A rather disturbing trend on company websites these days, is to refuse to do business with people who wish to pay by phone. Limewire is one of those companies.

As someone who has worked as a software developer for over twenty years, I can assure you that there is no such thing as a "secure" web site. There are dozens of ways of discovering what another user is doing on the web for those who are so inclined, the most obvious being to simply trap a user's keystrokes.

With this kind of potential risk, why do so many companies like Limewire insist that the end user has nothing to worry about? Please, the solution is simple. Just give us a phone number so we can call you and give you a credit card number without having to worry about third parties eavesdropping.

Or is that too complicated?

We do not have enough staff to handle phone calls.

In fairness, I can see how by providing a phone number you could get a neverending stream of support calls. It would be difficult indeed for any company to answer all the dumb questions on the planet.

However, the same doesn't apply to PayPal et al. They don't need to provide support, just collect payments and charge (probably megabucks) for doing so. At the same time, they demonstrate a lackadaisical commitment to security by not offering alternatives to payment by web. I guess they consider their systems to be impenetrable. I wonder how many others have made that mistake in the past.

Personally I don't care if I get the official version of LimeWire or not. It would be nice, but not at the risk of exposing debit and credit card info to potential hackers. And yes, they do exist. Just install a firewall and watch how many people are trying to get access to your computer from all over the planet. It's easy enough to verify.

For you folks though, I'd think it would be worth your while to get on PayPal's case. You're their customer, you pay for their services. Make them give you your money's worth. You're the one losing sales because of their policies.

It is. There's no customer in existence known who has managed to get through to PayPal's support. Hey PayPal is an eBay company - it simply has to be secure. Fortunately, you cannot download pr0n with LimeWire because otherwise PayPal would lock up their account just like that.

We have about a 2 million downloads a week (combining all the various operating systems). If even 0.5% of those people called us, that would be 10,000 calls a week. That's a lot. Too many, in fact.

As far as PayPal goes -- why not use a credit card?

Yeah, I agree. The world is a beautiful place. There's absolutely no need to be concerned about giving your credit card info over the internet. Every commerce web site is a hundred percent secure, and people who don't trust web developers and the blessed corporation are real idiots.

Besides, which company would want to talk to customers anyway? How crude and so not with it. Yuck.