MS Vista DRM has been hacked...

[Malakriss]

...but that's a bad thing. DRM is a bad thing. Virus writers able to use the OS to protect their rogue warez is a bad thing. To quote a slyck.com poster: "This malware has been digitally signed. "

Alex Ionescu’s Blog » Why Protected Processes Are A Bad Idea

Aren't we glad that we stuck with XP now?

[Dinthug]

no idea what the hell any of that even means... except that it's bad

[Vorph]

At worst this returns Vista to the level of XP sans any anti-virus protection, which is how I've run XP for years with no issues. While I understand that's a bad thing to a lot of people who can't seem to manage to avoid viruses and spyware without constant hand-holding, I would probably leave this 'flaw' unpatched for as long as possible on my machine.

Being able to deprotect and hook into DRM'ed apps is nice for people who like exercising their Fair Use rights. Unfortunately this happened too early into Vista's release; it would've been nicer if it happened a year or so later when there might actually be some things released under Vista DRM that don't exist at all on XP. Right now I can't think of anything at all this applies to.

[Malakriss]

The problem that this hack represents isn't that honest user can bypass restrictions on their music/video. The problem is that the dishonest hacker/author can now abuse the vista protections in their favor.

In laymen's terms: Viruses or pop-up ads can flip a switch and be protected by the OS itself. Those Anti-virus or Spyware Removal software you ran on XP? They couldn't even detect the malware let alone remove it. Even worse they could remove the protection of Vista processes themselves and run rampant on your system.

[Clericnon2boxed]

some hacker should hack dx10 into xp, really fuck MS and all that DRM

[Laerazi]

Originally Posted by Malakriss

The problem that this hack represents isn't that honest user can bypass restrictions on their music/video. The problem is that the dishonest hacker/author can now abuse the vista protections in their favor.

In laymen's terms: Viruses or pop-up ads can flip a switch and be protected by the OS itself. Those Anti-virus or Spyware Removal software you ran on XP? They couldn't even detect the malware let alone remove it. Even worse they could remove the protection of Vista processes themselves and run rampant on your system.

So basically this allows hackers to create harder to remove shit... yay. ~

[woqqqa]

Originally Posted by Laerazi

So basically this allows hackers to create harder to remove shit... yay. ~

Yep. Really glad I switched to a Mac. I keep an XP box for gaming, and once I'm no longer able to use that, no more PC games for me. No way in hell I'm installing Vista or any of its derivatives.