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Slashback: Intuit, Telemetry, Meetup
I'd prefer an apology from the IRS. Rico writes "Intuit have spoken out about the CD-protection methods of their TurboTax software. According to them, the protection is harmless to computers and does not erase data. Despite the huge negative customer feedback, Intuit are still profiting from the product."
Train the dog, then never call the command. Mitch Wagner writes "Barry Shein, subject of this week's /. interview, proposes in "ISP Head Floats Plan To Legalize Spam" that spam is impossible to block, and so instead should be legitimized and regulated, with a central, not-for-profit company charged with collecting fees from spammers and distributing those fees to ISPs that receive the spam. Of course, there have been many other plans for charging spammers to send spam, but those plans mostly have the fees going to the ISP that sends the e-mail, or to the user that receives the mail, rather than the ISP that receives it and has to deliver it to the end-users. I'm the author of the piece I link to in this article."
Make big money as an open source telemetrist! For anyone who missed it in the Science section, there's a great followup to the Linux-based home-brewed weather balloon we recently featured: the OpenTRAC project is looking for help in building an APRS-like protocol. If that's gibberish to you, check out their introduction to the protocol to get an idea of how it's useful. Future experimenters will thank you.
One good deed escapes punishment. Psyiode writes with a link to this story at the Houston Chronicle which begins "Jurors needed only about 15 minutes to acquit a Houston man who was accused of hacking into the Harris County district clerk's wireless computer system in March. One juror, Helen Smith, 62, said she and the other jurors found that Stefan Puffer indeed hacked into the system but they did not believe he caused any damage as the government had alleged."
Puffer was arrested last summer for demonstrating that the county court's wireless LAN wasn't secure, and telling them about it.
Do we need manned spaceflight? Professor_Quail writes "The BBC has a story on NASA's plans for a successor to the Space Shuttle. From the article: Nasa has revealed its first set of mission criteria for the Orbital Space Plane (OSP) - the series of space vehicle expected to replace the space shuttle from 2012. The new spacecraft's primary function will be to ferry crews to and from the International Space Station (ISS) and serve as a lifeboat if the station has to be evacuated."
Or do you have other plans? Finally, rufo writes "For those of you brave enough to weather the elements and meet your fellow geek, don't forget that the Slashdot Meetup is this Thursday at 7PM your local time zone. I've been to a couple and there's some rather interesting characters that show up, and the conversations are quite engaging. Highly recommended if you have nothing better to do on a Thursday evening." Hmmm, must check to see if there's one around Knoxville ...
Of course Intuit is profiting - their competition sucks. Anyone manage to get an upgrade to successfully download from taxcut.com?
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
I must've missed the period where it stopped being dangerous. Maybe when there wasn't any?
Nope, no sig
Why do people keep buying this stuff when they're just going to complain about it? There's plenty of software out there that doesn't do this kind of stuff, and one does have options besides software for tax preparation. Use the alternatives, and quit funding the companies that don't have any respect for your property. Technically speaking, this is far more innocuous than monkeying in the Windows Registry.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
With that in mind... the hardcore spammers would love it if all the softcore spammers were forced out of the business - due to laws. The hardcore spammers aren't going to stop regardless, but they'd love it if everyone else stopped ;-).
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
If it is impossible to effectively block the spam, why does Mr. Shein believe it would be reasonably easy to collect on spam? Spammers are just not the type to be honest. Does he think they are going to start using real "From:" addresses and stop using open relays and throw-away accounts?
The strange part of the article is this:
Key to the success of the plan would be the participation of the major consumer Internet service providers... If those companies banded together and threatened to cut bulk-mailers off from their recipients -- combining that threat with the incentive of easier access to the recipients if the bulk mailers pay a reasonable fee -- bulk mailers would have no choice but to go along with it.
