince Vista that what it's
communicating is premium content, the video (and/or audio) surveillance
content will become unavailable, since it's unlikely that a surveillance
center will be using DRM-enabled recording devices or monitors. I can just
see this as a plot element in Ocean's Fifteen or Mission Impossible Six, "It's
OK, their surveillance system is running Vista, we can shut it down with
spoofed premium content".

Note J: There is some confusion over exactly how much functionality gets
disabled when a revocation occurs. The HDCP requirements are quite clear that
once this happens (in technical terms once a revoked device's key selection
vector (KSV, effectively it's unique ID) appears on a revocation list) the
device is effectively dead since it won't be supplied with content any more
(in informal terms, your device gets "bricked", i.e. turned into a brick).
However the behaviour of devices subject to revocation in a mixed-content
environment is made very unclear in the specs. Some documents imply that it's
an HDCP-style kill switch ("Vista will [...] revoke any driver that is found
to be leaking premium content [...] if the same driver is used for all the
manufacturer's chip designs, then a revocation would cause all that company's
products to need a new driver"), while others indicate that the device will
still work, but be unable to render premium content. Exactly how well this
hope can be realised in practice (if it can be realised at all) remains to be
seen.

Note K: This invites a comparison with the old saw that if Lucas Electric made
weapons, war would be impossible.

Note L: I see some impressive class-action suits to follow if this revocation
mechanism ("bricking", see Note I) is ever applied. Perhaps Microsoft or the
content providers will buy everyone who owns a device that inadvertently leaks
content and is then disabled by the revocation process replacement hardware
for their system.

Some contributors have commented that they can't see the revocation system
ever being used because the consumer backlash would be too enormous, but then
the legal backlash from not going ahead could be equally extreme. The only
real indication that we have for how committed Microsoft really are to this is
the amazing speed with which Microsoft released a patch for the WMDRM (Windows
Media DRM) vulnerability, which they rushed out at a speed that even the most
virulent worm never produced (see "Quickest Patch *Ever*",
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71738-0.html?tw=rss.index). This would
seem to indicate that they're pretty serious about this, since they
prioritised it above any conventional non-DRM-related security problem.

For anyone who's read "Guns of August", the situation seems a bit like pre-WWI
Europe with people sitting on step 1 of enormously complex battle plans that
can't be backed out of once they're triggered, no matter how obvious it is
that going ahead with them is a bad idea. Driver revocation is a lose/lose
situation for Microsoft, they're in for some serious pain whether they do or
they don't. Their lawyers must have been asleep when they let themselves get
painted into this particular corner - the first time a revocation takes out a
hospital, foreign government department, air traffic control system, or
whatever, they've guaranteed themselves a front-row seat in court proceedings
for the rest of their natural lives.

(Several people have suggested that this was deliberate in order to guarantee
lifetime employment, but this seems highly unlikely. Firstly, lawyers have an
obligation to protect their clients, so deliberately getting a client into
trouble in order to generate more work would be a severely career-limiting
move. Secondly, they're corporate in-house counsel rather than independent
counsel, so they'll get paid anyway. Making more work for themselves would
not be a big priority for them).

Note M: Some insider comments indicate that it'll be mid-2007 at least before
Vista's non-Microsoft graphics and sound drivers are finished enough to be
stable and reliable. Vendors are frantically rushing to get drivers ready in
time for Vista's release (they didn't even make it onto the RTM media and will
have to be downloaded after the install), but even those have been described
as 'beta-quality at best'. No doubt we'll hear more of this at Vista's public
release.

Note M: The Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Vista do feature this type of
encryption, but the features of these high-end versions will never get into
the hands of typical users. In addition it's an all-or-nothing encryption
where (to quote Microsoft) "all user and system files are encrypted" when what
really counts is swap-file encryption, since that's what contains copies of
sensitive in-memory data. The OpenBSD approach of generating a random swap-
file encryption key at boot time and encrypting any memory data that gets
paged to disk is the correct way to handle this.

