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