Slashback: Intuit, Telemetry, Meetup

Slashback tonight brings you updates on TurboTax and your boot sector, NASA's plans beyond the shuttle, Barry Shein on spam, Linux telemetry, and more. Read on for the details!

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 ...

Re:Intuit's "competition"

I think the reason why they are still profiting is that 99% of their customers dont even know what a bootsector (bootsectortrack... whatever) is and consider DRM as something which protects them from all those evil h4x0rs out there..

Im glad we keep having these messages about intuit

It keeps reminding me that I STILL have to do my taxes, why can't I read slashdot when I get home and can remember it there.

I guess I just have to much to do at home and not enough to do at work, or is it that my priorities are out of whack?

Really?

I've been to a couple and there's some rather interesting characters that show up

I bet everyone is very corteous, civilized and good-manered. Nobody says "fuck you" or tells you you're a "dumbass" while hiding under a table. No asbestos suits are used or otherwise present. They all shake hands in the end and promise to send postcards.

Then on Monday it's open warfare again.

Re:Really?

"Some people will still show up, say useless comments, and then show some porn -- just to get attention."

Others will think they're the first to write "Anonymous Coward" on their name tag.

Re:Really?

> I bet everyone is very corteous, civilized and good-manered. Nobody says "fuck you" or tells you you're a "dumbass" while hiding under a table. No asbestos suits are used or otherwise present. They all shake hands in the end and promise to send postcards.

I was all lookin' forward to it until I read your post. Hmph! Fuck that!

Re:Really?

"I bet everyone is very corteous, civilized and good-manered. Nobody says "fuck you" or tells you you're a "dumbass" while hiding under a table. No asbestos suits are used or otherwise present. They all shake hands in the end and promise to send postcards."

I hope that G. Oatse dude doesn't show up. The only think likable about him is you can call him a 'big asshole' without being modded down!

Re:has the international space station had it's ti

Some years ago, at 1 AM on a weeknight, on a back-country road on the south side of Austin, I saw the most incredible traffic jam I've ever seen.

I live in Dallas. I've driven in Los Angeles. I've seen some traffic jams.

What made this incredible is that it was also the politest traffic jam I've ever seen. Everyone was having a good time, no one was arguing, no horns were honking.

That road ran by Bergstrom Air Force Base, by the ramp. The Shuttle transporter 747, with a Shuttle on its back, was sitting on the ramp overnight. Everyone in that traffic jam wanted to see the Shuttle.

I wish I'd taken some pictures of the crowd, to give to the people who MISTAKENLY believe that "nobody is interested in space." There sure were a lot of "nobody" out on that road at 1 AM that night.

Re:has the international space station had it's ti

If you want to be brutally practical, the ultimate reason for space exploration is simple: survival of the human species.

Species are able to survive disasters that strike their ecological niches by the simple expedient of being elsewhere. When a flood wipes out all of the creatures living in one particular meadow, the creatures in the next meadow over carry on as though nothing had happened.

Given the fact that, on a sufficiently long time scale, the odds of a worldwide ecological disaster (such as a "planet killer" asteroid, or a nuclear war) eventually approach certainty, it's absolutely imperative for the survival of "earthlings" that we start working towards a goal of spreading out, and taking steps to move beyond this one rock.

Disasters do happen, however infrequently. As every good sysadmin knows, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

Let's plan for the big one, and set up a RAIL (Redundant Array of Independent Lifeforms).

Now that's funny!

Mars is virgin territory, and that excites me.

Of course it does...

don't know why

I have no idea how these people think spammers would volunteer to be regulated and pay more. Even given the prescribed system the current bulk mailing methods will still work and still be cheaper.

I seriously doubt most of these guys care at all about regulations or laws given the lame illegel or immoral crap I see flooding my inbox.

TurboTax

I emailed their PR contact, and posted their reply [slashdot.org] to both the original [slashdot.org] slashdot story and my journal [slashdot.org].

