YouTube fake conversations to deceive the innocent onlookers

I encountered this identical conversation between 3 random people on two different videos in YouTube!

A friendly conversation between three strangers? Totally not.

I decided to dig a bit into this. It was easier to spot the deception than I thought. All three accounts were created on the very same day in 2020 (and magically appeared to make the same conversation twice in summer 2022). We can easily conclude that these three accounts were created by the same person or a computer script.

I looked further and found many similar fake conversations happening around topics of investment and crypto trading under popular YouTube videos. An unsuspecting onlooker could totally fall for these scams! All these fake conversationalists have no videos, very few subscribers, and created on the same day (as above) or within a few days/weeks apart - perhaps by a bot and stolen profile photos. Beware!

A similar, but longer "conversation" - but with better "participants" (with accounts not created on the same day). LOL.

Portugal, from ten years ago...

My journey to Lisboa

Ten years ago, on a day like this, I left home for Colombo airport to head towards Lisboa for my grad school. I thought I was going to grad school. To do coursework and do research. Maybe for a couple of years? I did not know I was on for a life of adventures of diving into cultures and making friends. A journey that changed me completely.

 

The journey was not direct. I first had to go to New Delhi to get my Portuguese student visa. Getting the visa was a story on its own.  Then three days later, with the visa stamped on my passport, I headed towards Lisboa via Dubai. Two days of August 2012 are of high importance to me. One is the Monday 20th for leaving home to live abroad for the first time, and the other is the Thursday 23rd to arrive in Lisboa finally.

View from my apartment in Lisboa, August 2012

During those early days in Portugal, I would think about where I would be in 10 years. Here, I am writing this blog post from Atlanta. Arrival in Lisboa was smooth. Emirates upgraded me to business class. The border control was friendly to me. The landlord was waiting for me with my name typed on his tablet. On his drive, he mentioned, "Portugal is having economic hardship now. But we are always happy." I also asked him why it was cold in the summer, coming from Colombo. He replied it was the end of the summer and almost autumn. The following days, I walked the streets alone. Everyone was helpful, despite me not knowing the language. Most people there can and will speak English, unlike, for example, in France. In some ways, it was like the opposite of Emily in Paris. Lisboa was nicer to me. (Oh yes, I have made a blog series about my life in Lisboa,  Pradeeban in Portugal!) But I did not know that I would end up doing my Ph.D., primarily based in Lisboa, eventually spending seven years of my life centered around Portugal until I completed my Ph.D. in 2019.

The Pacific Ocean, Santa Monica. June 2022

Moving to Lisboa started season 2 of my life. Due to Erasmus Mundus mobility requirements, I moved back and forth from Lisboa to cities in other countries - Sweden, Belgium, Croatia, Saudi Arabia, and the USA. Then in June 2018, I moved to Atlanta after submitting my thesis. I finally defended my Ph.D. thesis in July 2019 in Lisboa and August 2019 in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Erasmus Mundus joint degree requirements! 

I moved out from Lisboa in June 2018, did not visit Portugal after July 2019, and my last connection to Portugal was completed with my final Ph.D. defense in August 2019. But I feel I am still in season 2, which Lisboa started in my life. The last three years of the pandemic have significantly changed many aspects of our life and even how we interact with people. Things have slowed down significantly. My travels since February 2020 are entirely restricted to local trips within the USA. My life in Lisboa and my seven years of Erasmus Mundus are like pleasant dreams. I believe I will have an equally exciting season 3 somewhere sometime later. Until then.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2022

This year, Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is open to anyone who is a newbie to open source. Not just students. As such, we replace the term "Student" with "Contributor" this year.

Given below is an introductory presentation to GSoC 2022.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2022 from Pradeeban Kathiravelu, Ph.D.

There are some more important changes to GSoC this year compared to the past years. Specifically, workload has been made flexible this year. Some projects are medium size, requiring a half-time effort (18 hrs/week, 175 hours in total) as in 2021. Other projects are large projects (full-time, 35 hrs/week, 350 hours in total). Make sure to find the project that fits your availability. Of course, large projects yield to double the stipend compared to the medium size project, as your effort will be double too. Additional flexibility also include the potential to complete the GSoC up to 2 months later, with the mentors' prior approval. 

2020 and before, the potential to commit full-time to GSoC was a major deciding factor. Mentors would avoid selecting candidates who already have an on-going internship or a job unless they still exhibit the potential to commit the same amount of time and effort. This year, just like 2021, allows the half-time (medium-size projects) contributors to have other internships in parallel.

Mentors and collaborators can even schedule their work hours the way they see fit.

Good luck!

 

Random spam and a train journey...

Kansas City, KS

Have you ever received a WhatsApp or a WeChat (WeiXin) message like, "Hello, I'm Stella, are you Mr. Jack, the costume designer introduced by Annie?" from someone with a Chinese woman as the profile picture but a US number?