Get real. These ISPs have been cutting bulk-mailers off from their recipients the best they can already. So by the whole premise of spam being impossible to filter, Mr. Shein contradicts the feasability of the idea. We could go after spammers who do not pay if such a plan were enacted. But really, we can go after spammers now in many states and we all know how well that works. Good luck trying to collect Mr. Shein. If I get spam from your ISP because you are tryin a "make it legit" experiment, I will be sure to forward it back to you.
"Despite the huge negative customer feedback, Intuit are still profiting from the product." (sic)
[sarcasm]Well its nice to know the nerd and IT community's opinion means exactly DICK to the rest of the American population.[/sarcasm]
At least my mom took my advice, although TacAct is an ad-laden POS as well. She asked why it was such a big deal. I had to explain the boot track as "if computers had private parts, this would be one."
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
He took a reporter and presumably obtained a DHCP lease on the county's LAN and he's tried as a hacker? Everyone in IT Security knows that nobody does anything unless they are publicly embarrased about it. In the case of Microsoft, sometimes not even then. Taking a reporter also seems like a good way to prove your intentions are honourable.
I guess unless I am missing some critical aspect of the case the lesson here for the patriotic American to learn is that if you see a hole in the country's critical infrastructure, you should ignore it and move on.
I wouldn't want to be this guy. If there is this much fuss over an insecure 802.11b access point I can just imagine the trouble you could get in for walking around Los Alamos.
Why do people keep buying this stuff when they're just going to complain about it?
Exactly.
"Technically speaking, this is far more innocuous than monkeying in the Windows Registry."
Technically speaking, no, it very much isn't. Programs are *supposed* to add information to the registry when they're installed/run, that's the entire point of the registry. This is not true of the boot sector.
If the sales are the same as last year, when they didn't have this problem, then I would say that next year, they should remove it considering the "small but vocal" group's objection to it. I mean, if it was supposed to cut down on piracy, and yet, the market share remains the same even with this flap, then it probably bothered the neither the consumers nor the pirates. So why bother?
So, why did they use activation in the 1st place? Presumably to reduce sharing or the illegal selling of the software. Thus, more people will buy the software, and Intuit makes more money...
I would imagine that there sales would go up; that's the whole point, after all. If sales drop or they stay the same, it then brings to bear the question, "what's the point."
Now, according to Intuit (via C|Net), 'Bennett added that Intuit's share of the tax preparation software market stands at 69.3 percent, almost identical to its market share at the same point in the tax season last year. "While it's still too early to declare victory, all the signs are positive...and we're on track for another great consumer tax season," he said.'
Conclusion: The copy-protection software is completely usless! It did not help Intuit increase sales. Instead, sales remained at the same level and support costs went up!
Good job Intuit. You just proudly demonstrated the utter lack of utility of complicated copy-protection schemes on a $20 piece of software.
It seems that they have assumed that everyone uses Windows only, and only addresses sector 0 issues from that point of view. Their study does not address any complications that their software may cause with alternative bootloaders, etc...
Has anyone experimented with TurboTax with GRUB or LILO? I'm interested in your results.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My favorite quote from the cnet article on Intuit's financial situation:
Bennett added that Intuit's share of the tax preparation software market stands at 69.3 percent, almost identical to its market share at the same point in the tax season last year. "While it's still too early to declare victory, all the signs are positive...and we're on track for another great consumer tax season," he said.
So, you implement this new technology because 2/3rds of the tax returns using your software may be from pirated copies. This new technology rapes peoples hard drives, (whether it causes damage or not, it "touches" in in private places.) So now that 2/3rds has to buy a copy or not use it.
And after all this effort, taking a risk of pissing off many many people, you didn't convert any market share? Did all the pirates buy something else? And you are on track?
Someone's head should roll. It nice to make a little more profit (they are) but if your going to rape the public, but the goal was to make more CUSTOMERS, too. More market share. A _LOT_ more money.