Re:TurboTax

product activation does write a small amount of data to an area of the first track of the hard disk that is not used by the Windows file system, as do a number of other programs and utilities...

This technology in no way harms your hard drive or computer.

This reply from TurboTax is self contradictory. First it says that activation writes to the same area as is done by other programs and utilities and then it says that this is not harmful. How? You are writing on my disk in an area that may be used by other utilities and programs (you acknowledge this in your reply) and that also without informing me or taking my consent. And still you have guts to say, this is harmless? How about reformatting my non-windows hard drive partitions? These too are not used by Windows File System. Wouldn't that be harmless too?

Re:TurboTax

Horse feathers! This is what we call "spin control." The point is that a key is placed in the "boot track." Yes, a Windows OS PC has nothing there, but some alternate boot loaders do. The key is a unique identifier that Intuit associates with your registration data ON THEIR SERVERS. From then on, they can ask their installed software to provide this key on demand when you visit their web sites, partner web sites with whom they may share the data, and any future Intuit software can examine this key. It's a token they can associate with any future data.

Moreover, the purpose is ye olde Digital Restrictions Management. I'm not a software thief. I resent being presumed to be one. Yes, I bought and installed this crippleware, but I won't next year. No matter how much they change. They violated my trust. They don't get it back automatically because some PR flak said nice things. Yes, Intuit, that's right. I've spent several hundred dollars on your software over the years (every version of Quicken from 5 through 2000 where I stopped for lack of Linux support) and every version of TurboTax for roughly the same length of time. Not one dollar more. Ever. Period.

I'm not saying they are using this key, or sharing this key for nefarious purposes, but fer gudness sake! Get bent, Intuit! I can't install TurboTax on another one of my PC's, even if I deinstall it first from the first PC (well, it'll install but I can't file or print!).

(BTW, I think in my spare time I might write a little utility, you'll have to go down to DOS mode to use it, but the BIOS disk calls could be used to copy cyl 0 to a file and then to write that file to cyl 0 of another hard drive. Oh, wait! There's the DMCA. I could go to jail for presuming that software I bought and put on hardware I own was mine to use. Foolish me!)

This pattern of contempt for customers shouldn't be ignored just because a company backpedals a little bit. We lose choice when we do not make a choice. Intuit would have to come out and say "We were wrong. We will never use any such technology ever again." before I would even THINK about giving them another dime. Nope. I've never used a personal finance or tac package from a company other than Intuit before. But never again. TaxCut 2003, here I come. Gnucash, here I come. I'm done with Intuit. And I hope you are too.

Re:Amazing

*removes parent poster from horse*

Yes, those are exactly the commitments it DOES take to find new and better ways to do things. And don't kid yourself into thinking designing a space ferry is easy. NASA exists to find out how to do these things well so that eventually, someday, every highschooler will know the "obvious" way to design an efficient craft to get to space and back. Progressing through these generations of designs will cost lives, will take many decades, and will costs many billions. The rewards are immeasurable, and unavoidable. The frontier-seeking spirit of humanity can't be suppressed.

This is not insightful.

We are not going back to the "original plan." A hell of a lot was learned from the Shuttle fleet. One of the most important payoffs from flying the Shuttle was the experience gained in reprocessing reusable vehicles. This information will be integrated into OSP and all other future reusable spaceflight vehicles.

OSP would suffer from many of the Shuttles' problems if we had built it in 1975 and stacked it on top of Saturn Vs. We'd now instead be discussing when we were going to replace the expensive and risky OSP.

By the way, in case anyone is confused, OSP was planned before we lost Columbia. People have been discussing this for the past year, and the proposal went to Congress in the Fall.

I'm completely fed up with IT weenies on Slashdot pontificating on how the space program should be run. Most don't know shit about space exploration beyond what they've read on Slashdot, CNN, and in Discover. Not only do they not understand how to evaluate courses for the future, they don't actually understand what the planning failures were in the past!!!!

