Zen Master: Blog

So, okay, neither one is exactly short, but compared to most of my other work they are practically flashes. BOGO is about, well, a good BOGO deal I picked up. Shauna, on the other hand, is all about realizing that my neighbor wasn't exactly quite right, and I could benefit from that.
Neither story is what I'm spostabe working on, but I was out in the middle of nowhere for a couple of weeks (actually, working on the family farm described in "Johnny's Girls") with no TV, no cell coverage, and no Internet access, and those were the things my muse insisted on working on so I finished them just so I could get back to what I was spostabe doing....

-ZM

I've had this email address for a long time. I don't want to change it. However, it no longer works for everything. For the last couple of years, several of the biggest email hosts (Yahoo, Gmail, MS, etc) have been working on a solution for spam and phishing. They have developed one named DMARC that they claim can do what they want.
It allows Yahoo, for instance, to tell a receiver if this email from Nez_Retsam@Yahoo.com, for instance, really came from him (well, actually from Yahoo). The receiver can take the answer (yes or no) and make a decision. Further, the host can publish "policies" in the DNS that tell the receiver what the host thinks that the receiver should do with emails that fail, like 'trust' or 'monitor'.
Last weekend, about 10 days ago, Yahoo decided that no one except them mattered, and the published a policy that said "If email claiming to be from Yahoo fails DMARC you should reject it."
Now, that simple policy statement broke EVERY SINGLE FUCKING MAIL LIST SYSTEM IN THE WHOLE UNIVERSE. See, if I post an email (using my Yahoo address) to my church's mailing list saying "My iron broke; does anyone have one I can borrow?", the list will turn around and send it to everyone else on the church's email list so that I can hear from people who no longer iron, right? And, it shows up in everyone's in-box as an email from me because that's what email lists do, they redistribute email giving receivers a choice between "reply to sender" and "reply to list".
Now, since April 5th anyone with email hosted by Yahoo, Google/Gmail, MS/Hotmail, LinkedIn, ComCast, and a few other large email providers will check with Yahoo and be told that no, that email did NOT come from me (or Yahoo), and they don't know where it came from. Oh, yeah, you should reject that spam. So 60% of the world's email providers all bouncing emails back to your church's small mail-list will cause it to become blacklisted immediately as a spam-spewer eve if it doesn't crash from all the bounces.
That "innocent protective policy" broke every mailing list in the world. It even broke the IETF's main discussion list, because, you know, some of those engineers use Yahoo for this non-paying volunteer work. When their email managers finally got that figured out, their emergency suggestion to list operators everywhere was to "block anyone with a Yahoo address from posting until Yahoo fixes that".
Now, surely Yahoo will realize this was a mistake, right? I've been waiting for them to rescind that policy, but now Yahoo has finally published a clarifying letter on their own site. It basically says "We're doing this to control spam. Fuck anyone who uses email lists". And, I'm pretty active in a couple of email lists.
So, I'm moving to "ZM@TampaAD.net". I'll keep the Yahoo address for now, but as I get things moved over I'll check it less and less until I forget about it. If you want to contact me and don't want to see how often I check something broken, please use the new one.

Well, the title pretty much says everything I might put here. The proofreaders are done, I have fixed many of the issues they raised, we took a couple to the authors' list and got resolutions. It's time!

One of the guys I asked to look at IC was someone who had never read any of the Swarm Cycle stories. I thought that this might help make it more "mainstream", as I realized that it was written for Swarm fans, people who already knew all about what a Sponsor or a Hero was. Once he gets back to me with all of his "What does this mean" questions we should be done. The first thing to be posted should be the Glossary of Terms file, but that's the part that keeps changing as we realize the reader doesn't know an HEZ from an ECR and needs a translator.
-ZM

Independent Command is finally complete, and it has been sent to the wolves to be ripped apart, uh, has been offered to the Swarm Authors' Mail List for proofreading. Some of the last parts are still subject to argument, but I should have it back soon with edits. I'm publishing anyway if they dawdle. The first few parts have already been accepted by a jury of my peers, so I'm going to start re-posting them, one part per day (after the overhead stuff) so they have plenty of time to tell me where I went wrong if they want.