Archive for February, 2007

Is Vista’s DRM a step too far?

February 16, 2007 No comments

If it isn’t enough that Vista’s licensing legalese has being causing raised blood pressure, its use of DRM technology is arousing passionate outbursts and outpourings of FUD. The fact that DRM has been part of the Windows has been included in Windows since the 1990’s does nothing to quell the storm. One thing that needs to be pointed out is that the whole furore entails the delivery of protected content to consumers. Microsoft would no doubt approve of the line that if there was no protected content, then there would be no need to worry. However, there is a sizeable number of people who do not trust Microsoft to keep to its word and are making their feelings known.

The embodiment of the issue is Microsoft’s incorporation of HDCP into 64-bit Vista. It is an Intel standard and it’s already on the market but users already are having bad experiences with it. The problems surround the need to ensure that protected video is not intercepted while a movie is being played and this involves the hardware as much as the software. The result is you need a compatible monitor that will have the correct inputs so that DRM can be employed. Some also suggest that this is not the end of the matter as regards hardware compatibility and the list can grow long enough that a whole new PC looks a good idea.

At the heart of this debate?is a paper written by Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland, in which the consequences of Microsoft’s implementation are examined. The idea of a system with an alternative agenda to that which you have is hardly enthralling: neither using CPU time to monitor DRM and the locking down hardware are particularly attractive. Such is the exposure that this article has received that even Microsoft has had to respond to it. The point that they try to make is that decoding of protected content occurs in a sandbox and does not affect anything else that might be going on in the system. Unfortunately for them, many of those adding comments to the piece take the chance to launch a broadside on the company; some of the vitriol is certainly successful when it comes to trying to put me off Vista. To Microsoft’s credit, the negative comments remain but it far from helps their attempted rebuttal of Gutmann.

The main fuel for the negativity is not Gutmann’s paper per se but lack of trust in Microsoft itself, all of this in spite of its Trustworthy Computing initiative. The question goes like this: if the company uses DRM for video and audio, where else could it use the technology? The whole licensing debate also furthers this and it is on this point that the fear, uncertainty and doubt really goes into overdrive, no matter how much effort is expended by people like Ed Bott on debunking any myths. Users generally do not like software taking on itself to decide what can and cannot be done. Personally, I have past experience of Word’s habits of this nature and they were maddening: trying to produce my doctoral thesis with it went OK until I tried pulling the whole thing together using a master document; I backtracked and made PRN files for each chapter so that it wouldn’t change; LaTeX would never have done this….

What is the point of all of this DRM? It looks as if Microsoft clearly feels that it is necessary to pitch the PC as an entertainment content delivery device in order to continue growing their revenues in the home users market. Some would take this idea even further: that it is control of the entertainment industry that Microsoft wants. However, in order to do so, they have gone with strong DRM when there exists a growing backlash against the technology. And then there’s the spectre of the technology getting cracked. In fact, Alex Ionescu has found a potential way to fool the Protected Media Path (called Protected Video Path in a ComputerWorld Security article) into working with unsigned device drivers. Needless to say given the furore that has been generated, but there are others who are more than willing to take the idea of cracking Vista DRM even further. A recent remark from a senior Microsoft executive will only encourage this.

I must admit that I remain unconvinced by the premise of using a PC as my only multimedia entertainment device. Having in the past had problems playing DVD’s on my PC, I nowadays stick to using a standalone DVD player to do the honours. And I suspect that I’ll do the same with HD video should I decide to do watch it; it’s not that high on my list of priorities. In fact, I would be happier if Microsoft made a versions of Vista with and without protected HD capability and they do: 32-bit Vista will not play protected HD video. And it avoids all the hackles that have caused so much controversy too, allowing an easier upgrade in the process. The downsides are that the security model isn’t as tough as it is in the 64-bit world and that maximum memory is limited to 4 GB, not an issue right now it more than likely will become one. If you are keen on Vista, the 32-bit option does give you time to see how the arguments about the 64-bit world run. And if hardware will catch up. Me, I’ll stick with XP for now.

Operating Systems, Windows

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Is Vista licensing too restrictive?

February 15, 2007 No comments

There are things in the Vista EULA that gave me the heepy jeepies when I first saw them. In fact, one provision set off something of a storm across the web in the latter part of 2006. Microsoft in its wisdom went and made everything more explicit and raised cane in doing so. It was their clarification of the one machine one licence understanding that was at the heart of whole furore. The new wording made it crystal clear that you were only allowed to move your licence between machines once and once only. After howls of protest, the XP wording reappeared and things calmed down again.

