I’ve been asked several times about Microsoft Silverlight — what is it and do I need it.

Silverlight is Microsoft’s competition for Adobe Flash Player. It’s designed to play videos and allow interaction with the program.

My initial thoughts were that I didn’t need it. I had no application that areqired it and I did not need yet another video display system on my computer. I already had Windows Media Player which could handle video streaming. I already had JavaScript and ActiveScript (Microsoft’s name for its JavaScript interpreter in Internet Explorer). I already had Adobe Flash Player. Wy did I need Silverlight?

I managed to do without Silverlight all through the first version, which was released in 2008. However, in early 2009, I finally had to install it — it was required for one of my new applications.

Continue reading What is Microsoft Silverlight?

Peter Gutmann has written a very disturbing analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection and has made it available on the web.

The article is available on the University of Auckland’s School of Computer Science web site and appears to be either a term paper or an article for publication.

Rather than get into the politics of DRM (digital rights management, a.k.a. digital restrictions management), the article discusses the Vista content protection specification and its impact on existing audio and video systems.

Hint: you won’t get high-quality output because Vista will downgrade the signal

I especially liked the “Executive Executive Summary,” which said:

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