Windows Vista includes a new set of features that allow playback software to work with protected media. This DRM infrastructure is bitterly controversial, and it’s given rise to an enormous amount of misinformation. No one has been more active (or successful) in spreading FUD and misinformation about this technology than Peter Gutmann, a researcher from the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
In Part 1 of this three-part series, I discussed some of the technical errors in Gutmann’s paper that illustrate his lack of hands-on experience with the technology he’s trying to cover and his fundamental confusion over how Windows Vista content protection features work. (You’ll find more examples in Part 3.) If you think I’m nitpicking over these details, you miss the point completely. Gutmann is an academic researcher, and the way scientists have worked since the end of the Dark Ages has been with a rigorous set of principles: You start with a thesis, you design experiments that test that thesis, and using those experimental results as well as those of your peers, you assemble evidence that proves or disproves your thesis. Then you publish.
As I noted last month, Gutmann has completely skipped the “experimental” portion of this time-tested process. He has literally no firsthand evidence to support most of the outrageous claims he makes, and much of the secondhand anecdotal evidence he has assembled is either taken out of context or is of questionable relevance. As I show later in this post, some of his evidence is just plain made up. When someone who claims to be a scientist publishes a paper filled with provably wrong facts, that person’s competence is called into question. When all of those errors are in one direction, that person’s honesty, objectivity, and devotion to the truth are called into question as well.
In this part, I’m going to drill down into the more controversial parts of his paper that deal with the PC as a platform for digital media. It starts with an amazing political statement.
ERROR #5: FIRST STEP ON THE ROAD TO TOTALITARIANISM?
I include this example because it’s a near-perfect illustration of Gutmann’s willingness to link to a supporting article that has nothing to do with the point he’s trying to make. He appears to be betting that his audience won’t actually follow all of those links and notice the disconnect. According to Gutmann, Bill Gates himself is behind the Microsoft conspiracy to deny all of our digital rights, and Windows Vista is part of his evil plan to take over distribution of all digital media. His “proof” is in this statement:
Microsoft have been saying for some years now that they’d really like the PC to go away, to turn into a kind of media platform and content-distribution center for consumers. This was a major theme of Bill Gates’ world promotional tour for Vista in early 2007, and in particular something he went into in some detail at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
If it were all just about lining Bill’s pockets (and those of the long-suffering Microsoft shareholders), this argument might be tenable, if a bit cliched. But Gutmann takes this conspiracy theory farther than anyone. From that simple paragraph he segues into a short discussion of Microsoft’s evil master plan “to lock out any competitors… [And] because they will then represent the only available distribution channel they’ll be able to dictate terms back to the content providers whose needs they are nominally serving in the same way that Apple has already dictated terms back to the music industry.” It ends, in hyperbolic fashion, with a link to an online web site devoted to the history of the Soviet secret police (NKVD), with lurid details about forced labor camps and warnings about “a continual extension of the security apparatus and an ongoing escalation of repressiveness by the enforcers.” Gutmann concludes:
The many examples given in the rest of this writeup are an indication that Windows is already well down this path.
I am not making this stuff up or exaggerating. Peter Gutmann wants you to believe that Microsoft’s goal with Windows Vista is the elimination of the PC, which in turn is the first step on the road to forced labor camps and secret police. So, once again, I followed the link he supplied at the start of this section, which leads to a secondhand report at Download Squad, drawn from a Reuters report that is no longer available online. Here’s the entire Bill Gates quote from that story:
Certain things like elections or the Olympics really point out how TV is terrible. You have to wait for the guy to talk about the thing you care about or you miss the event and want to go back and see it.
How do you get from here to “Microsoft [would] really like the PC to go away” and then to Soviet-era concentration camps? I’m not sure either. A slightly more detailed report of Gates’s remarks includes this additional quote: “I’m stunned how people aren’t seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we’ve had.” The prediction that delivery of TV programs over the Internet will increase in the next five years isn’t exactly earth-shattering (see iTunes, YouTube, Amazon Unbox for the first glimmerings of this trend). It certainly doesn’t predict the death of the PC.
Gates is describing something that the rest of us, those who follow the media industry and are neither professional nor amateur paranoids, have been noticing for some time. As bandwidth increases and the penetration of high-speed Internet connections reaches ever-higher levels, the Internet becomes a practical way to deliver movies, music, TV, and more. That has profound implications on the traditional media industry, which has historically relied on cable, satellite, Blockbuster Video, and other controlled channels to reach its customers. Internet-based media delivery is a disruptive technology, and it’s only natural that both Microsoft and Apple would both want to be part of this changing landscape. But to sketch a path from content protection technology to the Gulag Archipelago is truly depraved.
In fact, this assertion is one of the foundation arguments in Gutmann’s paper. He believes that “content protection [is] Microsoft’s number one priority for Vista.” Which leads us to…
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