All the uninformed bull on Slashdot is really starting to drive me crazy.

Was the Intuit copy protection -that- big a deal?

I don't keep much in Track 0 besides my partition table and boot sector, and I doubt they add up to 30 sectors. I guess I don't like the idea that the software doesn't migrate properly to another computer if you want to move it, but I thought they were pretty clear in the license agreement that the software was licensed to one system only.

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.

Re:Was the Intuit copy protection -that- big a dea

"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.

Re:Was the Intuit copy protection -that- big a dea

Ignoring the fact that other people probably do use the full boot sector area of their disks, there's an obvious reason why Intuit shouldn't do it: standards. Standards have defined the boot sector not as a DRM tool, but as the first place on the disk that gets executed at boot time. It's a critical piece of every (AFAIK) operating system's core design, and needs to be very reliable, because it's hard to fix if you can't load your operating system, and even harder without rescue media handy.

This is the same as all of the CD-ROM copy-protection schemes out there that write special "bad" sectors or mess with the table-of-contents in a non-standard way. Plenty of people have CD drives that are unable to use those forms of copy-protection, and some of the manufacturers end up patching the game to remove it. Anyone who wants to actually copy the game, of course, can easily download a utility to get around the problem. It only hurts unknowing consumers.

Microsoft frequently plays the "embrace and extend" game and has been called to task for it. So should Intuit, Sony, and everyone else who tries to violate a standard instead of playing by the rules.

--Elentar

Footnote: Consider that a laissez-faire economy results in prices that rise to what the market will bear. If, then, a piece of software is regularly pirated, copied, or used once and returned, doesn't that indicate that the price is too high, according to the market? Corporations should listen to the message consumers are sending and reduce the cost of their software, not impede upon the rights of consumers to use their own possessions.

I went with TaxCut

After reading previous Slashdot posts regarding TurboTax activation and CDilla issues plus reviews from Walter Mossberg and others, I bought TaxCut this year.

I was able to install on 2 machines and print forms from either one. I'm gonna file later this week, and I won't be doing it from the machine I did the original install on. Couldn't have done that with TurboTax. Only TaxCut gotcha is that the rental property assistant isn't that good at reading data from last year's TurboTax return.

I tried out Intuit's TurboTax for Web...

Seems pretty nice. The best part is, you don't have to pay a dime until you get to the printing/filing part, so you can try it out and see if it suits you. No DRM/platform hassles that I can see; it works in Safari, Chimera and Internet Explorer on my Mac OS X box. The basic version is only $20 (+ $15 for your state forms), which seems to be worth the hassle of puzziling over the IRS's forms and all the different classifications you could possibly fall under (I'm in a slightly odd situation though, so the 1040EZ may wind up being a cheaper choice if there's nothing funky you have to do...) Here's the link if people are interested: http://www.turbotax.intuit.com/welcome/perm/banner 11/welcome.htm [intuit.com].

A/S/L?

So at this meeting will there be any hot slashdot gir....oh.. nevermind..

sigh.

Re:A/S/L?

No, but some of the guys will have some nice breasts.

Spam:Impossible to collect if impossible to filter

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.

Re:Spam:Impossible to collect if impossible to fil

Yeah, the whole idea that spammers will go to legitimate ISPs rather than continue to bounce off Asian open-relays is vacant.

Lesse, I'm a spammer, I can spam people almost for free by stealing services from a bunch of folks who live half way around the globe ... or I can pay a comparably huge sum of cash and be perceived as a legitimate bulk mailer of my herbal viagra and penis enlargers.

Right.

Message for Barry Shein @ TheWorld ISP -- Stick to mission statements.

Cheers,
-- RLJ

/. Meetups

Just a thought... I'm a student at Carnegie Mellon. We have /. meetups every day...they're called "class". ;)

Chargeable Spam

This idea to let ISPs charge for spam is preposterous. Shein is just looking to make money out of our discomfort. He argues that charging is a better solution because you can't stop spam - but if you can find a spammer to charge him then you can just as easily find him to stop him and make him pay a fine.

