Downloaders rejoice, ok well maybe not but those of us that are tired of the RIAA and its strong arm tactics can almost feel good about a recent decision that RIAA announced to the Wall Street Journal.

RIAA has decided to drop the lawsuits with their huge judgments and have instead decided to work with ISPs to keep an eye on what people are doing. If a user is discovered to have illegal material available for download (Sharing music etc) then RIAA will send a note to the ISP and the ISP will take over "correcting" the issue.

Of course you have to wonder how RIAA will find out that a certain user is doing this, will they staff a center to scour the Internet looking for these violations? Or will they employ other and shadier means.

Apple can be a pretty secretive company when they want to be and at other times they seem to let the cat out of the bag in a rather obvious way.

The cat in question this time is a large purchase of shares in a company called Imagination Technology. The amount is a 3.6% stake that cost them roughly 4.7 million US Dollars.

Imagination Technology is the creator of PowerVR Mobile Graphics. The components including their upcoming PowerVR SGX VXD will enable better graphics on the iPhone and iPod.

I know that many of you were looking forward to the performance increases the ATi 8-12 drivers brought. But for a select group of users the new drivers only brought frustration.

For many who had the combination of a pair of Radeon HD4850 in Crossfire Mode and Microsoft's Vista these new drivers meant black screens at boot and BSODs if they got into the OS.

ATi has now released a patch to fix all of that though.

A quick heads up for X-Fi owners; Creative has just released an updated driver (version 2.18.0008) which supports all X-Fi series cards based on the CA-20K series of audio processors. If you're not sure if your card uses one of those, it's used in the X-Fi Titanium Series, Xtreme Gamer Series, Xtreme Music, Platinum and Elite Pro.

The new driver brings back full Dolby Digital and DTS decoding for certain models in Windows Vista environments and DVD-Audio playback is now possible for cards under Vista 32-bit that came with the MediaSource DVD-Audio Player application.

It was not too long ago that people were speculating that Via was going to be out of the game. But they are still fighting and have now put out their own triple play in the SFF and Nettop/Book market.

This new release is called Trinity and is a combination of CPU, Media Processor and S3 Discrete GPU. Together these items offer Hi-Def Video, Blu-Ray, and DX 10.1.

What this means is that you can now get full Vista support from SFF, Note/Netbooks and even embedded devices.

Here is an interesting thought; what if the world's nuclear arms and vessels were all run by Windows?

It is a very scary thought to me, to be honest with you. Don't get me wrong I like Windows and Vista, and think that MS has some very good server and business products. I just do not think the military should rely on them.

However it seems that the Royal Navy (UK) has gone ahead and done it anyway. They have moved all of the systems on Nuclear Submarines over to Windows. Sort of gives a BSOD a new meaning doesn't it?

With all the news about Intel's Core i7 we have to wonder about the Shanghai from AMD. Will the new CPU be able to keep up? Will we see any real gains from AMD this time?

Well it seems that AMD are working to make sure we do. According to an SDTimes article AMD is working with Java developers to improve performance of Java Virtual Machines on the new Quad CPU.

Read more here.

In a not so big surprise Apple's share value dropped after an announcement that Apple would no longer attend Macworld after 2009.

But that was not the full reason that the stocks dropped (if rumors are to be believed.) In addition to Apple backing out on Mac World, it seems that the Patron Saint of Fruit Steve Jobs will not even deliver the Key Note speech at their last attendance. Many speculate this is due to Job's declining but there is no confirmation of that.

The Sydney Morning Herald has moreHere.

Sapphire Technology is today finally taking the covers off its ATOMIC Edition Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card and boy, does it pack a punch!

Not only is it currently the fastest graphics card on the planet (at least until NVIDIA out the GeForce GTX 295 at CES next month), but also combines all that graphics processing power in a single slot solution thanks to its nifty closed loop water cooled cooling solution.

I have been following the Australian ISP filtering issue (as have many of you) with interest. I personally do not like the idea and feel that it is dangerous in many ways.

To understand why filters on this scale are so dangerous it is important to know that all traffic would have to pass through them. This gives a hacker the chance to intercept all internet traffic from a single location.

BanThisURL.com recently sat down with Matthew Strahan, a security expert at Securus Global and asked them about these new filters. In his opinion the filters are extremely dangerous and provide (as I mentioned) a single point of attack and a single point of failure.