Hollywood Controlling Parts of Windows Vista Design

Ed Felten on a new Microsoft white paper describing the “output content protection” in Windows Vista:

The document reveals that movie studios will have explicit veto power over what is included in some parts of Vista. For example, pages 22-24 describe the “High Bandwidth Cipher” which will be used to encrypt video data is it passes across the PC’s internal PCIe bus. Hollywood will allow the use of the AES cipher, but many PCs won’t be able to run AES fast enough, leading to stutter in the video.

★ Saturday, 13 August 2005