TechRepublic.com has a great article about Microsoft’s most recent fiasco with the Vista Release Candidate 1 version.

It seems that the Media Center features stopped working on December 31st because it only licensed the MPEG-2 encoding technology until December 31st.

Those Vista beta users who decide to continue to trust Microsoft for media center functions are supposed to be able to get their Media Centers operating again when they upgrade to official release versions of Vista.

The official release is scheduled to be available on January 30th.  The Media Center functionality is in some, but not all, of the new Vista versions.

Welcome to the world of Digital Rights Management - Welcome to the world of Vista!

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.