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Old January 12th, 2003, 04:34 PM
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kjzone kjzone is offline
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Join Date: May 2002
Location: Silver Spirng, Maryland 20906
Posts: 346
Brian....... Just found this.....

Do you use TurboTax by Quicken? Then you need to be aware that it has possibly installed a spyware trojan on your computer. We've had a thread running at the forums for a week or two about a third party application called C Dilla that is installed by TurboTax.

According to an article at privacyandspying.com, C Dilla is a copy protection program that installs without disclosure with certain programs such as game demos. It disables your CD burner when copy protected software is on your computer, monitors what copy protected software you are using and how, disables "certain" internet downloads, and possibly sends user data off to a remote server without permission.

Quicken makes no mention of this software anywhere on their web site (that I could find), although possibly there is some disclosure in the click-through EULA. Considering that it is illegal in many places to provide customer financial data to third parties without the customer's consent, if you use TurboTax to do other people's taxes for a living, this third party software might actually be causing you to break the law. I'm sure the application doesn't send financial data back to .... wherever ... but since it isn't discussed anywhere on the Quicken web site, how can we be sure?

C Dilla is now a target of Spybot S&D. At first the developer was worried that removing it might actually break one of these ridiculous copyright protection laws that Hollywood keeps buying in Washington D.C. I pointed out at Spybot's support forums that there is nothing illegal about a third party uninstallation program. Or that if there were, Microsoft was breaking the law itself with its add/remove control panel applet. I'd like to think that my argument helped persuade him to include this trojan as a removal target and I hope all the other spyware removal companies also add detection for it. Just be aware that removing C Dilla will most likely disable whatever installed it, as is the case with many programs that install spyware. Make sure your documents are backed up in a standard format and is accessible by whatever you replace it with.
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