Around the same time, Paul Thurrott published his take on the Vista EULA on his Windows SuperSite. He takes the view that the new EULA only clarified what in the one XP and that enthusiast PC builders are but a small proportion of the software market. Another interesting point that he makes is that there is no need to license the home user editions of Vista for use in virtual machines because those users would not be doing that kind of thing. The logical conclusion of this argument is that only technical business users and enthusiasts would ever want to do such a thing; I am both. On the same site, Koroush Ghazi of TweakGuides.com offers an alternate view, at Thurrrott’s invitation, from the enthusiast’s’s side. That view takes note of the restrictions of both the licencing and all of the DRM technology that Microsoft has piled into Vista. Another point made is that enthusiasts add a lot to the coffers of both hardware and software producers.

Bit-tech.net got the Microsoft view on the numbers of activations possible with a copy of retail Vista before further action is required. The number comes in at 10 and it seems a little low. However, Vista will differ from XP in that it thankfully will not need reactivation as often. In fact, it will take changing a hard drive and one other component to do it. That’s less stringent than needing reactivation after changing three components from a wider list in a set period like it is in XP. I cannot remember the exact duration of the period in question but 60 days seems to ring a bell.

OEM Vista is more restrictive than this: one reactivation and no more. I learned that from the current issue of PC Plus, the trigger of my concern regarding Windows licensing. Nevertheless, so long as no hard drive changes go on, you should be fine. That said, I do wonder what happens if you add or remove an external hard drive. On this basis at least, it seems OEM is not such a bargain then and Microsoft will not support you anyway.

However, there are cracks appearing in the whole licencing edifice and the whole thing is beginning to look a bit of a mess. Brian Livingston of Windows Secrets has pointed out that you could do a clean install using only the upgrade edition(s) of Vista by installing it twice. The Vista upgrade will upgrade over itself, allowing you access to the activation process. Of course, he recommends that you only do this when you are in already in possession of an XP licence and it does mean that your XP licence isn’t put out of its misery, apparently a surprising consequence of the upgrade process if I have understood it correctly.

However, this is not all. Jeff Atwood has shared on his blog Coding Horror that the 30 grace activation period can be extended in three increments to 120 days. Another revelation was that all Windows editions are on the DVD and it is only the licence key that you have in your possession that will determine the version that you install. In fact, you can install any version for 30 days without entering a licence key at all. Therefore, you can experience 32-bit or 64-bit versions and any edition from Home Basic, Home Premium, Business or Ultimate. The only catch is that once the grace period is up, you have to licence the version that is installed at that point in time.

There is no cracking required to any of the above (a quick Google search digs loads of references to cracking of the Windows activation process). It sounds surprising but it is none other than Microsoft itself who has made these possibilities available, albeit in an undocumented fashion. And the reason is not commercial benevolence but the need to keep their technical support costs under control apparently.

That said, a unintended consequence of the activation period extensibility is that PC hardware enthusiasts, the types who rebuild their machines every few months (in contrast, I regard my main PC as a workhouse and I have no wish to cause undue disruption to my life with this sort of behaviour but each to their own… anyway, it’s not as if they are doing anyone else any harm), would not ever have to activate their copies of Vista, thus avoiding any issues with the 1 or 10 activation limit: an interesting workaround for the limitations in the first place. And all of this is available without (illegally, no doubt) using a fake Windows activation server as has been reported.

With all of these back doors inserted into the activation process by Microsoft itself, it makes some of the more scary provisions look not only over the top but also plain silly: a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. For instance, there is a provision that Microsoft could kill your Windows licence if it deems that you breached terms of that licence. It looks as if it’s meant to cover the loss in functionality at the end of the activation grace period but it does rather give the appearance that your £370 Vista Ultimate is as ephemeral as a puff of smoke: overdoing that reminder is an almost guaranteed method of encouraging power users jump ship to Linux or another UNIX. And the idea of Windows Genuine Advantage continually phoning home doesn’t provide any great reassurance either. However, it does seem that Microsoft has reactivated XP licences over the phone when reasonable grounds are given: irredeemable loss of system, for example. That ease and cost of technical support returns again. There is corollary to this: make life easy for Microsoft and they won’t bother you very much if at all. Incidentally, if they ever did do a remote control kill of your system, the whole action would be akin to skating on legal thin ice. And I suspect that they may not like making trouble for themselves.

I think I’ll let the dust settle and stay on my XP planet while in a Vista universe. As it happens, Paul Thurrott has a good article on that subject too.