Note N: The "kool-aid" reference may be slightly unfamiliar to non-US readers,
it's a reference to the 1978 Jonestown mass-suicide in which Jim Jones'
followers drank Flavor Aid laced with poison in order to demonstrate their
dedication to the cause. In popular usage the term "kool-aid" is substituted
for Flavor Aid because it has more brand recognition. There's also an
earlier, less well-known link to fruit juice laced with LSD, I'll avoid the
obvious comment about that and some of the thinking behind Vista's content
protection.

Note O: If I do ever want to play back premium content, I'll wait a few years
and then buy a $50 Chinese-made set-top player to do it, not a $1000 Windows
PC. It's somewhat bizarre that I have to go to communist China in order to
find vendors who actually understand the consumer's needs.

A reductio ad absurdum solution to the "premium-content problem", proposed by
a Slashdot reader, is to add support to Windows Vista for a black-box hardware
component that accepts as input encrypted compressed premium content and
produces as output encrypted (or otherwise protected) decoded premium content.
In other words, move the entire mass of hardware, driver, and software
protection into a dedicated black box that's only used in media PCs where it's
(arguably) required.

Now compare this add-on black box to the canonical Chinese-made $50 media
player. Why would anyone buy the black box (which will almost certainly cost
more than $50) merely as an add-on to their already-expensive PC when they can
buy a complete dedicated media player that does the same thing and more?

posted this here because it seemed like the most aproprete place, it effects hardware dirrectly as you will see if you read it.

please read the whole thing before you post uninformed comments!!!

thanks, and hi, my buddy told me this was a good place to hang out for tech heads

Darknova · Jan 11, 2007

I have read this before, and past it on to everyone I know warning them about Vista. It's disgusting, why the hell should Hollywood control what we can and can't use?
Plus if we buy a legit copy of a "protected" movie, but don't have the proper hardware we don't get what we paid for...yeah, that sounds right....

SpoonMuffin · Jan 11, 2007

yeah, thats exectly what bothers me, that and the fact that hollywood is in charge of vista security(they gotta signoff on any security software for vista) is that not insain?

im so glad i have windows 2003 sever, a buddy(one who sent me here) let me try his trial disk and after 20min (after install) i was hooked, its like xp without the buggs or bloat, its just plane faster!!!!

i have vista on a test box here, its ungoddly slow, slower then vectorlinux on my buddys p233mmx lappy(208mb ram 5.2gb hdd) and with enlightnment desktop it looks better

the gui isnt hardware accelerated at all yet is faster and looks better....whats that about?

SpoonMuffin · Jan 11, 2007

So if you design a new security system, you can't get it supported in Windows
Vista until well-known computer security experts like MGM, 20th Century-Fox,
and Disney give you the go-ahead (this gives a whole new meaning to the term
"Mickey-Mouse security"). It's absolutely astonishing to find paragraphs like
that in what are supposed to be Windows technical documents, since it gives
Hollywood studios veto rights over Windows security mechanisms.

mickey mouse security!!!!

Casheti · Jan 11, 2007

I TOLD YOU ALL VISTA WAS SH1T!!! MWUAHahahahahhaha

SpoonMuffin · Jan 11, 2007

Casheti read it, you will see even more reasions vista is sh!t

Casheti · Jan 11, 2007

I'm not a big fan of reading. Can somebody summarise??? Oh wait I can do it...

VISTA = SH1TE

XP FOREVER (or until I get Mac OSX)

SpoonMuffin · Jan 11, 2007

xp, blah, 2003 forever!!!!!, and mac......fook that, if i have to i will use desktop bsd or vector linux or mepis or any one of the other linux distros my buddy has burned ready to mess with, neither of us "like" linux but we both hate vista lol

Pinchy · Jan 11, 2007

stay with XP...not OSX

Casheti · Jan 11, 2007

I love Macs. They are beasts.

Casheti · Jan 11, 2007

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1809118256240983268&q=Intel+Mac

It's Beautiful

Makes me want to ACTUALLY USE a Windows computer for once.

