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| Técnico alumni network |
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| 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.
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| My journey to Lisboa |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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.
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!
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| Kansas City, KS |
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.
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| Train from Kansas City to ABQ |
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.