Red alert everybody, if he gets enough industry support behind this idea and throws enough money at Washington, we'll *never* see an end to the spam.

Even with ISP charging, spam will always be cheaper than traditional mail and most other forms of advertising, and if legalized in this way I strongly suspect that we'll see the quantity of spam increase rather than the opposite.

More Intuit Crappyness

In Canada MYOB software was sold to Intuit [intuitcanada.com].
They now no longer support any payroll tax table updates and a bunch of other things that basically make the software useless. However, even with these horrendous omissions, they are as of today, still selling [futureshop.ca] the software at full retail in stores across the country.
Lucky customers purchasing this software and want full functionality now have the option of .... well buying different software. [intuit.com] This helpful advice came strait from a support call.
This is FRUAD and these clowns should be charged criminally. I will never by an Intuit product for as long as I live.

My thoughts on space travel

Trips to Mars
We need them now
Oh please, NASA
Tell the Chinese how

Away they go
Into the sky
Their angle of re-entry, oh no!
They burn up and die die

So here's to space travel
It litters the orbit with metal of hunk
So that's what I pay taxes for?
I'd prefer a kick to the junk.

The Stefan Puffer case

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 [slashdot.org]. 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.

Future rocket scientists need your help....

While I understand that selecting a successor to the Space Shuttle is an important task, there is a much more important issue at hand: where will NASA get its next generation of visionary rocket scientists, to take us to Mars and beyond?

Many current NASA astronauts, scientists, and technicians first became interested in space exploration as a result of the "Space Race" in the 60s, and, later, grew and maintained their interest thoughout their adolescence by participating in the hobby of model rocketry.

After the space race ended, model rocketry started to decline, but the emergence of high power rocketry in the 80s and 90s revitalized the hobby, and brought back many "Born Again Rocketeers", or BARs, into the hobby; these are people who flew model rockets as kids, and rediscovered the hobby later in life. Many of these BARs are now introducing the hobby to a new generation, and passing on their inspiration.

Now, in the middle of a resurgence of interest, the hobby is in danger of being killed by overzealous overregulation. Due to a combination of misclassification of the most common hobby rocket propellant (Ammonium Perchlorate Composite Propellant) as an explosive (instead of a flammable solid) by ATF, and background checks being mandated by the Homeland Security Act for any employees of companies that ship explosives, shippers like UPS have decided to stop carrying "explosives" altogether, meaning that rocket motors are now virtually impossible to ship, even by UPS ground.

Bottom line, this, and other similar regulations, are leading to the demise of rocketry as a safe, educational hobby. The next generation of rocket scientists will simply not exist.

However, there is hope. Efforts are underway to push a bill through Congress to explicitly exempt the materials used in the hobby of rocketry, when they are used for rocketry (i.e.: non-weapon) uses.

What is needed is a groundswell of support from concerned citizens, supporting this effort. There are complete details on this effort at http://www.space-rockets.com/congress.html [space-rockets.com], along with a number of talking points you may wish to incorporate into faxed letters to your Senators.

The bill hasn't been introduced yet, but should be this week some time. If you decide to join in, and send a letter, please wait until the notice is posted on http://www.space-rockets.com/congress.html [space-rockets.com] before doing so. That way, the messages will have the most effect (and your senator may have some idea what you're talking about, as there will be a bill on the subject up for debate...).

If you want to help keep the dream alive, I encourage you to read the background info at that site, and join in this worthy effort.

Thanks,

- Rick "Rocket Geek" Dickinson

Perhaps I'm stupid...

Intuit says:
"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?

TurboTax - if sales are same, why bother?

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?

TurboTax is not as clever as they think...

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.

Re:Proof of guilt...

