Well that took a while, didn't it...
Huang Ji first replied to him on the forum, asking him a few questions about aliens. However, after waiting for a while, the person still hadn't replied. Scratching his head, Huang Ji continued reading the person's internet data.
"A QQ account? Username 'Commander Alvin1'? What's this now?" Through an in-depth read of their Tieba account data, Huang Ji found out that the person had once sent his QQ messaging account to a friend on Tieba in a private message. He was still able to find it despite the fact that this message had already been deleted.
Because he was just looking at the data and not the actual account itself, Huang Ji had no way of finding any information related to this QQ account; but it didn't matter. With a quick search, Huang Ji soon learned about what this QQ account meant.
"Oh! It's this piece of software!"
He immediately clicked on the little penguin icon already on the desktop and registered an account following the instructions he'd found. Once that was done, he used the search tool to find the person's QQ account. With this, he now had the actual account to observe!
Staring at the QQ account named, "Commander Alvin", and its profile picture, Huang Ji received a constant flow of information pertaining to this QQ account! He came into direct knowledge of the account password, including the entire messaging history using this account. It went without saying that Huang Ji was unable to read all of this data in a short period of time. Sensing a mountain of useless data, he blocked out the majority of it and chose to add him as a friend. He wanted to personally talk with him.
"Hm? A security question? What's my favourite video game?" Huang Ji blinked at the screen and then used two fingers to slowly type out three letters, "WOW2". Done, that should do it.
Huang Ji took a sip of water and then went to the washroom. After waiting around again, the person still hadn't accepted his friend request. It was getting late and he still had to rush back to the bookstore. And so, his solution was to directly log in to their QQ account! Once he finished manually adding himself, he logged out and waited for the person to log in again...
Huang Ji slowly typed, "Hello, I have a lot of interest in aliens and I have a couple of questions about what you said." The moment he sent this message, a barrage of text was sent back to him.
"Go to hell you fucking hacker! What, these days even dogs can use the internet now? Don't you fucking friend me you disgusting mongrel! Calling you dog shit would be in an insult to dog shit!
"Take a look in a fucking mirror! What did aliens ever do to you? Why don't you go play with bubble wrap!
"Seriously, I've never seen a more retarded piece of shit than you in my life! You hack my account and then send me a message like you're trying to have some educational conversation? Who the hell do you think you are!
"What's wrong? Don't know how to type? Why you ain't sayin' nothin'? Someone in your family go off to see Buddha?"
This giant chain of messages was fired at Huang Ji like a machine gun.
"???" Huang Ji was completely dumbfounded. His head was filled with questions marks as he was being roasted. To make matters worse, this was his first time touching a keyboard. He was still unfamiliar with typing and couldn't reply with even a single message...
"Is this the internet..." Huang Ji stared at the screen. The person on the other side continued their wave of attacks as they became increasingly invested. They managed to fill the entire screen with insults without repeating a single line!
He tried to formulate a response numerous times, but each time he tried he was forced to delete his message. By the time he'd typed just two words, the other person would have already sent at least three insults. Speechless towards the person's endless insults, Huang Ji thought about it for a moment before steadily type out a message.
"Dong An, can you shut up?"
"..." The person fell silent, and remained so for quite a while. He then sent over another string of messages, questioning Huang Ji about how he knew his name. Along with the messages was a series of guesses, wondering if Huang Ji was his childhood friend, or maybe the administrator of the internet cafe
Regardless of what he said, Huang Ji simply ignored him and continued typing with his two fingers, "Can you stop with the one-man act? I ask the questions, you answer."
Dong An refused to comply, typing away furiously and sending another wall of insults without even using a single swear word. Annoyed by his behaviour, Huang Ji silently sent over two rows of characters and numbers; they were the username and password of Dong An's World of Warcraft account...
Dong An fell silent again. Huang Ji smiled and continued typing, sending over the information of his main account and all of his alts.
"Sorry Boss, I'm just an innocent little child, please don't take it to heart!" He immediately gave up after seeing Huang Ji send over the login info of all the game accounts he'd worked so hard on.
Huang Ji rolled his eyes. He honestly didn't have any hope anymore that this person would know anything useful. But just in case, he still planned on asking him.
Fed up with his slow typing speed, after some thought, Huang Ji sent him a video call. A person who looked like a slim monkey soon appeared on the screen. Huang Ji hadn't installed a camera, so all the other person could see was a black screen on his side.