These morons screwed the public and couldn't squeek a single 1% more market share doing it.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Privatizing manned space flight is our best hope for reducing costs and improving safety (look at how well it worked for manned heavier-than-air flight inside the atmosphere!) -- but how should one get the ball rolling? Several SSTO manned programs flourished in the heady investment-rich days of the .com bubble, but now that the economy is in the tank, it's pretty hard to get investment dollars for blue-sky (black-sky?) projects. The technology to build a new rocket is pretty straightforward these days, regardless of what folks would have you believe. After all, Sputnik flew nearly 50 years ago. At that time, television was the latest, greatest consumer technology. I'd like to think we've advanced a little since then.
Of course Intuit's not showing a hit on profits yet. Most of the people who are complaining already bought the software before they found out about the problems (from someone else if they were lucky, the hard way if they weren't). What Intuit needs to question is what effect this will have on next year's profits, when the people who complained this year buy some other tax software package instead of TurboTax. Of course, by that time nobody will make the connection between declining sales and the screw-up 12 months before
>> "We did it that way because we don't want to eat up disk space, and we wanted to make it easier if people had to restore from a backup."
Just how do you manage to restore data that never gets backed up?
Good point. Or how is 512 bytes of data "eating up disk space"?
The response is laden with stupidities:
But when you write to an area of the disk that's not ordinarily used, people think you're trying to hide something
Uh, yeah?! Are they trying to say that they put it there for an other reason?
Or:
The PCTest results show that SafeCast consumes less than 1MB of memory on a typical Windows XP machine, according to Intuit.
So, let me see, if I install say, 100 pieces of software (not that unthinkable), I should consider it 'normal' that 100MB of my memory is basically gone?
Do I need to go on?
Mr. Shein knows that spam is unstoppable. He wants to profit from it. If anyone should be paid, it should be the end recipients. Better still, the ISPs should pay the endusers for each spam received. That would give them some incentive to stop spam.
>Tomorrow's rocket scientists will likely come in large part from India, Pakistan, and China
not to mention Iraq and North Korea
*ducks*
Call me old-fashioned, but I still hoard every precious byte of free memory I can, probably a throw-back to the days when I felt super-cool having 4 megs of RAM. I strive valiantly to kill every unnecessary process, in hopes that I can squeeze just one more frame per second out of my games, and these jokers are busy trying to write to my boot sector and bury me under TSRs.
It isn't really that Intuit's actions were evil on their own, but if we just rolled over and accepted this type of scheme, every software publisher would think it's okay to toss in their own piece of chaff to clog up our PCs. Memory may be cheap, but I buy it for ME, not for some hobo who sees every consumer only as a potential pirate.
Sheesh. Has anyone actually read the cnet story?
"We thought it was important to get some independent answers on some of these concerns," Tom Allanson, senior vice president of Intuit's TurboTax Division, told CNET News.com. "There's a lot of noise out there--we want people to be able to come to one place and get the facts and make up their own minds."
More like, we want people to come to one place, get facts that aren't relevant, and go back to being consumer sheep.
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.
"In all the test systems they set up, they didn't find any appreciable deterioration in performance for any of the computer systems they tested," Allanson said.
What about an appreciable deterioration in privacy?
Complaints have also targeted SafeCast's mechanism of storing its activation code on an unused portion of the PC hard drive--known as track zero--where it can't be viewed or altered by the customer.
It can't be viewed or altered by the customer, unless the customer gets a virus that is normally nondestructive but stores data on track zero, or the customer accidentally runs other software that erases or overwrites this _totally unprotected storage area_.
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.
Can anyone say "backpedaling"?
"We did it that way because we don't want to eat up disk space, and we wanted to make it easier if people had to restore from a backup. But when you write to an area of the disk that's not ordinarily used, people think you're trying to hide something. I can understand why people would be concerned about it."
They didn't want it to eat up disk space? I hate to sound like I'm in favor of bloat-ware, but a single extra sector's worth of data on the filesystem isn't going to make a difference -- especially considering that it would be protected from accidental erasure.
