A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection by Peter Gutmann is very well-written, well-reasoned, and well worth the read. Frankly, it’s an eye-opener to the extent to which Microsoft bent itself over backwards to please their Hollywood masters, while taking us all down with them in the process.

While the initial controversy surrounding this article was based on ignorance and the misperception that Microsoft could brick your computer simply because someone hacked a DVD using a chip that you happen to have in your computer, the Net community is correct to be outraged. It disgusts me to think how much time, energy, and money will be wasted on complying with Microsoft’s onerous DRM. Peter’s article breaks this cost down in detail.

I believe that Vista’s DRM is a paranoid and horribly inefficient mechanism that will make our systems more unstable and expensive.

I believe Fair Use is at stake, and Hollywood and Microsoft have declared war on their own customers.

I believe that this war will only invite piracy and criminalize the innocent.

I believe that the PC–my PC–is not a piece of consumer electronics, and Hollywood has absolutely no right to control major subsystems of it.

I believe that consumers should vote with their dollars and punish Hollywood and Microsoft for their practices and policies by staying away from Vista and the next-gen “premium” content delivery systems in droves.

I believe that Microsoft’s DRM is an erosion of my consumer rights and is yet another reason I’m staying as far away from Vista as I possibly can.

Links:

• Peter Gutmann: A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection
• Wikipedia article on Peter Gutmann
• Output Content Protection and Windows Vista from WHDC.
• Windows
  Longhorn Output Content Protection from WinHEC.
• How
  to Implement Windows Vista Content Output Protection from WinHEC.
• Protected
  Media Path and Driver Interoperability Requirements from WinHEC.
• Security Now 73: Next Generation Copy Protection
• Security Now 74: Peter Gutmann On Vista Content Protection
• Security Now 75: Vista DRM
• EFF: Protected Media Path, Component Revocation, Windows Driver Lockdown

Update

On January 20, Microsoft’s Nick White posted a response to Peter Gutmann’s article here. This, too, is a fascinating read and a study in self-contradiction. The very same Dave Marsh who authored many of the technical papers cited by Peter Gutmann’s article is responsible for much of the post’s content, and many places, he contradicts himself. Looks like Microsoft is trying to spin this for PR purposes now that all hell has broken loose on this issue of DRM.

In response to the response, Gutmann posted his own point-by-point rebuttal, basically calling Marsh out as the flack he appears to be.

MyQuery Builder is a web-based, visual MySQL query builder that is built on top of the fantastic Script.aculo.us libs. The initial release is available over on SourceForge.net.

There’s one kink in my development pipeline that makes people question my sanity. Back in the mid-90′s, I started building database apps in Access. I cringe to think of how painful this was back then, but one thing Microsoft had from the earliest days of this app was a visual query builder. This dark corner of the app was pure brilliance. You simply drag and drop fields and tables to construct even the most complex compound query.

Fast forward to today. While I haven’t used Access to build a database in more than a decade, I still find that I use the visual query builder to build complex JOINs and conditional queries. In fact, aside from checking sites in IE and Firefox, this is the only other thing I use Windows for.

Because it’s a bit of a pain to fire up Parallels just to build a query, I’ve always kept my eye out for an AJAX-y tool that does the same thing. Oddly, I’ve never found said tool, so I wrote one myself.

MyQuery Builder allows you to drag and drop fields and tables to construct complex JOINs, conditional WHEREs, ORDER BYs, and GROUP BYs. I find that I’m using it more and more.

While it is far from complete, this initial version is about 90% of the way there. In the future, I hope to add support for additional query types other than SELECTs, in addition to improving the interface and easing the workflow. I also have dreams that people will find the tool useful and actually contribute back to the codebase with their own improvements.

One thing that I’m stuck on is a way to draw arrows between connected fields. If anyone knows how to do this, please email me a link to a tutorial to steve at stringer sites dot com.

Links:
MyQuery Builder