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."

Comments

Re:Remember when Intuit were the good guys?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're called Eskimo's, you bigoted jerk...

TurboTax

[Anonymous Coward]

...still 500X better than GnuCash!

Re:For those who didn't read the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

The good... all posts but yours

The bad... your post

The ugly... you

How to Play the Intuit .MOV Files on a DVD Player

[(1337) God]

Intuit _does_ in fact work on Macs if you buy the right version (it's the white box with steel gray graphics, not the blue/green Windows retail package). Anyway, you can also play the .mov files you're familiar with on your DVD drive (little known fact, but I tried it out)!

I discovered when I dug beneath the hood that the Sorensen codec used in most conventional Quicktime encodings is actually MPEG2 frames in little-endian rather than big-endian format. Each frame is stamped with a SRSN watermark in an unused (and irrelevant for our purposes) portion of the field and run through Diffie-Hellman encoding which is lossless and while a good deal slower than MPEG4 on playback offers better quality and is the reason the movie studios tend to choose Quicktime over other video formats for their trailers.

Not entirely coincidentally, MPEG2 is what is used on DVDs, and I have discovered that it is possible to jerry-rig a decent VCD out of a .mov file with tools that are available for free provided you know what you're doing. I don't guarantee the following, but it worked for me after a period of trial and error.

As usual, don't forget PGP to encode/sign and decode/verify your media files. If you need help on getting started, check the links below at the end of this comment.

Hopefully you'll think it was worth the effort. Naturally, your DVD player will have to be able to handle VCDs for this to have any point, but irregardless it's almost a guarantee that the second or third Matrix DVD is going to have all of Animatrix as extras anyway if you don't mind the wait. But I thought I'd share this technique with you anyway because of the coolness factor. :)

Here are some more links to help you out on your endeavor:

mpeg2-movie

Ogg Vorbis Quicktime component (for high quality sound ;)

OpenQuicktime

GNU VCDImager

PGP extensions

A little geek duct tape ;)

Let's See...

[OS24Ever]

Intuit knew that hundreds of people would buy their software, then turn around and give it to tons of their friends to do their taxes with it.

They insert an activation key that tries to limit the number of returns the software does, and the number of machines it's installed on. They then botch the installation of said tools and make it very hard to remove/use until they release patch after patch.

Yet, somehow, in these great United States, they now are getting sued for trying to protect the licensing agreement that no one reads and every just clicks 'agree' onto.

What a great country we live in eh?