I think I just managed to gain a rare insight into an upcoming spam campaign.

I was browsing the Pastebin Archive, as I'm wont to do. There's a ton of interesting things you can find that have been pasted in the last 10 or so minutes!

Anyway, just now I found what seems to be a template for a spam campaign, pasted about 15 minutes before I started writing this post. Notice how a lot of words in the message have alternates defined - the idea is that they're randomly chosen at the time a spam is sent so that anti-spam programs can't latch onto a particular phrase.

I then decided to see if this particular spam campaign had been sent yet, so I went to Google. I obviously wouldn't have been able to Google a whole sentence because of the random words, but because I knew exactly which words were random, I was able to skip them and use wildcards. To be exact, I searched for "know a * of people * to do * but * have some * in what * do".

The only result which came up when I searched that today was this pastebin, which appears to be the original copy of the message, also pasted today. I'm thinking that someone from the company in question (which I'm guessing is called "Studio 54", given the pastebin title, but who I'm going to call "the client" from now on) was talking to a person from the company they were hiring to do the spamming, and pastebinned that message which had been crafted by the client. (Notice how this message has remarkably few grammatical errors, so it's not just a sample output from choosing random words.)

The spamming company then took the message, ran it through a program to look for common words and replace them with a list of alternatives in order to pre-prepare it for spamming, and then pastebinned the result back to the client to seek their approval.

Notice how the message with the alternative words would have a lot of grammatical errors in it due to the randomly chosen words - such as "I actually am sure which you, such as most people, like hearing to songs". (The original sentence was "I am sure that you, like most people, like listening to music".) And while I knew this would be the case, I've never actually seen the back-and-forth that goes between a client and a spammer before. So it's kinda fascinating. :D

So yeah. Upcoming spam campaign. Now that I know about it, I'll be interested to see if anything like this arrives in my spam folder at some point.

I started on hormones today! :D

When last we left our heroine on her adventures, she had come back from the GIC with an assurance that she would be prescribed hormones. The way this would work was they'd write to my GP and ask him to prescribe them.

I was hoping it wouldn't take as long as this for me to actually get them, though! I had tried calling the GIC on the 30th of December, and they hadn't yet written the letter. Based on the information they gave me, I decided to book an apppointment with my GP on the 20th of January (two days ago now).

So, on Friday, I went to the appointment I had booked with my doctor, in the hopes that the GIC would have by now contacted them. They had indeed, and I managed to leave with a prescription for Progynova. I started on the first tablet today, and I'm so glad I'm finally starting!

There is a snag, though. I was told by Dr Barrett that I would also be prescribed LHRH analogues, which would reduce my testosterone level. (Specifically, I was expecting Zoladex.) Because LHRH analogues trigger a testosterone spike in the first few weeks of usage, I was also going to be prescribed Androcur to cover me for that period. However, the letter they sent to my GP only mentioned the Progynova and nothing else other than a vitamin D supplement (as it's quite low).

I looked around and it seems to be safe to take the hormones without the Zoladex, and it'll still have an effect, so I'm starting on that now (2mg Estradiol valerate, once a day) and I'm going to call the GIC on Monday to find out what's up.

I'm going to be taking regular photographs of my body during all this. I suspect I'll post them to a filter like I did on LJ (which will crosspost to the same filter on LJ, so don't worry about that, LJ people - you won't be missing anything!), but I need to figure out whether I'll do that or not, first. I probably will.

Anyway, YAY AM FINALLY ON HORMONES. It's only taken, what, years. ;p

[posted to Dreamwidth only]

You may have noticed yesterday that this journal had been set to Deleted. If you went to the journal directly, or to the profile, you'd have seen the custom message I set up:

Blacking out this journal for 24 hours to raise awareness of SOPA (which is still a threat; see bit.ly/xQ3DGZ for why) and PIPA (which has always been a threat). See soph.livejournal.com for more information.

Fear not - nothing was lost. As the message says, I was blacking it out for a cause - raising awareness of SOPA and PIPA, which are both dangerous bills with the power to radically change the Internet for the worse.

I kept my LJ up for a few different reasons, which I outlined in a public post there. I didn't like posting to only one service, but I felt it important. My intention was to repost it on DW after the blackout, and this is what I'm doing with this post. (Which is not being crossposted because then people on LJ would see it twice.)

