I received an email from Jerry Kindall about the mysterious “joe maller.exe” thing I found on GNUtella. He suggested the file was produced by “a hacked Gnutella client that renames the file in question to whatever you’re looking for, to distribute a virus or worm or at the very least a Trojan horse. If you had searched for ‘Adobe Photoshop 6’ I bet you the same server would have returned the same file, only named ‘Adobe Photoshop 6.exe’.”

In the meantime, I had a small but signficant breakthrough with Perl.