Shrimp cocktail and rum & cokes, live industrial rock and a touch of adult biz in form of a pair of curvy décor girls, thus atmosphere was set for a no-limit Texas Hold’em tournament.

The billing company’s many clients, unanimous in their praise of services and support provided by multi-method processing platforms and innovations, indirectly recruited a good quota of registered players glad to fork over a little bit of cash for chance to participate in tournament.

Though prizes were final pay out, participants numbered at least four dozen and included inexperienced and those less obviously so.

Open bar helped early registration and tournament play take off as myVirtualCard CEO Howard Cohen made opening address. “I wouldn’t hire him for my kid’s bar-mitzvah,” said myVirtualCard VP Joshua Ungar. “But he actually did a pretty good job, and this wasn’t a kid’s event.”

The tournament advanced with eminent adult personalities dropping like flies as eliminations accumulated. Mantas from Rabbit’s Reviews, Ron from PlugInFeeds – all called and folded and bet and dropped, with Raja from SexSearch and Ramos of GoFuckYourself struggling to keep straight faces.

As tournament screws tightened, MVC programmers Jason Lotito and Richard Rondeau each grabbed a girl and took to dance floor in a scene somewhat reminiscent of a hardcore-techie ball.

In a short amount of time, Spyware has gone from relative obscurity to an almost daily mention. This article was prepared to help you understand basics and tell you where you can get more information.

What is Spyware?

Quite simply Spyware is a type of rogue software program that gets copied to your computer without warning or permission. The goal of Spyware is to monitor and record information about you. In some cases, Spyware gets loaded on your PC just by visiting wrong websites.

What is its purpose?

On serious side, "Keyboard loggers" do just that - record keys from your keyboard as you type. This is an extremely menacing form of Spyware. As you can imagine your accounts, passwords, emails anything you type is susceptible to keyboard loggers. In fact, this is kind of Spyware that is largely responsible for online identity theft.

In case of Adware it's to "profile" your online activities and interests. This information is used by advertisers to promote ads and pop-ups targeted to your specific interests.

Is Adware Spyware?

There is some debate on this, but consensus is that if Adware records and submits information about you ... it falls under category of Spyware.

How does it get on your computer?

In case of less harmful varieties they are usually bundled with some Shareware or "free" programs. The peer-to-peer (P2P) music downloading programs are notorious for including Adware with their programs.