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If you have been following news about piracy, copyright, or indeed almost anything you will know that the copyright industry often employs some rather shady methods to get their way. One of the shadiest methods is the demand letter. If you are not familiar with this term let us explain (if you are bear with us): a demand letter is when a legal firm tries to tie IP addresses they have identified to actual ISP subscribers. They send large numbers of subpoenas to ISPs asking that they put the two together so that they (the law firm) can then send a settlement letter demanding money from the alleged pirate.

When it comes to competing in the CPU market, one of AMD’s big issues has been trying to get to the same process as Intel. Ever since the purchase of ATi by AMD they have always been one (and in some cases two) processes behind. What made this even worse was when AMD hit such bad financial times that they had to sell off their FABs just keep the lights on. They now had to deal with a fledgling foundry company that still had some of the same old managers. This has meant that even when AMD might have a design they were still going to be behind Intel when it came to performance per watt.

It is no secret that malware is often spread through sites that offer pirated content. No matter the type of content there is a chance that someone has put up a file that is little more than malware. This type of behavior is common and plays into human nature in many ways. It also replies on the fact that many anti-malware applications already see cracked files and key generators are malware. This makes people ignore warnings from the systems designed to protect them and end up installing more than just the game they wanted to get out of playing.

The Point of Sale (PoS) station is probably one of the most targeted devices in recent years. There are multiple reasons for this: older operating systems, the need to POS users to have admin rights, generic logons for the “windows” accounts, and more. Most PoS softare is very resistant to attempts to properly secure it including getting all sorts of bent out of shape when you try to apply restrictive security policies to them. I have even seen them stop working because the removable drive mount option is removed from USB ports using a group policy object.