Earlier today I got a random message from xenophobiccoho on AIM. Something along the lines of “Politicians kissing babies… how much tongue is too much?“. I, naturally, am unfazed by such a question from a random person, having done quite a bit of trolling myself. Unfortunately, I missed the message by a couple of hours, or I would have answered the query. I remembered getting a similar message at some point in the past, from a *trout, so I figured I’d look up this screen name and see what info traces I could find on the net. What I found was way stranger and awesomer than I could have ever imagined.
It turns out they’re actually some sort of fish bot network. That’s fish as in the thing that swims in the water, not so much the malicious hacker kind. There’s a ton of them (names here), usually ending with *coho, *trout, and *salmon. It’s something called Project Upstream. From their web page:
“Project Upstream is an organization dedicated to promoting social ideals through the use of exciting new technology. Our most well-known service is our swarm of robotic fish, which connects AIM users to each other. Robotic fish connections occur spontaneously, and also by request.”
Their mischievous method is they will message two people at random, pulling names from Google, twitter, digg, etc.. They’ll act as a middleman, disguising each chat participant’s screen name from one another, basically enticing them to talk to each other randomly. Both users will usually cluelessly think the other has messaged them, and most of the time respond accordingly to that. However, you might also end up talking to a more knowledgeable user, as you can request your own fish. Chat messages are sometimes modified with a pirate theme, or old tymey english, or other variants. You can opt out of the program by sending a message containing $optout to one of the bots.
To me, it seems like a Discordian version of the Omegle project. Also, it’s a great social experiment and good natured fun all around. Good luck little fishies!
[project upstream] [request a fish] [wikipedia] | via [nixie pixel]