Concentrating wealth and power

Peter Gutmann at the University of Auckland has analysed the costs and implications of the content-protection mechanisms in Windows Vista. Looks like I’m using the last version (XP) of Windows I’ll ever install. Has Microsoft, with Vista, written “the longest suicide note in history”?

The most plausible motivation adduced is to monopolise content distribution, a motif for our time. George Monbiot writes bitterly of how in the last few decades the rich have reversed the egalitarian progress of the mid-20th century, concentrating their wealth and power to levels not seen since the 1920s – and how we have been seduced into complicity with this.