I'll make another post after this one regarding the current situation, which will be crossposted.

My LJ post during the blackout:

[this is a public post]

Today, I've blacked out my journal over at Dreamwidth for 24 hours in order to raise awareness of SOPA/PIPA, alongside many other websites, including Wikipedia.

Please note: SOPA is still a threat, despite the news reports recently that it was shelved indefinitely. (Lamar Smith plans to resume SOPA's markup in February.)

I'm only doing this on DW, for two reasons:

a) DW is now my primary home. Most people are watching me there, as far as I know, and keeping LJ up allows me to make posts like this one (which I'll repost to DW after the blackout);
b) LJ doesn't have any way to specify *why* a journal was 'deleted'. This would mean that people might worry about me.

Why am I doing this, even though I'm located in the UK and the bill is a US one? Because most of the sites I use on the Internet are based in the US.

( But Sophie, the bill only affects sites overseas! (Answer: No, it doesn't.) )

(TL;DR: A "site dedicated to theft of US property" is one located in the US and where the owner(s) have taken 'deliberate actions' to avoid confirming 'a high probability' of copyright infringement. The 'deliberate actions' are left undefined, as is what 'a high probability' means, and this is what makes the bill so dangerous.)

So what happens to a 'site dedicated to theft of US property'? Namely, a complete cutoff from anything that could provide financial support to that site - payment merchants such as PayPal or 2Checkout would be forced to deny payments to the site from its members/subscribers, and advertising networks would be forced to deny the site any ads.

Combine the unspecific nature of the bill with the financial cutoff penalty, and you have a perfect recipe for governmental censorship. And no, of course the government wouldn't use it to shut down YouTube, but they wouldn't need to. Services like YouTube simply cannot afford to fall foul of a law like this, and if the bill passed, it would give the government a *reason* to shut YouTube down. That's all they need, because with the threat of that hanging in the air, they could ask YouTube to do damn well anything and they'd have to comply. Blackmail, in other words.

I'll probably write more on this topic later, but for now, I hope I've given a good explanation of why this would be bad for the Internet as a whole, and why I've chosen to black out my journal for the day.

[edit 9:49pm GMT: For people in the UK, here's a petition on direct.gov calling on the UK government to condemn SOPA and PIPA: https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/26143 ]

I'm seeing reports from people on LJ that automatic payments have been turned on for them against their wishes. If you're on LJ, check your account status. You'll have an option to turn off automatic payments if it's somehow been enabled for the account.

It isn't happening for everybody, but this is important enough that I needed to say something about it.

I've been meaning for a while to do a post about Dreamwidth and the differences it has from LiveJournal, but for now I just want to point out that from now until the end of the year, you don't need an invite code to join! Just click to create an account and you'll be able to do so. :)

(This post is mainly being done for the people reading this on LiveJournal, but some already-existing dwenizens might find it helpful too!)

I just read a comment I posted on LJ in June 2008 about a certain topic which made me very angry. It still makes me angry when I look at it now, and I feel I need to talk about it. I'm going to put it under a cut as the stuff I want to talk about could be triggery for some people as it talks about strong transphobia, including rape and murder. Please be warned that I talk about these things in detail. (I also use strong language.)

( Trigger warning for rape and transphobia. )

In the last entry, I briefly mentioned how the website for the Transgender Day of Rememberance has some black-hat SEO links in its source. I haven't yet heard back from them in reply to the email I sent, but in the meantime I've done a bit of investigating.

Firstly - I've discovered no evidence so far that anything dangerous was added. I didn't think there would be, but you never know. (Of course, "no evidence so far" doesn't preclude the possibility that it exists, but I'm a bit more reassured by this.)

Secondly, I've discovered, by means of the Internet Archive, that the offending links were added to the site between April 18th 2010 and and May 17th 2010, so they've been there quite a while.

The site which was being linked is defunct, though I don't know how long this has been the case. (Presumably, when the links were added in mid-2010, they were active.) The text used to advertise the links refer to buying various Adobe products at cheap prices; I won't repeat the exact text here so as to avoid Google thinking that my journal is spam.

I mentioned in the last post that it was probable that the site was hijacked without the owner realising. I still believe this is the case - more so, actually, because the site is now defunct. While it obviously would be better for the links to have been removed in any case, the fact that they weren't implies that the owner wasn't aware that these links had been added in the first place.

