TurboTax 2003 contains invasive and potentially destructive Digital Rights Management software. ExtremeTech has a thorough summary of the debacle, including a timeline of how the news was discovered and how Intuit responded, lab analysis of how the software affects your computer, summary of the issues you need to be concerned with, and an editorial opinion. The very notion of DRM-protected software is interesting and highly debateable (especially when something as important as your financial records are at stake), but especially noteworthy in this case is the way in which it is implemented, and how various design and implementation failures affect users of this software.

There are going to be many examples of broken DRM implementations in the coming years, and it will be worth investigating each in this kind of detail. Consumers and media companies alike will have to decide if there is any acceptable notion of DRM that meets everybody's needs and protects everybody's rights.