SpoonMuffin · Jan 11, 2007

hehe, i will stick with my amd+2003, it trumps mac + intel

Casheti · Jan 11, 2007

Mac FTW

SpoonMuffin · Jan 11, 2007

note my siggy!!!!

Casheti · Jan 11, 2007

Pinchy · Jan 11, 2007

The only time ive ever used a mac, was when our scool had a lab of G3's. I hate them, cus they are slow, expensive, and were relatively hard to use (prolly cus im used to windows)

All apple products i see always lead to frustration for people that have them (that i know). Screens breaking easily, itunes screwing up, play screwing up....hence, no macs for me

EDIT - BUT i must admit, macs are good for ONE thing....providing some form of competition so MS doesnt totally monopolise the market

Jonnycat · Jan 12, 2007

SpoonMuffin said:
?
im so glad i have windows 2003 sever, a buddy(one who sent me here) let me try his trial disk and after 20min (after install) i was hooked, its like xp without the buggs or bloat, its just plane faster!!!!

I recently changed from Win2k to WinXP, and after pulling out my hair for the last month, I'm almost ready to go back to Win2k.

Wim2k3, huh? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Wile E · Jan 12, 2007

Pinchy said:
The only time ive ever used a mac, was when our scool had a lab of G3's. I hate them, cus they are slow, expensive, and were relatively hard to use (prolly cus im used to windows)

All apple products i see always lead to frustration for people that have them (that i know). Screens breaking easily, itunes screwing up, play screwing up....hence, no macs for me

EDIT - BUT i must admit, macs are good for ONE thing....providing some form of competition so MS doesnt totally monopolise the market

Try a new Mac and say those things. lol They're a far cry from the days of G3s.

Pinchy · Jan 12, 2007

actually, come to think of it, ive tried a G4 once...soo many problems, altho i hear the G5's are a lot better...

SpoonMuffin · Jan 12, 2007

Jonnycat said:
I recently changed from Win2k to WinXP, and after pulling out my hair for the last month, I'm almost ready to go back to Win2k.

Wim2k3, huh? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

thats why went back to 2k then moved to 2k3 when it was avalable!!!!

you may still beable to find the trial disk offer on ms page, duno now that vista lumes over our heads like a week old dead fish stinking up the place!!!!

Jonnycat · Jan 12, 2007

SpoonMuffin said:
thats why went back to 2k then moved to 2k3 when it was avalable!!!!

you may still beable to find the trial disk offer on ms page, duno now that vista lumes over our heads like a week old dead fish stinking up the place!!!!

k thx. My main concern will be compatability; will everything (like games) work as well as in XP/2k?

SpoonMuffin · Jan 12, 2007

yeah, just follow the guide to set it up as a workstation(google windows 2003 workstation guide) there have been 2 games i had "problems" with and neither where the os's fault, doom3 you need a modifyed msi file to install(or just copy the content of the disk to ur system, its easyer) the msi is readly avalable with support for 2k3 as well as 2k and 98(i think 98 was added to the same one rofl)

2k3 is just an evolutionary step on nt5, 2k is 5.0, xp is 5.1, 2k3 is 5.2, the main diffrance between xp and 2k3 is that 2k3 when releced was acctualy finnished and not in a beta state, it took the extra couple years from the relece of xp because XP WASNT STABLE ENOUGHT OR RELIABLE ENOUGHT to work as a server os, infact the server side at the time of xp relece was horribly unstable, like windows me but worse!!!!

Jonnycat · Jan 12, 2007

Thanks for the info, spoon. I'll look into this more closely.

niko084 · Jan 12, 2007

Its Microsoft... what else needs to be said?

LINUX FTW!

Funny, my Dad is still using Windows 2000 Server for his web servers......
And Windows 2000 Pro for his personal computer P4 3.2 Extreme.....

Now he is redoing everything under Fedora 5/6 and Debian....
Although he owns 25 licenses to XP Pro.... And has a free license for Vista sitting...