My friends and I kept receiving those messages frequently. The template is always the same:

"Hello, I'm [a woman], are you [a man], [description to the man's job] introduced by [another woman / my colleague / my secretary]?"
A Google reverse image search on the profile picture will take you to the source - where they have stolen the image from.

For fun, we tried to reply to those to see where they would go. "Oh, sorry, you have messaged the wrong person." They respond, "my bad, at least you are kind enough." But these never proceeded further. They always sensed that I was trolling them and discontinued the chat almost immediately.

Train from Kansas City to ABQ

But managed to continue the chat a bit longer as I was on a long train trip. After this "wrong number," the person, who claimed to be a cloth designer from California, suggested I add to their Telegram since the WhatsApp is apparently for their work discussions only. So, I added them to their Telegram, a number from Indonesia. The person also introduced themself as a divorcee with a child and even shared a family photo (again, stolen from the Internet) after I shared a selfie from the train. They again shared the sketch of some cloth they designed and their lunch downloaded from the Internet. At this point, I can see how lazy these scammers are. They are not lazy. They just don't want to invest too much time on each potential victim as they cannot be bothered and have to function at large. Seriously, why can't they send an actual selfie of their lunch?

Anyway, in the beginning, they mentioned they also invest in crypto (they shared a selfie in front of a crypto dashboard - again taken from the Internet). At this point, I was sure this was either a crypto scam, romance scam, or a scam that would make me pay for their cloth design. This chat was dragging on over a couple of days as if they had formed a close and caring friendship with me. Usually, their conversation was in bad/broken English. But every time they talk about crypto, they get more professional and convincing - as if they were copy-pasting some paragraphs they wrote sometime back (not from the Internet. No text matches on the Internet). They even offered to help me invest. Ok, that is when I decided this was a crypto scam. My long train trip was coming to an end too. They also realized I wasn't falling for them - instead, I wasted their valuable scamming time. Their chat was getting repetitive with little time investment from them (just photos and videos stolen from the Internet). They stopped trying to convince me into crypto investments, and I blocked them.

Some arrests have been made on these crypto scams.

When the reality exceeds the hype

Utqiagvik airport, midwinter 2021, -35C

Some events in life - we anticipate those for a long time. Before they happen, they feel almost like a dream. Then it happens. Sometimes they disappoint, after all those hypes and hopes. Other times, they surprise us even beyond our expectations.

 

A few come to my mind. First, the Erasmus Mundus. Doing an MSc in Europe, not just in one country - but two! It felt like too good to be true. Then I got accepted and spent 2 years in Portugal and Sweden: 3 semesters in Lisboa and a semester in Stockholm, to be precise. I left Sri Lanka on the 20th August 2012, 10 years ago, and arrived in Lisboa on the 23rd August, after spending a few days in New Delhi. The Erasmus Mundus experience, especially as a masters student living alone for the first time, together with many similar students, felt special and it pleasantly surprised me.

 

Utqiagvik airport, summer 2021

When I was in my third semester of the MSc, I applied to the PhD program under the Erasmus Mundus (now discontinued and replaced by Marie Curie funding) funding again. It felt it is going to be a larger version of the Erasmus Mundus masters, spending time in 2 EU countries again - but for 4 - 5 years. More time for those pleasant encounters. Then it happened. I spent my PhD in not just 2 countries in 2 years - rather 5 countries in 5 years! In addition to my universities in Portugal and Belgium (the host universities of my PhD program), I spent a few months in other universities in Croatia (1 month), USA (7 months), and Saudi Arabia (2 months), with research internships. While my MSc started this mobility experience with Portugal -> Sweden -> Portugal, my PhD felt like my MSc experience on steroids. More diverse experience. Now, looking back, my MSc + PhD experience of 7 years, 2012 August - 2019 August (2 years of MSc followed by 5 years of PhD) feels like a sweet past birth. An ultimate nomad life. I surely want to go back to Portugal for those memories.

 

No sunrise in the midwinter in Arctic

My visit to the North Slope in Alaska in 2021 was a travel experience that exceeded my extremely high expectations. I visited Anchorage (and surrounding towns - Whittier and Spencer Glacier) and Utqiagvik (and Point Barrow) in the summer, after wanting to visit Alaska for 2 decades since 2001. Utqiagvik, the Arctic Alaska, felt other-worldly, despite being the USA. I had to visit Alaska again (!!!) within a few months, in the midwinter, as I was so mesmerized by Alaska - this time to Anchorage, Fairbanks (and College), and Utqiagvik. Again, Alaska exceeded my expectations, making me want to go there for the third time. I even like that tiny Utqiagvik Barrow Airport. It does not have restaurants or anything fancy. But it has a minimalist and home feeling to it. Love that.

 

I am happy for these memories. But that also means I also want to go back in time (i.e., visit these places again). Hope I will still love Alaska and Portugal the same when I visit them again.