One Week In, Viruses, Monitor Upgrades Surround Vista

For starters: F-Secure says it has already found the first vulnerabilities in the forthcoming operating system:

An Austrian virus writer has published five simple viruses targeting Microsoft MSH in a virus writing magazine. These proof-of-concept viruses will never became a real-world problem, but the case is interesting historically, as these are the first viruses for a totally new platform.

So it took years for Microsoft to put out even a beta version of the OS, but about a week for writers of malicious code to do their work.

Word began trickling out about the vulnerabilities last night, and already the Blogosphere is buzzing. From RealGeek:

It has taken only about a week. I knew this would happen, so when I installed it last week, I tried to install Mcafee on it. It didn't work. Great LOL.

But that's just the beginning. Discussion is now starting to bubble to the surface about some of the new hardware requirements of Vista, including the potential for it to require new monitors on each system.

According to an analyst at TechDirt:

There's some wiggle room there -- users won't need a new monitor per se, but if they don't already have a monitor that supports the HDCP copy protection that's becoming prevalent in TV and video, protected video they watch will be displayed at a lower quality. Most people don't feel too strongly about DRM because they don't really see its effect on them. They buy songs from iTunes, they play on their iPod, it's all good. But when they're confronted with an effect of DRM that hits their pocketbook like this, they'll notice, and they won't like it.

HDCP stands for "High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection."

And DRM stands for "Digital Rights Management." Although, once the gold version of Vista ships to market, that could change to: "Does Require Monitor."