Subj : Re: Windows Update
To   : David Norton
From : Alan Zisman
Date : Tue Mar 04 2003 04:11 pm

-=> DAVID NORTON wrote to BOB BAINBRIDGE <=-

 DN> On 19:35, BOB BAINBRIDGE said:

 BB>I'm sticking with Win2000 Pro. Intuit has jumped on that bandswagon
 BB>with Turbotax this year.I may switch to Tax Cut next year after being
 BB>a loyal purchaser since 1989.

 DN> TurboTax also installs C'Dilla, a spyware program that does many
 DN> interesting things....

 DN> SpyBot Search and Destroy will remove C'Dilla and then TurboTax won't
 DN> run.

 DN> I uninstalled TurboTax, used their removal program from their website
 DN> to remove C'Dilla and found it didn't remove it all, it still sat there
 DN> and I had to weed it out of the registry key by key!

Intuit claims that its implimentation of this for product activation purposes
is not the same as the spyware produced by the same company.

Macrovision, creator of SafeCast/C-Dilla gives their side of the story on:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,832415,00.asp

ExtremeTech (a ZDNet site) did a lot of testing of TurboTax and posted their
results in a couple of pages:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,863408,00.asp
and 
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,881013,00.asp

They were not happy with the way that Intuit implemented this, including the
decision to write to the hard drive's boot sector, and what they described as
'bloat'  

However, they also concluded:
"Fortunately, TurboTax's implementation of SafeCast (the C-Dilla product which
Intuit licensed from Macrovision) does not appear to include any spyware
features, nor does it intentionally disable any system functions. "

It sounds like you did the right thing in returning it, and good for you in
getting the vendor to refund your money... but while there are lots of reasons
to dislike the heavy-handed product activation, it sounds like there's no
evidence to call it 'spyware'.

By the way, Intuit's Canadian products: QuickTax and TaxWiz have had product
activation since last year (to be more accurate, this is the 2nd year for
QuickTax and the first for TaxWiz), but it was done in a much less intrusive
manner, and resulted in far less complaints from users. I suspect Intuit-USA
will do something similar next time around.


.... -- az: email to alan@zisman.ca
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