Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 15

30: The Expected Heat Death of the Universe

Grinding hard on Run Your Own Mail Server.

Modern DKIM uses 2048-bit keys. With current mathematical understanding, they are not brute-force breakable before the expected heat death of the universe. Modern cryptographic algorithms don’t fall to brute force, however. Mathematicians nibble at them, discovering weak point after weak point until, eventually, someone figures out how to break them in a reasonable time. Computer speed might not be accelerating the way it did a couple decades ago, but p...

Terry Pratchett Discworld Bundle vs DRM

Terry Pratchett was one of the most brilliant writers of the last hundred years. I own everything he ever published, in print, a worthy investment of several feet of precious shelf space. Tattered SFBC hardcovers from the 1980s with feebly-glued pages covered in faded dust jackets, battered paperbacks smuggled from Canada, spiffy hardcovers from when the world realized his work was amazing. I have it all. (If you’ve never read Pratchett, Wikipedia has a handy flowchart to help you decide where t...

29: I Find Your Lack of DMARC Disturbing

This book is going to get me hate mail from DMARC advocates, but otherwise I would get hate mail from users. Users win.

If you don’t publish DMARC records, spam detection systems evaluating your messages will say, “I find your lack of DMARC disturbing.” That increases the odds of your messages plunging into the spam folder. But what should you do about reporting, mailing lists, and so on?

If you are running a mail server truly for yourself and you don’t use mailing lists, or if you know none of ...

Blog Archive

For a few years now, I’ve wanted a date/title index for my blog. I searched for a plugin to do that easily and simply, and couldn’t find one. I hired an earnest flunky to do so. He couldn’t find one either. I decided to live with the current situation, and stop wasting my time searching for a tool. But every so often, I’d search again anyway. Find nothing. Remind myself to stop wasting time.

A couple days ago, one such search turned up Simple Yearly Archive. Which is on release 2.2, and has been...

December’s Defiant Sausage

This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of December, and the public at the beginning of January.

The longer I run this thing, the more I regret calling a buck a month “See the Sausage Being Made.” Because it inevitably gets shortened to “sausage,” and that leads nowhere good.

Similarly, I shouldn’t have named that one level “Video Chat.” Obviously, it should have been named “Meet the Rats.”

And my web store should never have used the word “chapbooks.” That’s technically correct, but nobod...

2023 Income Sources

Here’s where my income came from in 2023. (For newcomers, I’ve done these posts for the last few years.)

I’m a writer. My income comes from writing books and making them available. I publish both independently and through publishers. I don’t consult. I don’t seek out speaking fees. I desire to make my living as an author, creating and licensing intellectual property. I make my books available in every channel that offers reasonable terms.

Whenever I share actual dollar figures, people inform me...

28: A Griddle Big as the Sky

Declaring the existence of something is a way to make me finish them. Here’s a chunk from the Giant Unnamed Fiction Project.

Weirder, Liberty could see Monterey’s face. Not much. But more than he had all night. A pallid glow from the east outlined Monterey’s angular chin and sharp nose. Distinct shadows filled his deep-set eyes.

A blotch of light marred the eastern sky.

Curiosity tugged Liberty to his feet.

The blotch cast a halo of shooting stars, radiating in all directions.

“Do you hear that...

27: Obviously Forged

Here’s another chunk from Run Your Own Mail Server.

Ideally, sysadmins want all the messages from their domain to conform to the highest possible standards. They intend to sign everything with DKIM, and publish SPF records that contain every host that might possibly send mail. Anything that doesn’t have perfect alignment is obviously forged and should be unilaterally discarded. Anyone who’s worked in computing more than a week understands that they missed something, though. Some critical system ...

26: It Can, But Doesn’t

Still hammering on Run Your Own Mail Server.

If you’ve worked with signing protocols like OpenPGP, you’re familiar with digital signatures. You take a chunk of data and sign it. Any alteration to the file invalidates the signature. You might be expecting DKIM to work the same way. It can, but doesn’t.

Traditional mail software has been free to rearrange messages if the programmer thought it necessary or correct. This might include adding or rearranging headers, substituting one kind of whitespac...

25: Shoes with Wheels on the Heels

Here’s a snippet from this month’s FreeBSD Journal Letters column.

System administration in a modern enterprise is like performing an oil change on a vehicle doing a hundred and twenty down the freeway. 120 miles an hour, or kilometers, you might ask? When you’re lying on your back on one of those oversized mechanic’s skateboards, clenching the oil wrench in your teeth and wishing you’d worn shoes with wheels on the heels so you wouldn’t have to work quite so hard holding your legs up, it doesn’...