Zen Master: Blog

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 [email protected], 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 "[email protected]". 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.

Back in the 1700s, the Royal Navy could not yet afford Xerox copiers. The shore-based establishments could use printing presses when appropriate, for sending every ship three copies of their regulations or their secret code book as an example, but the ships themselves did not carry printing presses, either. This meant that, when some admiral decided that he needed 15 identical copies of some order to be sent out to his 15 captains, some poor Midshipman, respectfully referred to as a "snottie", had to manually write each copy.
Now, we are talking about youngsters who "had their letters" but didn't necessarily understand the deeper meaning of what they were writing out, and that meant that any time this was done, some unfortunate lieutenant with better things to do had to supervise/babysit/proofread their work. I don't remember if it was CS Forester's "Hornblower" series or Douglas Reeman's 'Alexander Kent' books or some other author, but one of them had a long episode that included exactly this evolution, with the lieutenant exclaiming at one point "Good God, sir! Would anyone outside of Bedlam say that?" to one of the kids.
I volunteer as an editor here on SoL as well as some other places, and I think of that scene just about every time I get asked to read a new manuscript.

On a related subject, a few weeks ago I had to kill some time at an airport but didn't want to deal with laptop, cables, connectivity, _secure_ connectivity, etc, etc, etc. I bought a pair of magazines and the latest Clive Cussler adventure. That's what the cover says, "The Tombs, a Fargo Adventure". Well, I don't know this Fargo guy, but I used to like Cussler's early work, so what the hell.
Frankly, I feel cheated out of whatever price I paid. With no respect intended to Mr. Cussler's unquestioned abilities as a writer, I don't believe that he wrote that book. The publisher obviously has expert proofreaders, as all sentences were complete, all words spelled right, etc, but it was in no way as engaging or believable as his early work. Something important has been lost, here. One wonders if he turned his early works over to a nephew and said "Here, you write the next ten. I'm going on vacation."

To tie these together, a couple of days ago I got asked (via the SoL editor's availability service) to proofread and edit a new author's first work. Now, I didn't expect much, but I'll try to be polite. When people first start out doing something new they aren't very sure of their skills, so you have to baby them some so they don't get discouraged. You learn to say "Perhaps this might be improved a little" instead of "What is this shit?".
This guy, however, already has a fun read. Yes, it's rough, he definitely needs a proofreader and then an editor and it's gonna be awhile before it gets published, but it's _already_ a better yarn than "The Tombs", and I told him that bluntly. I'd rather pay for his next book than for Mr. Cussler's next book.
Someday, there's going to be a Zombie/Survivor story come out from a new author, hopefully here on SoL, and I will suggest that anyone who likes that sort of thing try it on for size.

On the Swarm front, I am about a quarter of the way through the last chapter of Independent Command. However, I've learned my lesson. I'll have to re-release the current posted chapters as I had to make some changes dictated by the rest of the Swarm authors to make sure it fits with the rest of the Swarm stories, but I'm not sure I want to do that until the story is completely completed, if that makes sense.

-ZM