September 20th, 2007
Everything you've read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 3)
This is the final installment in my series debunking Peter Gutmann’s widely read and undeservedly cited paper on Vista content protection. (If you missed Part 1 and Part 2, go read them before you dive into this conclusion.)
Today, I want to deal head-on with one of the most common objections I get from commenters who can’t believe that this widely quoted piece is so utterly and completely wrong about so many things. “He’s just analyzing Microsoft documents,” they say. “These are all Microsoft’s words, and he’s just pointing out their own flaws.”
That’s what Gutmann himself wants you to believe, but he’s wrong, as I’ll show in today’s examples.
- Those Microsoft documents are mostly old. The “Sources” section at the end of the paper includes a Word document and three PowerPoint presentations, all authored around the time of the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in early 2005, more than 18 months before Windows Vista was released to manufacturing. When Gutmann first published his paper to the Web in December of 2006, Vista had already been available as a free public beta for the better part of a year and was available to corporate customers in its RTM form. He added nearly 20,000 more words between December and June of this year. Yet there is no sign that Gutmann even tried to look at the actual product he was writing about.
- The quoting of Microsoft documents is selective to the point of dishonesty. In Part 2, I noted the distortions in Gutmann’s discussion of the Windows Logo requirements for graphics cards. On the next page, I’ll show you where he chopped out a sentence from the Microsoft documentation that completely contradicts his own argument. He’s obviously counting on his readers not checking his sources.
- The Gutmann paper is not based solely or even primarily on Microsoft documents. In fact, example after example after example in Gutmann’s paper are taken from secondhand sources and random reports of the “some guy with a web site says…” variety.
The biggest weakness of the paper is the complete absence of any attempt to try to reproduce these issues using the software and hardware he’s writing about. Would you buy a travel guide to San Francisco written by someone who had never visited the city but instead had studied preliminary plans for some of its infrastructure and checked in on a few newsgroups to see what random people were saying about the Golden Gate Bridge? Me neither.
Anyway, with that as prelude, please allow me to introduce a stunningly audacious example of how to distort the truth by selectively quoting material.
Next –>
Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 09/21/07
