The February issue just hit the wire, with Mavenage so fresh it's still steaming. As always, if we've got anything wrong with your subscription details, please zap us with the Zap Form. Enjoy!
(Oh, and hey: you should have also received the January issue on the 31st. Managed to not announce that ... sorry!)
3 January 2007: Internet Advisory regarding PDFs
We've just been made aware of a troubling problem with the Adobe Acrobat browser plug-in, which we recommended for use with Speculations during the time we were publishing in PDF format. Under many circumstances, execution of arbitrary JavaScript is trivially simple from a third-party link. Here's an example:
Test PDF
If you see a JavaScript alert box showing your GeoCities cookie after clicking this link (which will show a PDF documenting this bug) your system is vulnerable.
Recommendations:
If your system is vulnerable, please update Acrobat Reader and your Web browser as soon as possible. Currently there's no guarantee that this will fix the problem; we'll keep you posted when this changes.
If you have any PDFs on your site, either remove them or rename them with a different extension and advise your readers to save them, rename them back to .PDF, and run them locally.
When clicking links to PDFs, check to make sure there's no #-sign anywhere in the URL. Anything after the # is suspect.
Be suspicious of PDF links from third-party sites or (especially) e-mails. Watch for that #-sign in the status bar as you hover over the link; if you can't see the entire URL, view the source of the document and look for it. (True always on the Web: if you have trouble viewing or understanding the source, you're probably not going to want to click the link.)
Protect your cookies, by being careful about your login state. Re-examine any decision you may have made to stay logged in after exiting any site; if you happen to get caught in a trap like this one, anything visible in your cookies (potentially your login and password, depending on how careful your site operator is being) will be visible to your attacker.
As always, be very, very careful about choices of logins and passwords. Don't be lazy and use the same login and/or password for a Web site that you use for your e-mail. (Hopefully this goes without saying, but you never know.) If you're using the same login or password for an exploited Web site that you use for your e-mail, it's all over.
29 December 2006: Incoming
The December issue is heading your way; we should have November's feature article, "Incremental Backups and Version Control for Writers," online shortly. As always, please let us know if we've got anything wrong with your subscriber data. (If you're not a subscriber, why not become one now?)
31 October 2006: Ye Development Log
Hi, folks. If you've been away for a while, here's what's been wiggling around lately:
Feedback: The importance of feedback and community contribution has been brought front-and-center. Everyone still has the ability to submit positive feedback, but if your login hasn't been active long enough or your total feedback score drops below a certain threshold, you won't be able to submit negative feedback.
Plonk: After much soul-searching, I've instituted a Plonk function, so that when courteous discourse and feedback fails, you may ignore posts by the authors of your choice. To do this, sign in, go the author's home topic and click "Ignore This Author." To undo, sign in, go to your author page, click Change Your Preferences, and choose from the list of authors you've ignored. (Yes, the point that this may subvert Feedback to the point where it doesn't work for anonymous readers any more has been raised; I'm keeping a careful eye on that.)
Truncation: Posts by authors whose community feedback places them at the extreme lower end of the range may be truncated for length. Nothing's been deleted; signed-in users may view these posts in their entirety.
Jumping Search Box Bug, Fixed: The search box has moved up top to a header bar, and has added several interesting new features. Hopefully it won't jump around and cause readers to inadvertently click Sign Out any more.
Questions about these or suggestions for further improvement are welcome; please come visit The Future Of The Rumor Mill to discuss.
21 September 2006: Now We Are Ten
Yesterday (or the 20th, depending on which WHOIS you're looking at) marked the tenth anniversary of speculations.com. The Speculations site actually predates speculations.com by a little bit; we were online at sff.net for awhile before scoring our own domain, and I had a half-fast bulletin board (multiple instances of the guestbook from Matt's Script Archive, whee!) running in Perl on my employer's bandwidth and sneaking in via an IP address.
So far we've weathered spammers, bots, flamers, lamers, and trolls, taken Speculations from a paper bimonthly with a circulation under 100 to an online community with about a half-million messages, and seen a hell of a lot of work published by our readers. I think we've done pretty well, all things considered. :)
21 June 2006: on Net Neutrality
Not strictly writing-related, mind you, but if you've a mind to preserve the business model that allowed Speculations to stay alive online, please consider supporting the Net Neutrality initiatives. iMedia Connection has some good background, as does InfoWorld and Online Media Daily.
In case you've been living under a rock, US lawmakers are being heavily lobbied by last-mile Internet providers--phone companies and cable TV outfits--to allow them to grant "premium" access to the publishers of their choice, meaning that their offerings would show up faster over your connection, and those without premium access--mom-and-pop businesses, indy bloggers, and, oh, yeah, Speculations--would come up slowly, if at all. Premium access could be granted or revoked by any ISP to any publisher for any reason; money and politics come leaping to mind as candidates one and two.
I'm especially concerned by the apparent willingness of the ISPs to participate in setting up the mechanisms that will censor the Internet quite effectively, next time our government decides that a certain event needs to go unnoticed until they have a chance to spin it properly.
Quite a bit more is online at savetheinternet.com, and it would be entirely appropriate to discuss these matters under Internet Alerts. This slope is very, very slippery; please do what you can to prevent our government from taking the first step down.
16 May 2006: Be Careful Out There
It seems to happen every year: rain falls, flowers bloom, bees buzz ... and scammers crawl out of the woodwork. Lately we're seeing lots of interesting chat around American Book Publishers, Harris Literary Agency, and XLibris down in Caveat Scrivener. Good stuff offsite includes SFWA's 20 Worst Literary Agencies, Writer Beware, Teresa Neilsen Hayden's Making Light, and (of course!) Preditors & Editors.
We'd like to help spread the word about Writer Beware's list of the twenty worst literary agencies:
* The Abacus Group Literary Agency
* Allred and Allred Literary Agents (refers clients to "book doctor" Victor West of Pacific Literary Services)
* Barbara Bauer Literary Agency (see this, that, and the other thing)
* Benedict Associates (also d/b/a B.A. Literary Agency)
* Sherwood Broome, Inc.
* Capital Literary Agency (formerly American Literary Agents of Washington, Inc.)
* Desert Rose Literary Agency
* Arthur Fleming Associates
* Finesse Literary Agency (Karen Carr)
* Brock Gannon Literary Agency
* Harris Literary Agency
* The Literary Agency Group, which includes the following:
-Children's Literary Agency
-Christian Literary Agency
-New York Literary Agency
-Poets Literary Agency
-The Screenplay Agency
-Stylus Literary Agency (formerly ST Literary Agency, formerly Sydra-Techniques)
-Writers Literary & Publishing Services Company (the editing arm of the above-mentioned agencies)
* Martin-McLean Literary Associates
* Mocknick Productions Literary Agency, Inc.
* B.K. Nelson, Inc.
* The Robins Agency (Cris Robins)
* Michele Rooney Literary Agency (also d/b/a Creative Literary Agency, Simply Nonfiction, and Michele Glance Rooney Literary Agency)
* Southeast Literary Agency
* Mark Sullivan Associates
* West Coast Literary Associates (also d/b/a California Literary Services)
If you've got a Web site, please consider putting in a link to The Twenty Worst Literary Agencies. And be careful out there, and remember Yog's Law: money flows towards the writer!