Doing the next step of the root cause analysis leads to "Intuit lobbied Congress and the IRS hard enough that they passed a law, and the IRS conspired to change their procedures".
Your situation sounds like one that a CPA would be perfect for - especially with business taxes involved.
Our household has just the basic salaries / expenses / 401k / IRAs. THe year I received some temporary additional benefits, Intuit decided that I had to pay premium in order to enter that single additional 1099.
I left, found a much simpler, straightforward service with which I filed legitimately free, and have never looked back.
Plus, I've read about Intuit's history with the whole market, and I will never willingly give them a damn cent.
Let's end the debate, assuage the farmers who opposed time changes from the beginning, and honor every other timekeeping system in our earlier history:
From now on, sunrise is 0700. The clock runs from 0700 sunrise to whatever time necessary overnight to arrive at sunrise again, at which point the time becomes 0700. For the part of the year where that duration is greater than 24 hours, the time past 06:59 simply counts up extra seconds until reset.
Now we can have computers and every other carefully regulated timekeeping system on milliseconds since an epoch timestamp, and regular old clock time fits everyone's schedules regardless of time of year, and never needs 'adjusting' again, since its sun-synchronized.
And people said Y2K and the Year 2038 issues were hard...
Until some overly agressive anti-cheat that has kernel level access, decides to blacklist your machine, and because of whatever black boxed bugs, blocks your machine's Ethernet connections, all of them, and now you're stuck until you reimage and remove that borked kernel, except that they implemented an IME level code chunk that immediately downloads the anti-cheat code on the IME channel, and now your machine can never connect to the internet again until you replace the motherboard.
Every activity has its own popularity, and number of fans of various seriousness... Cat and dog shows, caber toss, curling, singing competitions, on and on and on, the list is about infinite, since it encompasses everything within which someone could potentially be more skilled.
Singling out video games among all the other things humans do competitively feels like a personal bias.
I personally don't care about probably 99% of the 'competitions' out there, but I don't give anyone crap for being obsessed about their own thing.
(I don't play games online multiplayer style, so I'm not in the target group anyway.)
I don't think there's such a thing as "gaming", as you use the word... everyone involved does their own thing, in infinite variety as well.
I'm in the US, so see this from a bit more abstract point of view, but I understand the insanity of being just over a border and not being able to watch/listen to media in the same language.
This is an awesome idea, I just wish I wasn't so cynical about the likelihood of any success... cash flow is jut a very big motivator.
Until we as a species grow past the greed that drives too many of us, I fear these fights will be long, slow, and provide little gain.
I applaud everyone working for that first inch, though, and maybe this is the first step in breaking down these systems.
It sounds like you're happy to hand control of your browser away for free. I've been writing code for a few decades, I don't know everything but I don't need someone to decide for me what's too dangerous for me to have access to.
If I was truly insane I'd go the Steve Gibson route and write a completely different browser from scratch. I'm aware it would take the rest of my life (or longer) at this point but the engine options are so few, and the ability to avoid the owners' restrictive BS limited enough, that I'd be happy as a clam to see a whole new reboot.
I'd jump onto even an alpha of that, just to bump numbers out of hope that ANY group could get together and get out from under the advertising trap.
A lot of places would see someone not following development guidelines, doing something unsanctioned, or otherwise not fitting in to the expected culture.
That can be far more toxic pushback to any attempted improvement.
The broken assumption thee is that the ocean floor doesn't change. Things are changing all the time. Faster and faster as you get shallower and shallower.
Shipping channels and shallows need to be resurveyed constantly or you have no idea what you might encounter.
There is a specific reason for the system performing like that... a development process that lets somebody in a far off office choose software components for financial/political/office politics reasons, wires together separate programs doing each task that are developed separately with barely any integration testing until it's too damn late to fix anything, and a whole host of other "our team is going to do this part using X" bullshit that winds up with the overall system looking like somebody tried to use Legos in one part, Lincoln logs in another, pottery cast clay elsewhere, and has three different interconnection schemes because each level of bureaucracy involved mandated a different buzzword when it got to review things two to five years after the last level saw it.
At least, that's what it looked like when I saw it in '98. It doesn't sound like it's gotten any better.
Without having a foot in the vendor / contracting process, it's going to be near impossible.
Other responses have mentioned some routes inside... but beware... make the incumbents look bad too much and you'll be bought out and shut down.
Pride takes a seriously distant back seat to maintaining the current procurement monopolies and relationships, and maximizing contract payments for the least effort.
I'll stop there before I start to incriminate myself or get on watch lists if I mention possible solutions.
Twenty years ago, when VMS just got introduced, it behaved like this...
I can't believe that after all this time, it's still completely borked, in all the same ways.
Somebody at NAVSEA needs to be dragged by their nostrils out on a deployment, take notes, and go back to their office with their pride in a garbage bag.
Proud as hell to have served, and angry as hell that our current crews are still dealing with the same ---procurement--- failures.
No one. Every name I can think of has had some great ideas, and some truly cockeyed are-you-kidding-me-seriously" moments.
Even legendary names are just humans. TBL and his support for DRM. LT's notorious personality. Page & Schmidt and completely losing sight of the helpfulness they started from.
Worship / revere / appreciate no one. Filter their good, acknowledge their bad, find a path past them to something better, and know you'll probably be corrupted by something along the way unless you somehow transcend your own DNA.
And they can tell? I'm not on Twitter but I can see just following everyone that passes in front of my mouse, and so be it. If that's banned, I'd egg people on to do it more and more and help tear down the idea that follower counts mean f** all.
The point is that there's no keys involved, nothing in your private office. No rummaging either.
Publishing to a public web server is analogous to that little free library, out in the yard. No keys, anyone can look in it at any time. If you accidentally put something sensitive in there, where anyone can see it without any access control, you can't blame them for doing so.
Which works great when there's some kind of access restriction in place.
If you wind up putting your tax returns in the 'little free library' you set up on your front yard, you can't blame others for reading them, then handing them back to you and not telling anyone else.
That's the proper analogy for what happened in the original article.