Easier to restore from a backup? What about backup programs that don't save data that's hiding where there shouldn't be any data in the first place? It would be just as easy to put it in a regular file where a backup program would be sure to copy it.
The PCTest results also show that SafeCast does not collect or transmit any information on the PC it's installed on, contrary to frequent mischaracterizations of the program as "spyware."
[...]
Allanson acknowledged that customer support surrounding activation issues was spotty during the first month or so after TurboTax went on sale, with some customers receiving conflicting or erroneous information on common issues such as installing TurboTax on a new hard drive.
Spyware isn't the issue. If there were spyware included in the product, that would be completely unacceptable and consumers should have been made aware of the product's deficiency before they were given the opportunity to make a purchase.
The real issue is that product activation itself is not acceptable. There is no legitimate reason for a company to force each and every consumer to have post-sale contact with the company to get the software to work as advertized beyond preventing piracy, and even with post-sale contact that's not possible when the consumer has total physical control over their own hardware.
"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.
[...]
Intuit executives said during the company's second-quarter earnings call earlier this month that the TurboTax flap has had a negligible effect on the company's business.
Translation: "We didn't realize how many people are committed to protecting their privacy, and we certainly didn't expect anyone to discover we weren't playing straight. Next year, we'll make sure to dress it up as a plus to quell consumer fears. It's a relief to know, though, that the general population is so technically illiterate that our bad behavior didn't affect our profit margins.
Sheesh indeed.
(Those too young to remember what a painful birth the Space Shuttle had may find this 23-year-old article interesting. It spells out what was promised, and how far short the delivered product fell.)
One comment: I don't know how old you are, but I'm 43, and to me it looks like people my age are the ones who should be sent first on any one-way space trips. Forty-somethings frequently have raised their children to a state of (semi-)independence, and don't plan to have any more (and would be willing to accept sterilization to ensure it, if necessary). On the other hand, we are young enough to still be reasonably fit, and many of us are looking for a new challenge, having dumped a couple of decades into a first career. We have a bit of experience under our belts, and we're old enough to understand what "the rest of your life on Mars" really means.
BTW, are you a member of any group that advocates the views you espouse, or is this just your own (well-thought-out) opinion?
The Russians used a disposable design for all of that time, had decent funding for much of it, and had an extremely proficient space program.
Do they have a Moon base?
> One comment: I don't know how old you are, but I'm 43, and to me it looks like people my age are the ones who should be sent first on any one-way space trips.
I'm 42, a fellow member of the generation that reveled in grainy black and white pictures of men walking and driving on the moon. I figure much of that magic is lost on the generations that followed for which it is just old news.
I'm afraid we are too old for Mars. Take a 40 something and tack on 10 years before there is any chance of getting there and we would have too many potential health problems and you don't want old, sick colonists in a difficult, hostile environment. You also dont want colonists that are past their child bearing days. You want people that will raise children there. Its a lot cheaper and more fun to raise future martians on site instead of shipping them in. Thats what colonists do.
> BTW, are you a member of any group that advocates the views you espouse, or is this just your own (well-thought-out) opinion?
No. I worked at NASA in my youth. I was just beginning work on the X-33 when I figured out the hard way NASA wasn't structured to do anything worthwhile any more and that the X-33 would never fly.
If I were still an idealist I could join one of the various Mars advocacy groups and pretend that lobbying NASA or assorted politicians would make a difference but it wont. It would take a JFK, a real leader with a vision and the guts to throw down the gauntlet. We just don't make that kind of politican anymore or if we do they don't get elected. It would also help to have an advesary to race there which is the only reason Apollo happened. Instead we just waste billions on wars and weapons, the ISS, the space shuttle etc. We don't progress.
If there is anything I would attribute my passion for Mars to its Kim Stanley Robinson and his great books, "Red Mars", "Green Mars" etc.
@de_machina