SpoonMuffin · Jan 12, 2007

i use 2k and 2k3 period, my shop got a good deal on 2k3 web licences from a company that went out of buisness, we also got their web servers, we converted and sold them as workstations, linus has its place, and its not on the common mans desktop, at least not till they get it to the point where its as easy to use and manage as windows, even the most "noob friendly" distros still have their querks where u need to use the old command line

vista is not about the common man its about ms catering to hollywood AND catering to their own greed, with vista they will beable to force those who buy online content to choose to use MS services to do so(kinda like iTuenes for video and the like) because they sure as hell wont support anybody elses protections, so if you have content thats considered"preimum" by nature it but isnt ms it probbly will be degraded so baddly u will have to buy a sepret player and screen that are capable of playing your content without problems IF you are stupid enough to install vista that is

as to servers, 2k3 web server is VERY easy to use and VERY reliable, its 2k but easyer and more robust!!!!!(2k config can be a real PITA for some server uses)

Processor	x2 4000+@2.96gz, thermalright ultra90 with 90mm panaflow ultra speed
Motherboard	biostar tforce 550
Cooling	Thermalright ultra90,90mm panaflow ultra speed fan
Memory	Transend AxeRam ddr2 800@986mhz 5-5-5-15 2t TrFc 75ns
Video Card(s)	x1900xtx+zalman vf900cu cooler
Storage	80+160+200+250gb
Display(s)	20.1in gaming lcd 1600x1200@120hz(dvi-d)
Case	cg-briza (thx again to ashen)
Audio Device(s)	realtek 8ch hd audio latist drivers
Power Supply	400watt fsp 12cm fan psu
Software	windows 2003 sp2(custom build),nod32,opera9,tcmp,vlc,udrfrag,perfect disk,utorrent

Processor	AMD FX 8320 @ 4GHz
Motherboard	Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5 rev1
Cooling	Corsair H70
Memory	4 x 4GB DDR3 Ripjawz 1600Mhz
Video Card(s)	Sapphire Vapor-X AMD R9 280X
Storage	1 x 500GB Samsung Evo 850, 1 x 500GB Vrap Data Drive, 3 x 2TB Seagate, 1 x 1TB Samsung F1
Display(s)	3 x DGM IPS-2402WDH
Case	Coolermaster HAF X
Audio Device(s)	Onboard
Power Supply	Coolermaster 1000W Silent Pro M
Mouse	Logitech G502
Keyboard	Logitech G510
Software	Windows 10 Pro x64

Processor	x2 4000+@2.96gz, thermalright ultra90 with 90mm panaflow ultra speed
Motherboard	biostar tforce 550
Cooling	Thermalright ultra90,90mm panaflow ultra speed fan
Memory	Transend AxeRam ddr2 800@986mhz 5-5-5-15 2t TrFc 75ns
Video Card(s)	x1900xtx+zalman vf900cu cooler
Storage	80+160+200+250gb
Display(s)	20.1in gaming lcd 1600x1200@120hz(dvi-d)
Case	cg-briza (thx again to ashen)
Audio Device(s)	realtek 8ch hd audio latist drivers
Power Supply	400watt fsp 12cm fan psu
Software	windows 2003 sp2(custom build),nod32,opera9,tcmp,vlc,udrfrag,perfect disk,utorrent

Processor	x2 4000+@2.96gz, thermalright ultra90 with 90mm panaflow ultra speed
Motherboard	biostar tforce 550
Cooling	Thermalright ultra90,90mm panaflow ultra speed fan
Memory	Transend AxeRam ddr2 800@986mhz 5-5-5-15 2t TrFc 75ns
Video Card(s)	x1900xtx+zalman vf900cu cooler
Storage	80+160+200+250gb
Display(s)	20.1in gaming lcd 1600x1200@120hz(dvi-d)
Case	cg-briza (thx again to ashen)
Audio Device(s)	realtek 8ch hd audio latist drivers
Power Supply	400watt fsp 12cm fan psu
Software	windows 2003 sp2(custom build),nod32,opera9,tcmp,vlc,udrfrag,perfect disk,utorrent

