Oh how I wish Groklaw were still publishing so that I'd know the whole story here.

That seems doubtful. No mysterious charges appeared on our bank accounts or credit card statements, and the tax return was correctly calculated. If it was a copycat, they did a good job on our taxes and a lousy job at stealing our money or our identities.

We used online TurboTax for the 2011 tax return. At the end, it emailed us a complete PDF of our state and federal returns, with a header saying that they would be filed online on a specific day. Then it failed to file either one. We only found out a year later when the IRS and the state tax board sent us letters asking why we didn't file our taxes. When we called the TurboTax people, they claimed that we had never had any kind of account with them, even though we showed them the email. We had to pay penalties and interest because of their bad software.

So privacy is not the only reason to avoid online tax software. Sometimes it just loses all your information.

We attempted to opt-out of Yellow Pages deliveries in our local area in California, but it doesn't work. The guys who throw these things on everyone's front porch do not care whether you are on the list or not. I'm not even sure that they have a list. You will still get phone books.

The average 2-year-old is about 34 inches tall, plus or minus 3 inches or so. This will be the world's tallest toddler.

GPLv2 says that source code includes "the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable". GPLv3 is even more explicit. So they are likely, depending on the details, just violating the GPL, not using any kind of loophole.