Fragile DRM

I'm sick and tired of DRM.

Now, while some might be opposed to digital rights management under any circumstances, I'm willing to put up with reasonable controls...but only if they work.

Case in point: Netflix's Watch Instantly feature. It's one of the most attractive features of the service, and when coupled with something like the Roku Netflix Player, it's hard to see why this isn't the future of media delivery. One thing though: it uses Microsoft's DRM, and in practice, that's fragile at best.

I used to be able to Watch Instantly on my PC and our home theater PC, both running Vista. Aside from the annoyance of having DRM software updates every couple of months, it was a pain-free experience. Until we upgraded to Vista Service Pack 1--which promptly broke Watch Instantly. Following the Netflix and Microsoft instructions to reset the DRM (essentially creating new keys and throwing out the old ones...you didn't need those old keys for other, um, protected content, right?), nothing worked. Some even said that Netflix was telling people to downgrade from SP1!

I finally reloaded Vista on my PC, and lo and behold, Watch Instantly started working again even with SP1. But to this day, it doesn't work on our HTPC. And now, the self-service instructions that Netflix used to offer have been replaced by instructions to call their technical support to resolve the problem.

And I haven't even hit the other frequent problems of the hardware fingerprint changing (such as changing a hard drive or motherboard) or running out of unique machines that Watch Instantly can be used on before having to call Netflix to increase the count.

Firefox? Opera? Mac? Linux? None of them work because Microsoft's scheme uses Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer (maybe Mac support by year's end, but you get the point).

"Handle with care" is all I have to say... Read more...

Humble Beginnings

The National Science Foundation has some interesting historical maps of the Internet in PDF format. I was in college in 1995, so it's cool to see what the backbone looked like then. Today, the company I work for has more bandwidth to some of our medium-sized locations than a backbone connection did back when I was in school.