I somehow stumbled into a blog debate of Vista DRM today which led me to A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection, a lengthy but extremely interesting look into the world of Vista’s content protection measures. The author, security researcher Peter Gutmann, sums up the document as follows:

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

Thought you were going to watch your 1920×1080 HD-DVD or Blu-ray movies with your new pair of HDCP-ready Radeon X1900 XT or 7800GTX cards? Thanks to the nearly impossible to meet requirements for playing premium content on a PC, neither of these cards, nor any graphics chip currently for sale, is capable of playing protected HD content at HD quality.

If a 42-page paper is a bit too much for you, try the 4-part podcast of the paper read aloud:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Microsoft’s Windows Vista team responded in January to the original article with an entry on their blog: Windows Vista Content Protection - Twenty Questions (and Answers). A little balance is necessary considering the original article makes it appear as though content protection will make Vista PCs nearly unusable in the near future when very little of the architecture it talks about is active except when you’re playing true protected HD content, and is only applicable to that data stream.