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Old April 16th, 2001
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Question Word-for-word search results

often when i search on gnutella, a file comes up whose name is my search query, word-for-word. this will happen even when there's an accidental typo in the search query. i will search for, say, "appel TRee," and i'll find a file called "appel TRee."

there's one particular file that has come up many times. its size is 8192 bytes, and its name is whatever my search query was. there is no file extension, unless you search for "blah blah .mp3", in which case it will have an .mp3 extension. the ip address is always different. i downloaded the file once and opened it in notepad, and from what i could see, it looked like it was an executable file. i've decided that the file, if opened as an .exe file, would probably launch a virus into the system of whoever downloaded it. but i could be wrong.

i got a word-for-word result once with another file. that file was much larger; i think the number of megabytes was two or three digits.

1) has anyone else seen something like this?
2) how is it possible for someone to make a file whose name is whatever another gnutella user searches for?

another question, unrelated:
should i suspect something if someone randomly tries to download a file from me that never existed? several times someone has tried to download a file from me called "burp.mp3," and i've never had a file named anything like that.

thanks.

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