This is the rough draft, my printer is down, and I have a quirk, where I can't really edit my writing until it is printed, so sorry about grammar/spelling mistakes (which you can point out at your leisure). Feedback, and constructive critism welcome.
Peer-to-Peer Sigil Sharing
As some people have moral and/or financial objections to the concept of peer-to-peer file sharing, I will warn you now that as the title hints towards, this article deals with just that.
I’ve gotten several songs that end with fwyh at then end of the file name. I wasn’t sure what this meant, I assumed originally it was an album name as I didn’t know much about the artist I was looking in to. When it showed up with another band, I assumed it was an advertisement from a ripping program, just as some image and video rippers put their logo at the bottom of the image, I assumed this mp3 ripper put fwyh at the end of their file names to advertise themselves. Finally when it came to my attention again, I manage to track it down. Apparently there is an “MP3 ripping group” called fwyh, and that is why it is there. Unfortunately I can’t research this easily, search engines are cluttered with people listing playlists and including fwyh within them, so I’m going on the word of a musician who complained about the group.
Regardless of the origin of fwyh, it is all over the Peer-to-Peer networks, which is a big realm. Limewire has an estimated 2.7 million users, Kazaa seems to have somewhere just below that number, and there are many more similar programs out there. Peer-to-peer file sharing is a big thing, that despite the threats of illegal activities, does not seem to be dying down.
So this leads me to the simple question, what can I make this do for me? The answer was shades of fwyh and a conversation with a friend. If people download countless files with this bizarre fwyh trailing it, just because it is a song they want, then they would do the same with another ending, one that is working towards my goals.
The idea of attaching a sigil at the end of a file name is one I find interesting. As the said file is downloaded from my computer, as people view it and possibly wonder about the letter soup at the end they begin to the charge the sigil. They may share the file, spreading it further, or they may remove the letters from the name, in effect banishing their copy of the sigil, just as deleting the file would do.
I prefer more visual pleasant and creative sigils, but sadly those can’t be attached to the end of a file. So I use an old standard method, I write out my intent “I will go on that trip to Mexico”, and begin hacking away at it. You can do this in a variety of ways, some people go straight to removing letters, though I think for this purpose it is better to remove some dull words, and leave the action words behind, to really cut down on the letters, “I go trip Mexico”. Now I remove all the duplicate letters “igotrpmexc”, then the vowels “gtrpmxc”, and it is still a bit long, so every third letter “gtpmc.”
I think gtpmc is small enough to fit at the end of a file name, so now it is time to attach it to something. I moved an assortment of my files into my shared folder, and let it run for a day, and then went back and checked what was uploaded, looking for a pattern. Two things were downloaded from me in large quantities, porn and meditation/new age/reiki music. I tacked my sigil onto my meditation music and porn, charged it a bit for each one, and then I cleared my shared folder of everything but files like those, so that my uploads wouldn’t be taken up by other things.
There was one flaw to my logic. The music is somewhere between three and ninety megs, where as the movies are two hundred to just topping a gig. Someone can get a song from me easily enough, but movies are so big that they have to take them from many sources, and there is a chance then that it won’t end up with my file name, and it takes a lot longer. By removing the movies and leaving just the movies, I had my files going at almost ten times the speed before.
Depending on what you have on your computer you might have something that is wanted than meditation music, so take some time to explore that idea.
Another idea I had, stemmed from a friend’s method of fighting *****. In his shared folder he had several images with very clear ***** titles, but the images were actually gruesome photos of murder victims, and crash victims. Not my style of battling it, but to each their own, but it did give me something else to consider. An image file allows you to put in a more visual sigil, which some people prefer, myself included. Of course not many people will find, or download My_get_to_Mexico_sigil.jpg, so you can either add your sigil onto an existing image, or just save it with a convincing name. I’m assuming the pictures that will be downloaded the most are ones labelled to be porn, or of celebrities (in embarrassing situations all the better). I haven’t done this yet, but I would be interested to hear people’s experience with such.
I like to occasionally search for files I have, to see if I can find my sigiled file, to watch it spread. Tracking symbols of my will as they find their way through cyberspace. I like this method, and I like the idea that I’ve turned. I think from what I’ve said, that people can explore their own usages of peer-to-peer network, and find other ways of using these networks to their own advantages. Best of luck to those who try.
Copyright © 2006 Gesigewigu’s