Processor	x2 4000+@2.96gz, thermalright ultra90 with 90mm panaflow ultra speed
Motherboard	biostar tforce 550
Cooling	Thermalright ultra90,90mm panaflow ultra speed fan
Memory	Transend AxeRam ddr2 800@986mhz 5-5-5-15 2t TrFc 75ns
Video Card(s)	x1900xtx+zalman vf900cu cooler
Storage	80+160+200+250gb
Display(s)	20.1in gaming lcd 1600x1200@120hz(dvi-d)
Case	cg-briza (thx again to ashen)
Audio Device(s)	realtek 8ch hd audio latist drivers
Power Supply	400watt fsp 12cm fan psu
Software	windows 2003 sp2(custom build),nod32,opera9,tcmp,vlc,udrfrag,perfect disk,utorrent

System Name	UltraPC
Processor	E8500 Core 2 Duo, 1333Mhz FSB, 3.16Ghz @ 4.5GHz (got into Windows @ 4.75GHz)
Motherboard	ASUS P5Q-e
Cooling	CPU Cooler - TT V14 Pro, 2x120mm CM Blue LED fans, 1x90mm CM Blue LED fan
Memory	G.Skill Pi 4GB (2x2GB) Dual Channel DDR2 PC8000 (1000MHz), 5-5-5-15
Video Card(s)	Sapphire HD4850 512mb with ASUS EAH4850 BIOS
Storage	2x 500GB Seagate 7200.12 Raid 0
Display(s)	Acer AL1912, 19" LCD screen
Case	Thermaltake Soprano Black ATX case
Audio Device(s)	Onboard 7.1, Speakers - 5 + Sub + Monitor speakers
Power Supply	Thermaltake 850W Toughpower Cable Management - Quad (2x18A and 2x30A) 12V rails
Software	Win 7 Pro x64, MSN, CS:Source, etc etc

System Name	The ClusterF**k
Processor	980X @ 4Ghz
Motherboard	Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 BIOS F12
Cooling	MCR-320, DDC-1 pump w/Bitspower res top (1/2" fittings), Koolance CPU-360
Memory	3x2GB Mushkin Redlines 1600Mhz 6-8-6-24 1T
Video Card(s)	Evga GTX 580
Storage	Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB, 2xSeagate 320GB RAID0; 2xSeagate 3TB; 2xSamsung 2TB; Samsung 1.5TB
Display(s)	HP LP2475w 24" 1920x1200 IPS
Case	Technofront Bench Station
Audio Device(s)	Auzentech X-Fi Forte into Onkyo SR606 and Polk TSi200's + RM6750
Power Supply	ENERMAX Galaxy EVO EGX1250EWT 1250W
Software	Win7 Ultimate N x64, OSX 10.8.4

System Name	Back to Blue
Processor	i9 14900k
Motherboard	Asrock Z790 Nova
Cooling	Corsair H150i Elite
Memory	64GB Corsair Dominator DDR5-6400 @ 6600
Video Card(s)	EVGA RTX 3090 Ultra FTW3
Storage	4TB WD 850x NVME, 4TB WD Black, 10TB Seagate Barracuda Pro
Display(s)	1x Samsung Odyssey G7 Neo and 1x Dell u2518d
Case	Lian Li o11 DXL w/custom vented front panel
Audio Device(s)	Focusrite Saffire PRO 14 -> DBX DriveRack PA+ -> Mackie MR8 and MR10 / Senn PX38X -> SB AE-5 Plus
Power Supply	Corsair RM1000i
Mouse	Logitech G502x
Keyboard	Corsair K95 Platinum
Software	Windows 11 x64 Pro
Benchmark Scores	31k multicore Cinebench - CPU limited 125w

Violate the laws of physics:Windows Vista DRM

New Member

New Member

New Member

New Member

New Member

New Member

New Member

New Member

New Member

New Member

New Member

New Member

New Member

New Member

Power User

New Member

New Member

New Member

New Member

New Member