Vista DRM claims appear to be unfounded

Peter Gutmann has made claims about what the DRM in Vista does and will do to your data and machine. One problem, he hasn't actually done any testing of this. If you are going to beat up Microsoft, at least get some facts before making claims.

Is it bad reporting, bad research, or something worse?

That’s the question I asked myself when I read this NetworkWorld account of Peter Gutmann’s presentation at the Usenix Security Symposium last week. Gutmann is a researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who specializes in encryption (on his home page, he describes himself as a Professional Paranoid).

Gutmann generated a lot of heat last December with the publication of a paper that called Windows Vista’s Content Protection scheme “the longest suicide note in history.” He updated it in April, mostly to call his critics names, and he updated it yet again yesterday with a top-of-the-page slam at my ZDNet colleague George Ou, who took exception with some of Gutmann’s claims yesterday (see Claim that Vista DRM causes full CPU load and global warming debunked!).

Gutmann has a flair for melodramatic language and headline-grabbing phrases, but his theoretical arguments against Vista’s video subsystem fall apart quickly when they make contact with the real world. Based on Jon Brodkin’s story for NetworkWorld, it appears that Gutmann’s presentation at the Usenix conference was simply a rehash of his earlier claims about Vista and DRM.