I'm very glad about that, because I really didn't want to have to believe that the site owner was using black-hat SEO techniques on a site which was about remembering those who aren't with us - it would have been abusing the cause.

As it is, I still feel a little nervous about linking the site considering the owner apparently hasn't noticed the additions yet, but as I've so far found no evidence of danger, I'm going to do so anyway, because it's well worth looking at the site and as far as I can see, it's just invisible SEO links that were added.

So, take a look at the Transgender Day of Rememberance site and see for yourself about the number of people who have died because they were trans. It's sad to see. :(

Just so that everybody knows, I've been feeling very poorly over the last few days. I may not be able to do as much for a while.

So, I promised people on Twitter I would write a post about how my second GIC appointment went. If you want to remind yourself about how my first appointment went, here's the post I made about it. Like last time, snowfields accompanied me to the GIC, although this time he stayed in the waiting room.

The second appointment didn't go as planned. The main reason for this is that, as you'll have noticed in the post I just linked, my second appointment was meant to be on November 10th.

No, I didn't forget what date it was supposed to be on! But some miscommunication meant that I was under the impression the appointment had been moved to the 14th.

A few weeks ago, I had received a letter from the GIC with appointment details on them. Because of the proximity to the actual appointment date, and because I only knew about the appointment I had earlier booked, I had assumed it was a simple reminder letter. But it was different to how I expected it to be, because the appointment listed on it was on the 14th instead of the 10th.

Later on, I called the GIC about this. I first asked to confirm the appointment for the 14th, to make sure that was correct, which it was. I then asked why the appointment date had changed from the 10th to the 14th. The receptionist wasn't able to tell me why it might have happened, eventually concluding that it had probably been rescheduled because the person I would be seeing had no clinic on that day.

Of course, the reason she was unable to tell me why it had changed was because that particular appointment *hadn't* actually changed; it was a second appointment with no relation to the first. I had assumed that the letter meant that the date had changed, when it hadn't.

So, it turned out I had missed the appointment for the 10th to see the second psychiatrist (the first being Dr. Andrew Davies, as detailed in the other post). It turned out that *this* appointment was to see an endocrinologist about the results of the blood test that I'd had done last time (and which I see I failed to mention in the post - sorry!). Apparently there were some abnormalities in my blood test results and they wanted to ask questions about me and my family, and examine me physically.

It turned out that the blood test results showed that I had a higher level of FSH than is normal. Based on this (and possibly the physical examinations - I can't remember when they said this), it means that there's apparently a chance that I might actually not have XY chromosomes, but XXY chromosomes. To confirm this they wanted me to take more blood tests, and they also wanted to see other things from the blood test too, like my bone marrow density. They also wanted to retest my baselines - that is, the levels of hormones that I have. So, I went along to the hospital again to have more blood taken. This time they took about 10 (or so) blood sample bottles full - quite a lot!

With regard to the appointments... when I realised that I had missed the appointment on the 10th, it upset me a lot; I actually started crying right there at the GIC. It meant that there was no way I was going to get hormones that day (though Fated reminded me later that I was probably not going to get them anyway considering that they want to retake my baselines), but more importantly, I was worried because the GIC's policy for patients not attending the first and second assessments was to discharge back to the GP.

Thankfully, it didn't happen this way. I'm not entirely sure why - maybe they realised what the problem had been. In any case, because of the mixup, they offered to reschedule me for the next available appointment instead of rescheduling for six months down the line like they'd normally do.

So, the appointment that I was *supposed* to have on the 10th will now be in three weeks, on the 5th of December. In addition, I have another appointment with the endocrinologist in June.

And to end this on a good note, it occurred to me while writing this that if the blood test results come back within those three weeks, it's *possible* that I may be able to get hormones then. If I had attended the appointment on the 10th, I wouldn't have been able to get them until my next proper appointment (because they'd have wanted to retest baselines), which would almost certainly have been months in the future.

I do hope I can get hormones in three weeks, and ask about voice therapy.

So, it seems that for the last few days I've been losing mail in my Google Apps mail account. This is pretty much my fault, probably; I have a weird mail system setup. But I don't know how best to solve it.

Does anybody happen to know/be a Google Apps dev/admin and can put me in touch with them? This is something of an emergency for me (losing email is serious business for me) and I need to be able to fix it.