When it comes to software piracy, it is hard to find a more complicit, competent, and friendlier ally than Google, assuming you are a pirate. Google owns the popular blogging site “Blogspot.com”. If you want to know how to illegally gain access to software, blogspot is probably one of the premier resources on the internet today.
NOTE: Many cracks and key generator programs are actually malicious software designed to steal from you. I do not recommend that you click on any of the results of the following searches. There is no honor among thieves and you will almost certainly get infected if you download the files they provide.
Copy and paste the following into Google searches and you’ll see what a powerful ally Google is to the pirates.
keys crack NOD32 site:blogspot.com
keys crack Kaspersky site:blogspot.com
keys crack Norton site:blogspot.com
OK, I didn’t realize how friendly Google is to the pirates. I actually typed in “Notron” instead of “Norton” and Google helpfully asked me if I meant Norton.
keys crack Adobe site:blogspot.com
keys crack itunes site:blogspot.com
keys crack windows site:blogspot.com
OK, I know, you don’t care if Microsoft gets pirated.
The list goes on and on. If you want to find serial numbers and crack for programs, Blogspot.com is your one stop free shopping mall, all courtesy of Google’s complicity. I do not fault Google for returning results of searches, I fault them for hosting the content to perform piracy on the blogspot web site they own and failing to provide reasonable redress.
Google’s PR folks will be quick to cite their policies against this sort of behavior, but it is much like me repeatedly hitting you in the face as I tell you I abhor violence.
Here are the problems. If I am alerted to a blogspot page advertising obviously illegal serial numbers for cracks of ESET products and I email abuse@blogspot.com, I get a delivery delay notification and no action. If I look further I am told that to report this type of activity, I have to actually send a hard copy complaint through the mail to Google. This means that it will take a minimum of 2 or 3 days to potentially get a web page with blatant piracy taken down. Meanwhile, courtesy of Google’s blogspot.com, the pirates can add another batch of sites, which will take a minimum of 2 or 3 days, to get taken down, at the expense of time and postage for the victimized company. There is no cost to post the pirate content.
There really is no freedom of speech issue here. We are not talking about instruction on how to crack some mathematical algorithm, we are talking about programs being freely distributed and advertised to illegally crack software.
Some of the software is hosted on responsible web sites, such as Mediafire.com. At Mediafire you send in a legitimate complaint and they act promptly to remove the illegal files.
Yesterday I contacted some individual people at Google for assistance. The “help” I got was largely limited to links that do not really help at all.
Of the links to blogspot pages that blatantly provide illegal cracks and or keys for software, two are still live. A different link I reported over a month ago is also still live.
If Google isn’t interested in manning the pirate ships, they need to have reasonable processes for reporting piracy and responses to reports of piracy. I understand that in some cases there may be gray areas that potentially require paper correspondence, but there are ample examples of outright piracy that require less intellect than the average hamster possesses to see what they are.
For today, the pirate ships of the Internet are largely manned and powered by Google’s blogspot.
The views and opinions in this blog post are mine and may not reflect the views and opinions of ESET, but I believe them to be indicative of the views and opinions of victims of Google's blogspot throughout the world.
Randy Abrams
Director of Technical Education
