LimeWire claims to be the fastest file sharing program on the planet. There are 2 versions (FREE and PRO) of LimeWire. The PRO version cost $21.95 for 6 months of software updates and technical support or both for 1 year at $34.95. The benefits of LimeWire PRO is you get optimized search results, turbo-charged downloads, connections to more sources and more reliable downloads.
LimeWire doesn’t implement any protection on it’s PRO version. No serial number or any security checks at all on the software. After purchasing LimeWire PRO, you’ll immediately being forwarded a sales page where you can download the PRO version of LimeWire for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, OS/2 and Solaris. Whenever the customer requires to re-download LimeWire PRO, he/she will only need to access the sales page.
It seems that LimeWire doesn’t care at all on protecting its own software from piracy. No protection on the program and the sales page don’t require authentication/logging in. If you know the sales page, you can download the PRO version anytime. As we all know, Google has the smartest bot that crawls millions of websites and guess what, it managed to index the LimeWire PRO sales page as well which enables many pirates to download the latest LimeWire PRO for FREE!
If you know how to use Google’s search strings, simply use the “site” string and look for “sales.limewire.com“. As you can see at the screenshot below, only 1 link appears on the page but if you click at the text that says “repeat the search with the omitted results included”, about 70+ LimeWire sales page links will appear.
Most of the LimeWire sales page indexed by Google will tell you that “This account has expired”, “This account was cancelled” or redirects you to LimeWire FREE download page. Out of the 70+ links, only 4 sales page are still valid.
This bug has been around for many years already and I don’t know why LimeWire still allow this to go on. They are already using robot.txt to prevent search engine bots from crawling into the sales subdomain but it is still being indexed because people post the links to forums and websites. This is an important lesson for all of you who are selling ebooks or any intangible products on the Internet. Most of the time your products will be leaked out via direct link (just like Chapter-M). At least password protect the page or install some kind of script to detect unauthorized multiple logins. Also, using random characters on the filename also helps.