TurboTax en Espanol 2002

Rating:
Summary: Contains C-Dilla Malware / Spyware / Trojan.
Review: Buy something else.

Intuit Turbotax 2002 included a non-optional program called "C-Dilla". That program was supposed to be a DRM (Digital Rights Management -- anti-piracy) program, but is a particularly nasty form of spyware / malware that may be difficult or impossible to remove from your system.

In the 2002 version of TurboTax, a great protest rose up from prominent computer-industry magazines and users, which led to Intuit/TurboTax's somewhat apologizing for C-Dilla, and offering a program that uninstalled C-Dilla after you'd uninstalled TurboTax2002. (The original uninstaller didn't remove C-Dilla.)

Why dislike C-Dilla ? Here's why.

Here's a quote from extremetech.com. (ExtremeTech &sister publication PC Magazine're industry leaders. You've probably heard of their most famous writer, John C. Dvorak.) This's from one of many articles there about TurboTax/ C-Dilla. (Intuit-TurboTax-2002's C-Dilla wasn't different from other versions of C-Dilla. It just got alot of attention because TurboTax *was* very popular software until C-Dilla became a part of it.)

From the article:
"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). [....] or your customers still looking to exit TurboTax for good, the uninstaller at this link now fully removes components of SafeCast/C-Dilla that were previously mostly impossible to remove."

In short, C-Dilla is an extremely strong reason for anyone to avoid this product until Intuit promises that C-Dilla is NOT a part of the current Intuit TurboTax offering. Be safe...buy something else instead. If you're planning on using this product at work, forget it... your Info Technology manager will have a cow if he/she knows that you're installing destructive trojan/spyware (C-Dilla) on the company PCs. If you've already installed this software on a PC at work, let your IT manager know IMMEDIATELY, so he/she can take whatever steps are possible to remove C-Dilla.

AFAIK, CDilla probably sets itself up on an undeclared, self-created partition and parts of itself on your main boot partition. Yes, that means it goes in and changes your hdd partition table!!! For some users, that's going to be a big problem, because monkeying with the partition table is NOT a good idea...particularly if you are at a company with a reasonably security/safety-conscious network administrator, or have several partitions dedicated to several flavors of operating system (Windows and Linux, for example... with a LiLo-type partition to provide you with a boot-time menu so you can choose which operating system to boot).

You can search extremetech.com to find several TurboTax CDilla articles, and informative users' discussions about C-Dilla, what it does, why folks dislike it intensely, whether it can be removed from a PC...

Rating:
Summary: Contains C-Dilla Malware / Spyware / Trojan.
Review: Buy something else.

Intuit Turbotax 2002 included a non-optional program called "C-Dilla". That program was supposed to be a DRM (Digital Rights Management -- anti-piracy) program, but is a particularly nasty form of spyware / malware that may be difficult or impossible to remove from your system.

In the 2002 version of TurboTax, a great protest rose up from prominent computer-industry magazines and users, which led to Intuit/TurboTax's somewhat apologizing for C-Dilla, and offering a program that uninstalled C-Dilla after you'd uninstalled TurboTax2002. (The original uninstaller didn't remove C-Dilla.)

Why dislike C-Dilla ? Here's why.

Here's a quote from extremetech.com. (ExtremeTech &sister publication PC Magazine're industry leaders. You've probably heard of their most famous writer, John C. Dvorak.) This's from one of many articles there about TurboTax/ C-Dilla. (Intuit-TurboTax-2002's C-Dilla wasn't different from other versions of C-Dilla. It just got alot of attention because TurboTax *was* very popular software until C-Dilla became a part of it.)

From the article:
"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). [....] or your customers still looking to exit TurboTax for good, the uninstaller at this link now fully removes components of SafeCast/C-Dilla that were previously mostly impossible to remove."

In short, C-Dilla is an extremely strong reason for anyone to avoid this product until Intuit promises that C-Dilla is NOT a part of the current Intuit TurboTax offering. Be safe...buy something else instead. If you're planning on using this product at work, forget it... your Info Technology manager will have a cow if he/she knows that you're installing destructive trojan/spyware (C-Dilla) on the company PCs. If you've already installed this software on a PC at work, let your IT manager know IMMEDIATELY, so he/she can take whatever steps are possible to remove C-Dilla.

AFAIK, CDilla probably sets itself up on an undeclared, self-created partition and parts of itself on your main boot partition. Yes, that means it goes in and changes your hdd partition table!!! For some users, that's going to be a big problem, because monkeying with the partition table is NOT a good idea...particularly if you are at a company with a reasonably security/safety-conscious network administrator, or have several partitions dedicated to several flavors of operating system (Windows and Linux, for example... with a LiLo-type partition to provide you with a boot-time menu so you can choose which operating system to boot).

You can search extremetech.com to find several TurboTax CDilla articles, and informative users' discussions about C-Dilla, what it does, why folks dislike it intensely, whether it can be removed from a PC...