A method and apparatus for an application aware traffic shaping service node architecture is described. A file introduced into a processing system is tagged with a security tag if the file is introduced via a supervised introduction point andor introduced by a supervised program. The sound transducers are positioned at a mutual distance x0+xd, and sound transit time t1 between the sound transducers is measured, wherein position x0 is the distance for optimum acoustic coupling of the two sound transducers and xd is the deviation from this position that is designated as the deviation. The communications protocol includes messages that can be sent by the high-level animation system to the low-level animation system to designate an animation and how the animation is to change over a specified period of time. Moreover, pieces of management information on the designated file are changed to a reference-disabled state.