Background on protests over TurboTax (even before we knew the details of this particular and very dangerous ugliness): http://news.com.com/2100-1017-979357.html -Declan --- http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,881243,00.asp We Uncover Low-Level Monkey Business [...] Clearly, the data in Sector 33 is a special "signature" that SafeCast uses to decide whether a program installation is legitimate. If you copy TurboTax to another hard drive , or restore to a new drive from a backup, this signature will not be included. And without that signature, SafeCast may deny you access to the software even if you've legally purchased and registered it. Reserved Sectors Can Be Unsafe: Unfortunately, these "reserved" sectors of the hard drive aren't necessarily a safe place for data. And they're an especially dicey place to keep licensing information. According to Frank Van Gilluwe -- whose company, V Communications, publishes System Commander and Partition Commander -- viruses have been known to hide in this portion of the disk. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ Recent CNET News.com articles: http://news.search.com/search?q=declan -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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