There's something fishy going on

Today I discovered a very neat horrible invasion of privacy. There is a group on LiveJournal called Project Upstream, which scans livejournal and various other sites (deviantart and such) for AIM screen names, and then randomly starts conversations with each of them, impersonating the other with a screen name that ends with Salmon, Trout or Coho  So, for example I had a conversation that looked like this:

LittleLeagueCoho: Hey.
Me: Hello.
LittleLeagueCoho: To whom am I speaking?
Me: I think it is only fair I know who I am speaking to first.

Whereas the person I was talking to (We'll call them Other) had a conversation that looked like this:

DeclarativeCoho: Hey.
Other: hi?
DeclarativeCoho: Hello.
Other: To whom am I speaking?
DeclarativeCoho: I think it is only fair I know who I am speaking to first.

No one is really sure what is up with this, other than someone wants the world to make friends.  I think this is super awesome, because who doesn't like friends.  On the other hand, I feel slightly violated.  This is basically like a stranger saying, "Haaaaave you met Dan?"  I believe its foundations are in The Great Gatsby, where a central theme is random meetings of people.  So, it fosters friendship and has literary references, which I can certainly stand behind, but is still pretty unsettling.

It turns out that the person I was talking to is pretty awesome.  She went to MIT and is now at Stanford pursuing a Ph.D in applied physics.  But I don't think we'll be friends, simply because I feel fairly inferior to her.  But it was fun.  And now that I know what is going on, I am actually going to talk to people who randomly message me, explain what is going on, and meet interesting people.  If you like, you can get it to randomly pair you with people.

If you'd like to know more about this wacky thing, wikipedia has an article you can read.

Now I feel kind of bad for being a jerk to the first few people this happened to me with.  Maybe they were Ph.D students as well...