Author: Michael Lucas

Writer. Sysadmin. Owns this site.
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“PAM Mastery” tech reviewers wanted

My long-dreaded PAM book now exists as a complete first draft.

I’m sorry.

I’ve somehow persuaded Dag-Erling Smørgrav, author of OpenPAM, to do a technical review. DES knows PAM, to his eternal regret, but I really could use more people to review the manuscript before it hits print.

If you know PAM, and would be interested in pointing out my errors before the rest of the world gets a chance, drop me an email with the subject PAM review. Tell me your familiarity with PAM, so I know the context of your feedback.

I’d need any feedback by Monday, 8 August 2016. That’s about four weeks. Given that this book is longer than Tarsnap Mastery but shorter than DNSSEC Mastery, that should be enough time.

I should say, though: this is a book on PAM. It’s not on LDAP, or SSSD, or Kerberos. I cover several add-on PAM modules, but all in the context of illustrating and leveraging PAM.

With luck, the book will be available Septemberish.

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My BSDCan “OpenPAM & BSD” talk

My BSDCan 2016 talk on OpenPAM and BSD is now on YouTube.

The video comes straight from screen capture, which means it’s missing details like the green dot of the laser pointer.

Also, the audio only covers my voice. You don’t get all the audience interaction. Sadly, I forgot to repeat audience questions at the end, but you can figure most of them out based on my responses.

Also, I need to stop saying “um.” I really need to stop saying “um.”

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Why I refuse to join Kindle Unlimited

Lots of my self-pub writer friends urge me to sign on with Kindle Unlimited. They tell me I’ll make more money by making my books only available on Amazon.

They’re probably correct… in the short term.

But if you have only one customer, and only one sales channel, that sales channel can destroy yo without warning. And today, Amazon’s scam-fighting techniques are crushing authors guilty of only one thing: trusting Amazon as their sole customer.

Puzzled? It took me a while to figure out how this scam was working, too. And it’s driven home that signing on with Kindle Unlimited is like playing Russian roulette. Eventually, it will burn you.

Understanding why means understanding how Kindle Unlimited works.

An author places a book in Kindle Unlimited agrees that the title will be exclusive to Amazon. You won’t be able to get it on iBooks, Kobo, or sell it on your own store. Authors can place any fraction of their books in Kindle Unlimited.

Readers who sign on with Kindle Unlimited get unlimited access to books in KU for $10/month. Readers can try the service for free for 30 days.

Amazon sets aside a pot of money each month. This money is divided between KU authors each month, based on the number of pages of the author’s books people read. Amazon increases the pool each month, keeping the payout per page somewhat constant.

An author who violates KU’s terms of service gets their publishing account suspended. All of the books published with that account get yanked from sale, and any money Amazon hasn’t paid out is lost.

As a businessman, I have problems with Kindle Unlimited. The price you get paid has nothing to do with how many you “sell”–it’s entirely in Amazon’s control. They can change that at any time, and you have no recourse. The exclusivity clause means that readers who like Kobo or another ereader have no way to legally get your book.

Also as a businessman, Amazon offers little interaction with suppliers. Yes, I write books, but that’s with my author hat on. Once I take off the author hat and put my business hat on, I sell widgets. (Strictly speaking, I sell nothing: I license copyright. That’s a separate discussion, though.) If Amazon has a problem with me, they’ll shut me off with minimal explanation and not give me an opportunity to get back in compliance. They might offer a big publisher a chance to make whole, but not a little company like mine.

I’m a full time author. Yes, my wife works, but she’s not supporting me. Our goal is to be able to live on one person’s income, so that if something happens to one of us we will be okay. If I do not make enough money to realistically contribute to my family, then I need to get a job that does.

By that measure, I’m successful. (Thank you, loyal readers!)

An amount of money sufficient to support my family is small enough that Amazon does not care about me. My business is quite literally not worth an hour of an Amazon support rep’s time.

So: if I screw up, if I anger the 800-kilogram capybara that is Amazon, and Amazon is my sole customer…

I’m out of business. Kaput. Done. Finished.

Most one-person publishing businesses are smaller than mine. And Amazon cares even less about them. I don’t know if you can have negative caring, but if you can it’s in Amazon’s software.

Let’s go back to how Kindle Unlimited works. The rules are simple. The purpose of simple rules is to be abused. Anyone who knows anything about fraud, or anyone with a security background, can come up with half a dozen ways to scam Amazon out of a share of the profits.

