[Air-l] folder and file names as direct speech

[Jill Walker]

>>> This is (or was) common practice on filesharing networks - not the 
>>> p2p kind, but the kinds where you use a client to log onto a network 
>>> of servers, some of which will let you in for free, others which 
>>> only let you in if you type in the fifth word of the twentieth line 
>>> of a website you only get to after viewing a long ad for porn, some 
>>> which will let you in but won't let you download any warez unless 
>>> you upload some first, and yet others which only let members or 
>>> perhaps even friends log
>>
>> sounds to me like you're talking about a melange of IRC DCC Fserves 
>> and 0-day warez FTP sites.  which, or both, did you intend?
>
> I as thinking bbs's

No, actually I was thinking of the kind of software people use to, uh, 
share their "backups" of games, movies and other software. Hotline and 
Carracho are too popular clients for the Mac. Perhaps this is a kind of 
FTP, I don't really know enough about it to say.

They're still active, though I think p2p systems like Kazaa and 
Limewire and BitTorrent (which works differently) are more popular 
because it's so much easier to search them and everything's open. My 
understanding is that the servers you get access to through Hotline and 
Carracho are often more "elite" - if you've got the passwords and get 
in with the right people, this is where you get freshly-cracked warez 
first.

One of our MA students wrote a fascinating thesis on software pirate a 
couple of years ago. It's a very complex and nuanced realm, and I may 
well be misrepresenting things a little here due to lack of 
understanding.

I assume the file naming structure is common to many of these kinds of 
servers.

[Sorry about the late answer, btw]

Jill

Dr Jill Walker, Dept of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen
http://huminf.uib.no/~jill