WastedTimes

[aiolos]

Two controversial aspects of micros0ft's Vista were conspicuous by their absence at yesterday's launch event - neither digital rights management nor the way micros0ft will shut down or reduce the functionality of software it considers to be an illegal copy were mentioned.

But micros0ft's DRM protection has already been broken according to a well-known security blogger and micros0ft Student Ambassador.

DRM restricts the kind of media content you can use on your Vista machine. This is meant to make life harder for pirates but in practice, as Sony learnt, it can make life harder for honest users too.

Alex Ionescu said on his blog that he had written code which could be used to bypass Vista's DRM - more details here. Ionescu has not published the code but promises in a later post to publish "some safe, generic, proof of concept code that targets what I believe is a flaw in the Code Integrity/Driver Signing model.".

Ionescu should know what he's talking about. He's a (possibly soon to be former) micros0ft Student Ambassador. These straight arrows are apparently: "the most talented students from around the world for their dedication, passion and involvement with micros0ft."

This is likely to be the first of many such problems as an informal army of unwashed hackers starts to target the software.