Here’s a way that seems to be in play today.

  1. Start a “book-booster” service. The service automatically generates Amazon accounts and signs them up for the free 30-day Kindle Unlimited trial. It can also “read” the books. This can be built out of the same freely-available software used for building web sites.
  2. When an author buys the service for one of his books, the service checks out “reads” the book.
  3. Poof! The book climbs in the bestseller lists.
  4. The boosted ranking makes the book more visible. Perhaps some real humans will notice it.
  5. The author gets money from Amazon’s pool.

This is a clear violation of Amazon’s terms of service. If you get caught, the Amazon Capybara will eat you. You’re out of business.

Depending on how you ask, the current book-boosting algorithm is either naive, or takes advantage of Amazon’s ranking methods. It borrows the books all in one day. In reality, book sales are spread out and erratic, achieving averages only on a quarterly or even yearly basis.

It seems that when Amazon sees a book getting a one-day sales spike, from accounts that act in concert, it concludes that the author has hired a book-boosting service and closes the author’s account.

How do these book-boosting services attempt to hide their customers?

By also boosting Kindle Unlimited authors who have not hired the service. They’re attempting to make this seem like normal activity.

The catch is–again, Amazon does not care. To Amazon, authors are plentiful and of low value.

If Amazon sees this kind of boost on a KU author, they unilaterally close the publishing account. All books, including those not on Kindle Unlimited, are removed from sale.

And this is only one scam among many. Amazon crushes these scams with extreme prejudice. It isn’t looking to crush one-person publishers, but if a few low-value publishers like mine get caught up in scam-fighting software, that’s an acceptable loss.

There’s no way to know when one of these scam-fighting measures is about to hit you. Amazon’s decision-making processes are opaque.

Now, let’s look at life without Kindle Unlimited.

As a publisher who uses Amazon as one of many sales channels: Amazon is about half my income. Losing them would suck.

If I signed on with Kindle Unlimited, I would probably get enough additional reads to more than compensate for the loss of Kobo, iBooks, and so on. But then I’m completely and utterly at Amazon’s mercy.

I’m playing the long game. No, not a year-long game, or a five-year game. Try twenty years, a hundred years.

My ultimate goal is to guide readers directly to my site for everything, providing a disintermediated revenue stream for myself and my heirs. I want to transform Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, and all the other bookstores into billboards that pay me. That directly conflicts with using Kindle Unlimited.

Where do you want to be in twenty years?

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FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS (Version canadienne)

I’ve wondered for a while what to do about Allan Jude.

Allan is my co-author on FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS and FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS. I could have written those books on my own, but they wouldn’t have been nearly as good.

We have had one major disagreement, though: is it pronounced zee-F-S or zed-F-S? This has proven an intractable problem.

I’ve come up with a solution, though.

FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZedFS – Canadian Version.

fmaz-canadian

Here’s the front text.

This book exists because Allan Jude is too generous for his own good.

Alan has aided my efforts to become a professional writer in ways that can never really be paid back. They can only be paid forward.

The only real disagreement we had while writing this book was on the pronunciation of ZFS. Is it zeeFS, or zedFS? This special edition of FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZedFS exists as a physical token of my appreciation.

What makes this book different from the regular edition?

First, the special Canadian cover.

The text is modified to be more palatable for Canadian readers.

This edition contains a footnote that does not appear in the standard edition.

And last, this edition has not been proofread or copyedited.

Thanks, Alan, for everything.

Michael W Lucas
24 May 2016

The catch is: it’s only available in print.

Only five of them exist. (The electronic originals have been destroyed, so I couldn’t exactly reproduce this if I wanted to.)

I have one.

Allan has three. (There’s a YouTube video of part of the presentation.)

One, and only one, will be on sale.

The only place to get it is at the BSDCan charity auction, benefiting the Ottawa Mission.

BSDCan attendees, this is your one and only one chance to get a copy of this exotic, rare object.

Ask Alan or myself for a peek at it.

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Getting Ahead of Blackmail

Here’s the interesting things about blackmail: it only works if the victim permits himself to be embarrassed. A victim who is willing to release everything renders himself invulnerable to such threats.

People have wondered how I make a living as a writer. It all depends on how you sell your product.

dealing1

dealing 2

dealing 3

_DWM4286_3_DxO

dealing 6

dealing 7

dealing 8

dealing 9

Sorry, David. You’ll have to buy your books like everyone else. Meet me in the alley if you’re still interested.