Putting on headphones, Huang Ji listened to the person's voice, "C'mon Boss, why you doin' this! A man of your skill wouldn't steal my accounts, right!"
Huang Ji attempted to perceive his data, but ended up disappointed. As expected, Huang Ji was unable to acquire Dong An's personal data through video and a microphone. In other words, he hadn't met the requirements of seeing or hearing him.
"I really do have to directly see them with my own eyes. What I'm seeing right now is just an image of electromagnetic signals being converted onto the screen. I'm not truly looking at Dong An. It's the same with the voice. All I'm getting is information about the computer and the electromagnetic signals, not about Dong An himself."
It was like looking at a photograph. Huang Ji would only be able to obtain information about the photo itself, and not the person in the photo. To gain information about a person, Huang Ji had to personally see them or come in contact with them.
Upon confirming this, he asked with a heavy voice, "What's your basis for this post about aliens? How do you know astronauts have seen aliens?"
Dong An replied, "Them's all foreign conspiracy theories that some people came up with. They figured it out by reading between the lines during interviews with these astronauts. I heard there was even a hacker who hacked into the FBI's classified records and said that the government was hiding the existence of aliens...."
The monkey in front of the camera rambled on. At one moment he was talking about a UFO that had crash-landed, where the Americans found and dissected an alien body. The next moment he said the alien hadn't died and had entered into an agreement with America. The moment after that he mentioned about a flying saucer hidden in an underground base beneath Area 51.
At first, Huang Ji listened closely to what he was saying, but he soon realized: Is this guy just throwing out a bunch of wild speculations?
"Oh right. Actually, I suspect that the Americans faked the Moon landing, and that the live stream was all filmed beforehand. People have already figured this all out, exposing all of the problems with the Moon landing footage. America's never been to the Moon before, there's no other explanation for why their current space technology has gotten worse instead of improving over the years.
"Think about it. There's no moisture on the Moon, how could his footprints be so clear? And that shadow, it's the result of multiple light sources. It was clearly filmed in a studio..."
He finally lost his patience as Dong An rambled on about all sorts of guesses and "evidence". When Huang Ji heard his talk about the "Moon landing hoax", he finally came to the conclusion that Dong An really was just spouting a bunch of nonsense.
Huang Ji knew very well whether or not the Moon landing was a hoax. When he stared at the stars at night and saw the Moon, he could see directly the "Number of times humans have been on the Moon", the answer was six.
Furthermore, there were also the 24,483 pieces of garbage that the humans had left behind. The garbage consisted primarily of remnants and pieces of the spacecraft. Then there were objects like the American flag, moon rover, and retroreflectors. With these items on the Moon, there was no way the Moon landing was a hoax. Yet, listening to Dong An point out the suspicious points in the footage really made it sound like he was telling the truth.
"Good thing my data perception can prove the Moon landing. Even though what he's saying sounds very convincing, it's just plain wrong. In that case, everything he mentioned before about aliens was probably a bunch of wild guesses too. While his evidence and reasoning are all sound, they're most likely all wrong..."
Huang Ji shook his head, realizing how stupid he was. Now that he thought about it, it was silly of him to see a random person's comments on the internet and believe that the person might have actually known something about the aliens.
"Is this the internet...it's kind of disappointing." He'd never come in contact before with the internet, and he only had an elementary understanding of how it worked. His expectations about the information he could find on the internet were too high.
"Though, the information he mentioned like the FBI's classified records and the Area 51 underground base aren't completely useless either. I just have to go check them out and everything will be clear. Same with the astronauts. I just have to see them to know if they've even seen aliens before.'"
Thinking about it, Huang Ji ended the video call with Dong An, turning off the computer and leaving the apartment. After this experience, he gave up on his wishful thinking of being able to easily find large amounts of intel.
"Any mystery, and any secret, will reveal its truth to me when I go straight to the scene or come face to face with the party involved. At the moment, the aliens aren't a concern. I can leave them alone for now and focus my attention on learning."
......
<< Previous Chapter | Next Chapter >>
1. The original username originates from a movie and is a play on the French phrase "Comment allez-vous?" Couldn't really think of a meaningful way to translate it and ended up trying to do the same thing in English. Hopefully it kinda works.↩
2. I don't think this needs explaining, but WOW = World of Warcraft, the most popular MMORPG of the past two decades.↩
Thanks for the chapter!
ReplyDeleteHuang Ji be looking like an almighty hacker to others hehe.
Maybe he can part time in some job that requires hacking? Probably not testing security strength tho since he could (probably) just see right through it lol