Fantastic Anti-piracy Statement

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Let's get a few things absolutely clear (because there's nothing I hate more than people spreading misinformation):

Macs can get viruses. In fact, occurrences of infected Macs are on the rise; as their popularity increases, so do the number of people willing to write viruses for them. They are not magically immune to viruses.

"Pirating" abandonware is not always illegal. It depends on the circumstances of the abandonment. In some cases, abandonware refers to software that has been willfully released into the public domain and is therefore legal abandonware.

Pirating is not illegal. Sharing copyrighted material is, which is why seeding torrents can get you in trouble. Downloading ROMs from mirrors is perfectly legal, although the ethics are still completely up in the air.

As felixmole said, pirated material is not usually infected with viruses. With some basic computer awareness and prudence it is practically impossible to get infected by a virus. Run a virus check on anything you download (also, nowadays many torrent programs come equipped with virus programs), learn how to spot typical warning signs (to some extent trial and error, but if a file is in a format it shouldn't be, has a dubious name, is smaller/larger than it should be you should exercise caution). Typically, "legitimate" torrent sites have a flagging system where infected files are flagged and hopefully deleted. Most torrent sites are to a fair degree virus-free, but you will still need to be careful.