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There is a great oportunity of sharing your experiences as a dissapointed Windows Vista user.
The BadVista campaign is a new place where disappointed Windows Vista users can share their experiences, and where well-aware power users can focus their activism against the last monopoly threat.
Now, we can give more informed advice to people about why switching to free software and keeping our software rights safe.
Have you ever read the legal and technical limitations that Microsoft has put on Windows Vista? If you are one of those people clicking yes to every setup window you find, you better think twice when installing Vista. Take a look to the resources on badvista.org.
Here is a description of some nasty things you will find in Vista's EULAs, just in case you won't read it.
Windows Defender, the Anti-virus program bundled with Vista, actively scans for spyware, adware, and other potentially unwanted software. Given that the EULA does not define these terms, here are their meanings:
Windows Defender will ask you if you want to ignore, quarantine, or remove the unwanted software. It is only matter of time for removal to be mandatory (Do you remember the Windows Genuine Advantage shortcomings?)
During the instalation process, you must activate Vista online, and you will transmit certain hardware information directly to Microsoft. Hey! that could sound like spyware to some! Moreover, any change you should made to your hardware, Vista will have to be revalidated. None of those changes can result on you owning more than one single copy of Vista.
The EULA states that Microsoft may use the computer information, error reports, and Malware reports to improve our software and services. We may also share it with others, such as hardware and software vendors. They may use the information to improve how their products run with Microsoft software. . Am I the only one looking a problem here? Hardware and software vendors are not required to keep this information protected; are they? Advertisers will be anxious to buy it and take advantage of the errors to improve their adware/spyware.
Microsoft is now wrestling the open-source movement; they now require hardware vendors to close the hardware specifications so we cannot design open-source drivers for them.
Most of these limitations are througly described in Peter Gunman's paper. Several of them affect non-pc hardware.
Vista's content protection will disable noncompliant hardware: The S/PDIF interface of your soundcard, component video, etc. Will it also disable earphones? Sure! Why not? That will be an excuse for companies to design a new digital interface just for earphones, bloating them and even requiring batteries, and advert them as High Definition Earphones to push them down your... ears. That's a good premise for tapping your wallet further.
Content protection will classify graphics devices according to resolution, and will enforce DRM policies based on them. Gunman says: It's normal to have error codes indicating that there was a disk error or that a network packet got garbled, but I'm sure Windows Vista must be the first OS in history to have error codes for things like display quality too high. Other quote: 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".
Playing HD media on your Vista PC will be more than a pain: Content protection will eat system resources, errors will pop out of inexistent hardware devices (Macrovision Distribution Failed, anybody?), and you will be paying extra for your HD movie and the whole DRM scheme. Tell me, how do you feel for those playing pirate HD versions of your movie for less money and less overhead?
To prevent active attacks on hardware, Vista requires every device driver to poll its associated hardware every 30ms for digital outputs and 150ms for analog output to ensure everything is secure. Then even with nothing else happening in the system, hundreds of drivers have to wake up the processor thirty times a second each just to make sure that nothing continues to happen!
If you are a gamer thinking that Vista will bring the latest on graphics to your gaming experiences, you should know that many companies will be forced to kill features on their newest chips to bring space to obnoxious cryptographic subsystems you will not use.
This quote of Footnote C is for you, physicists: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.
Microsoft and the content owners believe that everyone is a potential software pirate, that's why they bloat your computer with so many uneffective security measures, which at the end of the day only mean more overhead to your processor.
TheStar.com: Vista's legal fine print raises red flags.
Peter Gutmann, A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. Auckland University, Australia.
FiringSquad, The Great HDCP Fiasco, where you will learn about those graphics cards utterly not compatible with Windows Vista premium content.
A comic by Phillip Dorrell
Paul F. Roberts, Windows Defender Lets Spyware Slip onto Vista PCs, InfoWorld
Last updated by Fabio on Jan 23, 2007.