Operating Systems, Windows

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HennessyBlog theme update

February 12, 2007 No comments

Over the weekend, I have been updating the theme on my other blog, HennessyBlog. It has been a task that projected me onto a learning curve with the WordPress 2.1 codebase. I have collected what I encountered so I know that it’s out there on the web for you (and I) to use and peruse. It took some digging to get to know some of what you find below. Any function used to power WordPress takes some finding so I need to find one place on the web where the code for WordPress is fully documented. The sites presenting tutorials on how to use WordPress are more often than not geared towards the non-techie rather than code cutters like myself. Then again, they might be waiting for someone to do it for them…

The changes made are as follows:

Tweaks to the interface

These are subtle with the addition of navigation controls to the sidebar and the change in location of the post metadata being the most obvious enhancements. “Decoration” with solid and dashed lines (using CSS border attributes rather than the deprecated hr tagset) and standards compliance links.

Standards compliance

Adding standards compliance links does mean that you’d better check that all is in order; it was then that I discovered that there was work to be done. There is an issue with the WordPress wpautop function (it lives in the formatting.php file) in that it sometimes doesn’t add closing tags. Finding out that it was this function that is implicated took a trip to the WordPress.org website; a good rummage in the wp-includes folder does a lot but it can’t achieve everything.

Like a lot of things in the WordPress code, the wpautop function isn’t half buried. The the_content function (see template-functions-post.php) used to output blog entries calls get_content function (also in template-functions-post.php) to extract the data from mySQL. The add_filter function (in plugin.php) associates the wpautop function and others with get_the_content function and the p tags get added to the output.

To return to the non-ideal behaviour that caused me to start out on the above quest, an example is where you have an img tag enclosed by div tags. The required substitution involves the use of regular expressions that work most of the time but get confused here. So adding a hack to the wpautop function was needed to change the code so that the p end tag got inserted. I’ll be keeping an eye out for any more scenarios like this that slip through the net and for any side effects. Otherwise, compliance is just making sure that all those img tags have their alt attributes completed.

Tweaks to navigation code

Most of my time has been spent on tweaking of the PHP code supporting the navigation. Different functions were being called in different places and I wanted to harmonise things. To do this, I created new functions in the functions.php for my theme and needed to resolve a number of issues along the way. Not least among these were regular expressions used for subsetting with the preg_match match that weren’t to my eyes Perl-compliant, as would be implied by the choice of function. I have since found that PCRE’s in PHP use a more pragmatic syntax but there remained issues with the expressions that were being used. They seemed to behave OK in their native environment but fell out of favour within the environs of my theme. Being acquainted with Perl, I went for a more familiar expression style and the issue has been resolved.

Along the way, I broke the RSS feed. This was on my off-line test blog so no one, apart from myself, that is, would have noticed. After a bit of searching, I realised that some stray white-space from the end of a PHP file (wp-config.php being a favourite culprit), after the PHP end tag in the script file as it happens, was finding its way into the feed and causing things to fall over. Feed readers don’t take too kindly to the idea of the XML declaration not making an appearance on the first line of the file. The refusal of Firefox to refresh things as it should caused some confusion until I realised that a forced refresh of the feed display was needed – sometimes, it takes a while for an addled brain to think of these kinds of things.

Programming, Scripting, Web Development

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From real to virtual…

February 9, 2007 No comments

In a previous entry, I mused over a move from Windows to Linux, a suggestion being that Fedora Core Linux would be my base operating system with Windows installed in a Xen virtual machine. That of course led me to wonder how I would swap my current situation about: Linux in VM, Windows as host. Meantime, I discovered something that makes the whole process a little easier: VMware Convertor. The Starter version can be downloaded free of charge while the Enterprise edition comes with VirtualCenter Management Server for corporate use. What it does is to make a virtual version of a real computer, a process that takes drive imaging much, much further. I have given it a whirl and the conversion seems to go well; the only thing left is for me to fire it up in VMware Workstation – I believe that Player and Server will also run the VM that is created and, like Convertor Starter, they also can be downloaded free of charge; Workstation does everything for me so I haven’t looked beyond it, even though it did cost me money all those moons ago – and get through licence activation issues without leaving me with no authorised Windows installation.

Virtualisation

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Octals in UNIX shell scripting

February 9, 2007 No comments

I have just discovered that if you have a number with a leading zero, such as 08, it is assumed to be an octal number, that is, one of base 8. The upshot of this is that you get errors when you have numbers like 08 and 09 in your arithmetical expressions; they are illegal in octal: 08 should be 10 and 09 should be 11. Og course, as luck would have it, you get exactly these expressions when date/time processing. Luckily you can forced things to be base 10 by having something like 10#08 or, when extracting the minute from a date-time value, 10#$(date +%M). Strange as it might appear, this behaviour is all by design. It is dictated in the POSIX standard that governs UNIX. That said, I’d rather it if 08 was interpreted as an 8 and 09 as a 9 rather than triggering the errors that we see but that could have been seen as muddying the simplicity of the standard.

