Oppression

Alex Ionescu has released (working binary, no code, to prevent it being used by malware authors) a program that circumvents the Vista Protected Processes by letting the user mark any process as protected or unprotected.

I'm not a Windows internals expert by any stretch of the imagination, and I don't even have the code in question. But while Alex gets the title of his post right - Why Protected Processes are a Bad Idea - he doesn't explicitly answer that question. A naive reading of his post would simply tell you that Protected Processes are a bad idea because the implementation's broken. So I wanted to add this commentary:

If you can't implement the desired separation of privileges with the permissions system you've already got, much more important things are broken than DRM.

All accounts of the evil of Vista DRM are careful to remind us that no users ever asked for DRM. Microsoft have sold out to the MPAA, they wail. And almost noone stops to consider if this is really true or not.

They're all making the same mistake promulgated by Microsoft and the MPAA's PR. They assume that the primary users of Windows are the people who run it on their private PCs at home to "consume" media. The same people who soon won't even get to choose what version of Windows they run, as big integrators like Dell stop selling XP.

But the real mass-users of Windows, the ones with power to influence Microsoft, are big corporations and governments.

And corporations want DRM very, very much.

Zuska links to this article by Natalie about teenage girls being presented with stupid role models. The following quote is representative:

Unfortunately, the message repeatedly rammed down our throats, even today, is that women are not attractive if they are smart.

This is certainly the case. I just wanted to emphasize two points. Teenage boys are also influenced by this pop-culture message, which can make them search out and prefer the stupid, sexy, submissive girls they see advertised. (Read: encourage such behavior in girls who wouldn't behave that way by themselves.) And there is also another message, which says men are not successful and attractive unless they are physically strong, aggressive and uncompromising. And incidentally stupid.