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Two new stories and a novella

In May, I started slogging through my backlog of fiction to be published. I’m happy to announce two new stories and a novella. Click on the cover images for more details on each.

Forced to Talk ebook coverFirst, I finally leveraged my technology experience into my fiction. The result is, of course, a DevOps murder mystery story. I can’t say that Forced to Talk, Like, With Your Mouth is based on folks I know. But I can say that I know folks an awful lot like these folks.

Moonlight's ApplesThe story Moonlight’s Apples brings us Tough Biker Dude versus the Fairy Queen, in southwest Ontario. It’s not like any modern fairy tale you’ve read before.

Finally, I have a confession to make…

I’ve written a romance novella. With explosions, of course.

earthquake kitten kiss cover B

Earthquake Kitten Kiss is a spin-off from Butterfly Stomp Waltz, starring the most unlikely romance heroine ever, Liza Bradley.

In other fiction news: I tried to write a Montague Portal short story. It turned into a novella, and then grew into a novel. Hydrogen Sleets should be finished this month, and available August-ish. Then I finish another novel, git commit murder, and proceed to the next Butterfly book, Terrapin Sky Tango. After that it’s Immortal Clay book 3, tentatively titled Bones Like Water.

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Reality check for “PAM Mastery.”

Two blog posts in one day, after a few weeks of silence? It happens. Weirder still, there will be another tomorrow. I’m asking for help from my tech book readers here.

Some things are such an integral part of my life that I can’t imagine others are unfamiliar with them. I’m considering using one of them for “PAM Mastery,” but I must consider that perhaps not everyone understands it. I don’t want to say what particular part of my life I’m talking about, as that would invalidate the test here.

So, with the following text, do you:

1) get the reference
2) if you do NOT get the reference, do you understand it anyway?

A chain of PAM controls don’t resemble the strict allow/deny syntax you’ll find in applications like packet filters, web servers, and other Access Control Lists. They’re more like a long-standing committee in a centuries-old educational institution steeped in tradition and ritual, where each member has an unusual name, baroque responsibilities, and unusual privileges.

This committee votes on authentication in a specified, stately order. Each member has specific ways they can vote. Perhaps the Archchancellor starts the vote, and can either say “yes” or reject the whole proposal before anyone else gets a chance. The Dean can vote “no comment” or “no,” but doesn’t actually get to vote in favor of anything. The Senior Wrangler can vote either “no” or “yes, so long as nobody else objects.” If voting reaches as far as the Lecturer in Recent Runes he can either stay silent or declare, “yes, dang it, and the vote’s over, I win!”

Meanwhile, the Librarian has a seat at the table but can only take notes.

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BSDCan Intro Session Volunteers Wanted

A person’s first visit to a particular tech con can be overwhelming. BSDCan is now having an introductory session for new attendees, to try to ease them into the event. Somehow, I’m running it.

From 6-9 PM on Thursday night I’ll be in DMS 1160 to greet new BSDCan attendees and discuss how the conference runs with folks new to BSDCan.

I would really like someone from each of the BSD projects to help me ease new attendees into the con. Ideally I’d be able to say “Oh, you want FreeBSD? Let me introduce you to Fred, he’s a FreeBSD guy,” or OpenBSD, or whatever project they’re interested in.

This will be pretty informal. I plan to order carryout and hang out.

The event concludes at 9 PM, leaving time for a gelato run, of course.

In my mind, new attendees need to know about:

  • breakfast and lunch
  • harassment policy (Abusing other convention goers will really tick me off. And I’m on the BSDCan committee, so I take that seriously.)
  • Opening and closing sessions
  • The closing auction
  • Presumably, they’ve read the talks schedule before registering–but if not, we’ll have it.
  • BSDA testing–they’re probably not prepared to take it, but maybe next year?
  • evening open events, like the Royal Oak, the Hacker Lounge, and the FreeBSD Doc Sprint

Can you think of anything else I should add to this list?

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Books for “FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS” print sponsors

I return from my literary forced death march writing class in Oregon to find this.

IMAG0374

Which I have partially transformed into gifts for the folks who were kind enough to sponsor FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS.

IMAG0375

I’m heading for the post office now, to relieve myself of the responsibility for these.

Mind you, one of these gets delivered to Perry, Michigan, about a 90 minute drive away. It did occur to me to drive up there and hand-deliver the book. But that a) is stalkery, and b) uses up time I need to finish preparing for the Lucas track at Penguicon this weekend.