Linux, Programming, Scripting, UNIX

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A perspective on Linux

February 8, 2007 One comment

I have revisited an old website that I used to have online in and around 2000 that has since been retired for while. One thing that it had in common with this blog was its focus in computer technology. I don’t remember blogging being bandied about as a term back then but a weblog would have fulfilled the site’s much better. One of the sections of this old world website was dedicated to Linux and UNIX; this was where I collected and shared experienced my experiences of these. These days, unless it is held in some cache somewhere (rather unlikely, I think), the only place that it is found is what I bundled together in a tar.gz file for transfer to Linux. Irony strikes…

Back then, my choice of Linux was SuSE 6.2, followed by 6.4 from PC Plus DVD. It was the first, and only, Linux distro that I bought after exploring a variety of distros from cover-mounted CD’s in books and magazines. While I did like it, it wasn’t enough to tempt me away from Windows. I had issues with hardware and they got in the way of a move. Apart from what some might judge to be clunkiness, there were less impediments on the software side.

I am a DIY system builder and there were issues with Linux support of my hardware, particularly my modem. Rather than being in possession of all the electronic wherewithal that a full modem would need, it got the operating system to do some of the work. The trouble was that this locked you into using Windows, hence its Winmodem moniker. Besides this, my Zip drive was vital to me and SuSE didn’t support it out of the box: a kernel recompilation was in order and could involve losing any extensions that SuSE had actually added. Another foible was non-support of a now obsolete UDMA 66 expansion card.

But improvements in hardware support were coming on the scene. Support for printing with CUPS, scanning with SANE and audio with ALSA was coming along nicely and has matured nicely. Apart from cases where vendors refuse to help the Open Source community and bleeding edge hardware that needs drivers to recoded according to the demands of GPL, things have come a long, long way.

Software-wise, the only thing holding me from migrating to Linux was my use of Microcal (now OriginLab) Origin, a scientific data visualisation and analysis package that was invaluable for my work. Even then, that could be run using WINE, the Windows API library for Linux. OpenOffice could easily have replaced MS Office for my purposes unless formula editing was a feature outstanding from the specification. GIMP, once I had ascended the learning curve, would have coped with my graphics processing needs. After committing myself to non-visual web development, Bluefish and Quanta+ would have fulfilled my web development needs. Web technologies such as Perl, PHP, Apache and SQL have always been very much at home in Linux so no issue there. At that stage, experimenting with these was very much in my future. Surprisingly, web browsing wasn’t that strong in Linux then. Mozilla was still in alpha/beta development phase and needed a lot of rough ends sorting and the dreadful Netscape 4 was in full swing with offerings like nautilus coming on stream. Typography support was another area of development at the time and this fed through into how browsers rendered web pages. Downloading and compiling xfstt did resolve the situation.

SuSE 6.4 desktop (317 kB)

These days, I have virtual machines set up for Ubuntu, Fedora Core and Mandriva while openSUSE is another option. I spent Saturday night poking around in Fedora (I know, I should have better things to be doing…) and it feels very slick, a world away from where Red Hat was a decade ago. The same applies to Ubuntu which is leagues ahead of Debian, on which it is based. With both of these, you get applications for updating the packages in the distribution; not something that you might have seen a few years ago. Support for audio and printing comes straight out of the box. I assume scanner and digital camera support are the same; they need to be.Fedora includes the virtual machine engine that is Xen. I am intrigued by this but running a VM within a VM does seem peculiar. Nevertheless, if that comes off, it might be that Fedora goes onto my spare PC with Windows loaded onto one or more virtual machines. It’s an intriguing idea and having Fedora installed on a real PC might even allow me to see workspaces changed onscreen as if they were the sides of a cube, very nice. Mandriva also offers the same visual treat but is not a distro that I have been in a lot. The desktop environment may be KDE rather than Gnome as it is in the others but all the same features are on board. The irony though is that, after starting out my Linux voyage on KDE, I am now more familiar with Gnome these days and, aesthetically speaking, it does look that little better to my eye.

So would I move to Linux these days? Well, it is supported by a more persuasive case than ever it has been and I would have to say that it is only logistics and the avoidance of upheaval that is stopping me now. If I was to move to Linux, then it would be by reversing the current situation: going from Linux running in a VM on Windows to Windows running in a VM on Linux. Having Windows around would be good for my personal education and ease the upheaval caused by the migration. Then, it would be a matter of watching what hardware gets installed.

Fedora Core desktop (972 kB)

Linux, Operating Systems, UNIX

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