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Intuit Sued Over Product Activation
An anonymous reader writes "PCWorld is reporting: [Scott] Leviant's firm of Stanbury & Fishelman has filed a class-action lawsuit against Intuit in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of all U.S. purchasers of TurboTax software for the 2002 tax year. The suit alleges that Intuit engaged in unfair and deceptive business practices by failing to fully disclose the mechanisms and consequences of its product-activation technology before consumers pay for the software."
It's not that product activation is bad all of the time, it's just that the implementation really sucks on occasion.
;-)
I have no problem with paying for good, reliable, quality software for my home machine, but if you use tricks or traps to sucker people into paying more than they should, that's just not right.
SOFTWARE MAKERS: Don't cry foul about piracy and then turn around and be just as dishonest with consumers.
Well, I guess this is a reason to go back to pirating my games
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
It's true. I should know, it happened to me.
I thought it was something that _I_ personally did wrong until I started searching Google trying to find out what I did wrong before installing the software. Did I mess up permissions some where? Did I forget to "su root" before running the scripts? Where was the error?
Well, then I found a blog that said "Likely the biggest problem users have expressed, is the level at which the TurboTax licensing agreement is managed and protected with the SafeCast/C-Dilla technology. People believe C-Dilla infiltrates their system in a very insidious manner, and uses memory and resources even when TurboTax is not loaded. And some believe it has caused them serious compatibility problems with non-related CD writing operations. (PC Magazine and ExtremeTech will be conducting some tests next week to see if we can duplicate some of these problems).
Intuit and Macrovision have provided only cursory information regarding C-Dilla operations. Understandably, Intuit does not want to expose significant details. But if the scheme is mathematically and technically sound, there really is no reason why ALL the details should not be known, as it would likely not be computationally feasible to crack in a reasonable timeframe, even if one is armed with full knowledge of how it works. Unless Intuit and Macrovision provide this level of information, many people will still not trust you."
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
OK, so suppose Intuit gets slapped down. Still doesn't stop other weasels from writing in the boot track. Does this tool exist:
:-)
1. before install, make a backup of the boot track and checksum it.
2. after install, checksum the boot track, and display diffs, if any.
3. optional restore of the boot track.
This allows us to get our old boot tracks back, and *still* get the fun of starting a righteous flame-war on SlashDot.
Sorry if the answer to this is "yes, you clueless fool, go use tool __". But at least I'll get educated
TurboTax has the Windows(tm) logo flag. So, I take it they pass the "Designed for Windows" logo criteria.
How in heaven's name could anything that writes the boot track earn the Windows logo? This cranky old software validation manager smells either cluelessness (MSFT) or cheating (Intuit) or some combination of the above.
hehe no doubt. I actually switched from money to quicken for just that reason a few years back. Just last week I bought money again. I've had to call MS to reactivate Windows when I built a new computer. Pretty painless, the person I spoke with was really easy going. I didn't feel like they though I was trying to just get a second system going. I'm hearing quite a different tale from people dealing with Intuit and reactivation though.
No, sir. I am not a Canadian. I AM AN AMERICAN, AND DAMN PROUD OF IT.
I'll get to the point in a second, but first, I want to dog the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service. If you work for that fucked up piece of beaucracy, listen up... You probably don't realize this, but your actions FUCK UP PEOPLE'S LIVES. The way a government beaucracy works is kind of like a complicated piece of software from Microsoft (except that Microsoft's software is actually better than the operation of a government beaucracy, and believe me, I have no respect for Microsoft or anything they do). A beaucracy is able to (albeit very inefficiently) handle a specified number of "states." There might be 10 or 100 or 10,000 of these states. For example, say you have a file with this yellow form in it, that green form, and some purple form. That would place you in a very specific state, and the beaucracy "knows" how to proceed in processing your "case" from this point forward. Now if you approach the beaucracy with something that does not conform exactly to one of the states that they handle, you will be stuck because nobody in the beaucracy has the authority to do anything about you. It's like falling through the cracks of a conveyor belt and landing in some shit pile where you'll stay forever because nobody ever cleans it up. Did you recently hear about a bunch of people getting busted over destroying INS documents because they wanted to eliminate the so-called backlog? Yeah. I live in the United States since before I was two years old. I am twenty four now. Over fifteen years ago, my immigration process got stuck somehow in an unhandled "state" like I described above. Papers from my file were lost by the INS, and as a result, no matter where I turned, nobody could or would help me. Maybe those documents were shredded. Maybe they fell behind someone's desk and got thrown away by a janitor who gets paid $30.00 an hour. It doesn't matter how it happened. What matters is that regardless of what I tried, I was told that this is already being handled by the INS (which I knew for a fact that it wasn't), and if I got a penny for every time I was told, "Don't call us, we'll call you," Bill Gates would be my personal servant. The INS literally fucked up my life. I could not get a social security number, or a driver license, or a bank account, or a job, or go to a university... I could not cash a check written to my name. If I had been so inclined, I would not even be able to prove my age to buy a pack of cigarettes. This went on for twelve years. If I was to count the hours I spent waiting in LONG lines with millions of Mexicans, being the only gringo in the entire building who could ACTUALLY speak this country's official language, only to be turned away by the idiot INS clerk who could not and would not even attempt to help me, I probably wasted a year of my life in man-hours standing in those God-damned lines.
Some might be inclined to tell me, "If life is so bad for you here, go back to your country!" What those people don't understand is that AMERICA IS MY COUNTRY! I know no other country. I have never set foot on foreign land, save for my almost two years as an infant when I lived elsewhere. The United States is the one and only country I know, and there is no way in the world that I would break because of a stupid agency and move to some foreign land where I don't even know the language. Being probably the most honest American around, I even contemplated breaking the law and seeking quality false IDs--the ones that can't be told apart from the real thing because they're made from the real thing, stolen from the agencies that make them. Sure, those can cost thousands of dollars, but did I mention the THOUSANDS of dollars that had to be paid TO THE INS as FINES for THEIR negligence?!? That's right. The INS would fuck up and I would have to pay a fine for it.
In case you're interested, I was lucky enough, after having fallen into a deep depression and having suffered at the hands of the INS for YEARS, to fall into the hands of one officer who took it upon himself to reconstruct the missing documents and get my life on the right track. This process took a year, which is light-speed compared to what happened before.
We Americans, of which I am a member, should be FUCKING ASHAMED at the shit our government pulls off. (The previous statement does not include the current war, but definitely includes the so-called War On Drugs, which is a waste of time and money. You want to fry your brain? Fine... The government should legalize ALL drugs, sell 55-gallon drums of the stuff to ANYONE who is so inclined, for the price of the drum plus delivery. The drugs inside are free and of supremely high quality. This will immediately destroy the entire market for illegal drugs. Did I mention they should tax the stuff?)
Now to get on-topic. I purchased this piece of GARBAGE from Intuit, not knowing that it contained this shit, and I refuse to damage my computer and/or tell software makers that this practice is ok by installing it. I definitely want to join the aforementioned class action lawsuit.