Touch the bait

“Am I your boyfriend?” Lin Yuan’s lips were almost splitting to his ears when he sent that message.

He waited eagerly to see how Xia Ye would reply.

But before a message came, a video call request popped up.

Lin Yuan immediately got up and ran to the bathroom.

“Why did it take you so long to answer my call?”

“I was just squatting.”

“Squatting for what?” Xia Ye’s tone sounded a little sulky.

Lin Yuan turned his phone camera around, “I’m in the bathroom.”

To avoid Xia Ye seeing him pretending to be cool and drinking coffee at his office desk, Lin Yuan could only hide in a bathroom stall.

“Oh. What did you mean by that question just now?”

“Which question? The one asking you, ‘Am I your boyfriend’?”

“Nonsense.”

“I was just… just making a normal confirmation, you know.” As an engineering major, Lin Yuan had always been very cautious about such big matters, just like TCP needing a three-way handshake to establish a connection.

A complete verification process facilitates smooth network communication, and a cautious male-female relationship benefits their future interactions.

“What’s there to confirm?”

“Isn’t such a big deal something that needs to be confirmed?”

“You held my hand yesterday,” Xia Ye said with feigned anger, “Would I let you hold my hand if you weren’t my boyfriend?”

“Well, you’re right.”

“Pig head.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

“Gotta go, I have class again. Bye, muah.”

“Muah, muah…” Lin Yuan hadn’t even finished saying “muah” when the video call was hung up. He couldn’t be blamed; “muah” was appearing in his life dictionary for the first time, so it seemed he’d need to use and practice it more often in the future.

Lin Yuan walked out of the stall with a spring in his step, just as a colleague came in to use the bathroom. The colleague looked at him with surprise, “You’re hiding in the bathroom… Send me the serial number, and I won’t report you.”

“Get lost, I was just video chatting with my girlfriend.” Lin Yuan had become quite familiar with his colleagues here over the past half-month.

“Video chatting with your girlfriend specifically in the bathroom? You’re being assessed by formal employee standards, it’s fine to slack off during work hours, okay?” The other person obviously didn’t believe him.

Lin Yuan didn’t bicker much with his colleague and came out after a few perfunctory words. Back at his desk, the first thing he did was open his email.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t received a reply email with the review results.

Due to time constraints, Lin Yuan had to ask the OCR application specialist again on WeChat. The specialist’s refined answer was: wait patiently.

Wait? The thing Lin Yuan couldn’t stand most right now was waiting.

What to do?

Lin Yuan recalled how last time, he had unintentionally added his school’s name in the signature, which led the other party’s email system to increase its priority and send him an additional email. So this time, he might as well use the same trick.

But the method definitely couldn’t be too clumsy; he had to subtly touch the bait to stir the nerves on the OCR side. Otherwise, if he appeared too eager, it would inevitably arouse the other party’s suspicion.

After much thought, Lin Yuan couldn’t come up with any good ideas for a while.

He could only return to the core concern of OCR: what the other party cared about was definitely his school’s prestige. As an old, prestigious school deeply involved in national defense science and industry projects, this was OCR’s main concern.

If Lin Yuan claimed that he wasn’t actually running food delivery data, but rather helicopter aerodynamic data models, then even if the other party was skeptical, they would most likely be willing to allocate computing resources to Lin Yuan. Because compared to the small investment in computing resources, the potential returns were clearly more attractive.

But Lin Yuan obviously couldn’t do that, because Lin Yuan vaguely remembered, according to Zhang San, the “outlaw lunatic,” that espionage is a conduct crime, not a result crime.

So, as long as Lin Yuan did that, regardless of the outcome, even if he used fake national defense data to consume real enemy resources, he would still be done for.

So what to do? How could he both provoke the other party and keep himself out of trouble?

At this moment, Lin Yuan really wanted to ask Song Xiaoxiao. Because the core of this operation was essentially “wanting to be a prostitute and still erect a memorial archway,” being both and having both.

But due to not being familiar with her, Lin Yuan had to give up.

Lin Yuan immersed himself and thought carefully.

‘I’m a graduate student, so from their perspective, I might be able to participate in some sensitive projects undertaken by the school.’

‘But I’m a CS major, I’m not a helicopter or drone design major. So their weighting for me is low.’

‘So the key is to make them believe I have the opportunity to access some sensitive projects.’

‘Right! I can say I’m a national defense student!’

Lin Yuan admired his own intelligence too much. Heh, he would use the point of being a national defense graduate student to provoke the other party. He didn’t even need to prove that he really was, because he just needed to borrow one or two H100s for five days. The cost to the other party was very small, but the potential gain was very large.

This method was feasible, but the problem was that Lin Yuan fell into the previous issue again—espionage is a conduct crime. Impersonating a national defense student was still crossing the line.

After much thought, Lin Yuan let his mind wander and finally came up with a cunning trick—why should I say I’m a national defense student? Why can’t I be a classmate of a national defense student?

Being close to the water tower gets you the moon first, he didn’t believe the other party wouldn’t be tempted.

But he couldn’t overtly tell the other party, “Hey, my classmate is a national defense student, come bait me.”

‘What would Song Xiaoxiao do?’ Lin Yuan asked himself. ‘What do they do when they want to hook someone?’

Soon, Lin Yuan snapped his fingers. ‘WeChat Moments!’

So Lin Yuan quickly concocted a fresh WeChat Moments update—Seeing the national defense students during military training, they are simply too cool. I hope to work on projects with them in the future and contribute to the motherland’s national defense cause.

He also attached several pictures he found online of Zijin Aviation School’s previous aircraft exhibitions on campus. A formidable Wuzhi-10 armed helicopter, carrying rocket launch pods, stood majestically there.

To avoid any unexpected problems, Lin Yuan was truly grateful for Tencent’s WeChat Moments grouping function.

Lin Yuan put all his WeChat friends, except for the OCR application specialist, into one group. Then, this Moment was naturally hidden from this group. This meant it was a Moment specifically created for the other party.

—

Less than five minutes after that update was posted, the OCR application specialist proactively contacted him.

The other party, in a very formulaic manner, did not mention the update Lin Yuan posted, but instead informed Lin Yuan, “The review should have results very soon, please keep an eye on your email for a reply.”

Was this a coincidence? How could it be?

Lin Yuan could guess some of the key points. Such NGO organizations certainly cast a wide net; facing a large group of potential development targets, how could they arrange people to constantly monitor WeChat Moments? They must be using crawlers.

Automatically crawling friends’ WeChat Moments updates and then feeding them to an AI system for analysis, right?

Do you think WeChat has security precautions? Of course it does.

But a foot higher in the Dao, a yard higher in the Devil.

Even if the other party couldn’t use a crawler, they could use a rooted Android phone, or simply a virtual phone. Then they would run a program in the background to simulate manual refreshing of Moments, and then just take screenshots of the phone screen.

For an NGO organization with a tech background like OCR, performing OCR recognition on images would be too simple.

Thinking of this, Lin Yuan couldn’t help but chuckle softly.

Back to that coincidence. The acronym for Open Computing Republic and the acronym for Optical Character Recognition are both OCR.

The OCR organization seemed to exude something unusual just from its name. Regular OCR recognizes characters, while what this OCR wants to recognize is naturally self-evident.