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Adobe products are traditionally among the most pirated pieces of software.

Cracked versions of Acrobat, Illustrator and Photoshop are installed on millions of computers, despite recent anti-piracy measures.

In an effort to educate people about the dangers of “non genuine” software the company is now actively warning users. To do so, Adobe is bundling its products with a Software Integrity Service that can scan for and detect pirated software.

“Adobe now runs validation tests and notifies people who are using non-genuine software. Our tests check for software tampering and invalid licenses,” Adobe explains.

“This is a new service, designed to inform and protect our customers from the risks of non-genuine and counterfeit software,” the company adds.

The warnings come in the form of a pop-up and are limited to Acrobat X users in the United States, for now. When a pirate copy of the software is detected the following message appears.

The notification is meant to inform users, and can be clicked away. It may reappear after a short while, but Adobe stresses that nobody will get in trouble for it.

Their goal is simply to inform users of the risks and point them toward legal alternatives.

“Adobe’s goal has always been to help customers avoid the dangers of non-genuine or counterfeit software. We have been working on this service for a while, taking our time to ensure it is delivered to customers in an easy to understand and actionable way,” they say.

After running a pilot last year, the service now appears to appears to be rolling out more widely. A new “genuine” website was launched recently and the pilot references have been removed.

Aside from a few recent complaints about the pop-up there hasn’t been much backlash, which could mean that the program is still gearing up, and not operating at full swing just yet.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Zootopia, which was released as Bluray rip this week, is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

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(credit: Alexis Rodriguez)

Lots of evidence suggests that Mars once had copious amounts of water. There's even some evidence that the planet may have had a large ocean covering the northern pole of the planet. But the existence of the ocean remains controversial. An ostensible shoreline isn't visible across the entire basin that would have been occupied, and arguments have been made that ice would have covered any significant body of water.

Now, however, a large team of scientists has put forward an idea that may help reconcile a number of the apparent contradictions: giant Martian tsunamis. They suggest that one particular region of the red planet they've looked at contains evidence for two of them, the second of which may have driven an icy slurry across Mars' coastal plains.

If you assume an ocean was once in place on Mars, then a tsunami is probably a predictable event. The authors estimate that, in the region they're looking at (part of the Arabia Terra), a meteor big enough to carve out a 30km wide crater would have hit about once every 15 million years. For the area in question, that translates to 23 of these impacts during the time the ocean was thought to be in place.

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