... needs only 640K

and runs on all processor architectures....

The poor pampered masses, will they ever learn....

This only pampers the procrastinating crowd even more....

Intuit should post a refund to everybody who had the smarts not to participate in this mass meltdown. Taxes are inevitable, you might as well *file* long before the deadline and *pay* at the deadline.

Anybody who trusts a computer system at the receiving end of mass hysteria to perform flawlessly should work through the following exercise:

You are at a rock concert, with 10000 fans. The concert ends at 10:00 pm. Starting at 10:00pm a 10 busses will ride every 6 minutes until 12:00 am. Each bus has a capacity of 100 fans. You and 50% of the audience decide to stay until the last bus.

How many of you will have to walk home?

Fast and Loose

The article plays fast and loose with the details of ABN AMRO's token scheme. Authentication is required for each subsequent transaction, which makes me think that the man in the middle attack in fact changes financial information on the fly.

I challenge the security critics to provide a water-tight authentication scheme that works even when the home computer is compromised. Intuitively it seems impossible. How can you trust the information you see when the display device has been compromised?

Overall the article does a disservice to token authentication, it is a lot more secure than just using passwords. The main problem naturally is in its delivery - compromised computers cannot be trusted! The easiest solution is to not use Windows.

My 2 cents