This sort of thing is exactly the reason the best advice is to never speak with a member of law enforcement without an attorney present if you even think you are or will be accused of a crime.

Re:Proof of guilt...

Yeah, and I can't wait for the quote that goes like:

I just asked him what he was doing at the store and he replied, "I want a lawyer." So I took that as an admission of guilt.

TurboTax is going out of business!

...including the company's beleaguered tax preparation software.

Or at least, to the same degree Apple is. This beleaguered stuff is scary...

Intuit

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.

Intuit profits, but for how long?

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

Just wait'll next year, Intuit

Everyone I know who has bought Turbotax has done so before they knew about the full pain in the ass that this copy protection is. To these people, I have evangelized TaxCut, which I have used for my taxes this year. Most people's hangup is that they think that TaxCut can't bring in their previous year information from a TurboTax file, but it can.
As far as the protection itself is concerned, I know I am preaching to the choir when I say that writing any kind of information to the MBR other than the day you format a disk or install a bootloader is a big no-no. Inuit is deluding themselves if they think this won't affect them in the long run.

A new space plane

In reading that NASA is going to spend 10 years and billions of dollars to build a new space shuttle that does even less than the current space shuttle I'm left shaking my head. Is this all NASA can manage, spending more and more money to do less and less. I appreciate the new mini space shuttle may be cheaper, simpler and safer than the space shuttle but it also can't carry any cargo and all it will do is ferry people to and from the ISS which is already recognized as a dead end a giant waste of money in space.

NASA may as well pack it in if this space plane and the ISS is their vision of manned space flight for the next decade. They talk about the ISS as crucial to the trip to Mars but I just don't see it.

If NASA wants to do something to stay relevent they need to pour their resources into:

- Cheap heavy lift launchers to get big cargos in to low earth orbit
- Innovative interplanetary propulsion like the ion drive starting initial tests
- Innovative means to protect againt radiation on interplanetary space flight, cowering in low earth orbit in the ISS wont help.
- Serious closed biosystem research. The ISS is a joke because it requires constant resupply of water and food.
- Continued discovery of the resources available on Mars and figure out smart ways for colonists to tap them when they get there.

If we want to get to Mars stop planning for a round trip. Round trips make the mission MUCH harder and make it in to the same dead end that was Apollo. We need to start designing one way missions that send people to Mars as colonists and not visitors. There would be no shortage of volunteers for a one way trip as long as they have a fair shot at long term survival. If I were a little younger I would be at the head of the line. Throughout history there have always been exceptional individuals that want to explore new frontiers. At this point, short of exploring the oceans, there simply aren't any frontiers left here to explore. Spinning around in low earth orbit sure isn't a new frontier any more. Create a new frontier to explore on Mars and will capture the imagination of the world again and NASA you really, desperately need that if you dont want to wither away as poinless bureaucracy.

Its an absurd waste to have to try to get a ship to Mars that has to get back to earth. The round trip scenario has led to the massive NASA fixation on long duration zero gravity research which is about all the ISS is good for.

A far more rational apporach is a fast one way trip for colonists with periodic cargo flights before and after they arrive to insure the colonists have the resources and equipment to create permenent habitats, raise food, find water and survive.

We should be doing research on how people cope with 6-9 months in zero G en route to indefinite periods at the %38 Martian gravity. Going from zero G to %38 is a lot less of a problem than spending years in zero G on a round trip and ending up back in Earth's gravity.

Please NASA, start designing fast propulsion, biospheres and Mars colonization missions. Please stop reinventing the space shuttle and wasting money on dead ends that are relatively easy for you to do but pointless. Please do things that are hard but worth it.

Indicted, not arrested

"Puffer was arrested last summer for demonstrating that the county court's wireless LAN wasn't secure, and telling them about it."

This is backwards. In March of last year Puffer told the county their wireless LAN was insecure. He then arranged a demonstration. Three or four months later he was indicted - not arrested - for wire fraud.

Intuit's distractions

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.