Monday, February 24, 2003

Intuit offers TurboTax tests, apologies According to CNET News, Intuit is placing test results on their web site purporting to show that the spyware/copy protection scheme in this year's TurboTax isn't so bad after all. Customers have complained in online discussion groups, shopping sites and other forums that SafeCast runs continually in the background on computers with Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, even when TurboTax isn't running, thus consuming memory and other resources. The PCTest results show that SafeCast consumes less than 1MB of memory on a typical Windows XP machine, according to Intuit. But why should anyone lose 1MB of memory, all the time, for a program which may not even be running and performs no purpose for the user other than validating "honesty"? Other memory-resident programs at least perform a function which a user may call up at any given moment. Complaints have also targeted SafeCast's mechanism of storing its activation code on an unused portion of the PC hard drive--known as sector zero--where it can't be viewed or altered by the customer. Allanson said that although neither of those mechanisms should be a problem for consumers, Intuit will remove them in next year's version of TurboTax. Shouldn't be a problem. Except that an application writing to a boot sector is wrong. The potential for problems is huge. Intuit got caught red-handed because their copy-protection scheme was ill-advised and poorly implemented. "I think we might have missed the general goal by upsetting the number of customers we upset--we certainly missed the mark on that one," he said. "We've learned a lot, and were going to do it differently next year. Only because they got caught. 10:32:38 AM    Oh yeah? []