Before anyone starts flaming me, I'm not taking Microsofts side here.
QUOTE(arcman @ Mar 2 2007, 12:11 PM)

How so? Gutmann is what you would call an expert in the industry, and he bases everything he states in the document from from the Vista specs published by MS.
Yes, but the problem with the documents is that they aren't very precises and leave room for interpetation. Which means that the in them selves documents aren't adequate when drawing conclusions as to what exactly has been, and is being, done.
QUOTE(arcman @ Mar 2 2007, 12:11 PM)

From the article:
QUOTE
[Q:]This is a biased writeup.
[A:]Perhaps, but then I challenge anyone to read the specifications given in the Sources section above and write a positive analysis of Vista's content protection. Someone has to point out these problems, and it happened to be me in this case, but I think anyone with technical skills who reads the relevant documents would come to a similar conclusion.
Others in the industry indeed have come to the same conclusions after studying the documentation. Just as they have studied the response.QUOTE(arcman @ Mar 2 2007, 12:11 PM)

So far as Microsoft's response, Gutmann's document has already been updated with any new technical info their response provided. In addition, he points out the statements in MS's response that are blatantly contradictory.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs...t.html#responseMicrosofts response is problematic, and has contradictions, which are obvious to anyone who reads it. They even (although they don't say it straight out) agree with Gutmann on several points.
QUOTE(arcman @ Mar 2 2007, 12:11 PM)

Matter of fact I've seen the inconsistencies of what MS has said verses the way Vista behaves. From MS:
QUOTE
Will the 'tilt bit' mechanism cause problems even when the driver is not under attack from a hacker, e.g., when there are voltage spikes?
It is pure speculation to say that things like voltage fluctuations might cause a driver to think it is under attack from a hacker. It is up to a graphics IHV to determine what they regard as an attack. Even if such an event did cause playback to stop, the user could just press 'play' again and carry on watching the movie (after the driver has re-initialized, which takes about a second). Again, it is important to note that this could only occur in the case of watching the highest-grade premium content, such as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. In practice I doubt it would ever actually happen.
I've already seen this to be false after running basic setups and installations of brand new Vista machines. I'd have a machine sitting on the bench simply idling, and out of the blue I'd get error messages from the ATI driver stating the graphic subsystem had to be restarted. Thankfully it wasn't a catastrophic failure, the display didn't crash out completely, nor did the system have to be restarted. Still, there is the potential for future tilt-bit issues, and stating "I doubt this would ever happen" is either ignorant or willfully deceptive.
I've seen the same thing, although I cannot say if it is due to tilt-bit or not, the Vista drivers aren't all that good to begin with. Ignoring the tilt-bit issue, what I find must disturbing is the fact that the graphics and audio driver makers are gonna spend a lot of time and money building the DRM into their drivers which they then can't spend on stability and performance improvements.
As for WMP: Couldn't you just use a has function the see if the checksum changes after playing the file in WMP. It won't be able to tell what has changed but it should be able to tell if something has changed. Anyway I use Foobar2000 and Media Player Classic for my media playback needs, and EAC for ripping.