FC: Beware of TurboTax, which modifies hard drive's boot sectors

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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.

   [...] 




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