Archive for July, 2006
Bittersweet Chocolate Marquise with Cherry Sauce
Posted by Extremulus in Food on July 24, 2006
After getting off to a slow start, here is my first entry in the food category of the new blog here. Some folks might find some value in this, but one of my primary motivations for creating this is to track where I’ve been, how well it worked, and improvements I might make.
I was entertaining for my wife and a friend last night (rfb) and decided to make this dessert recipe on a hot summer day. We had summer favourites like shish-kabob’s and some homemade macaroni salad as well. It was all good, we finished up, rested and it was time to try out the cake(?).
Preparation: This recipe basically results in a mousse like chocolate loaf. The recipe recommends using a loaf pan, buttering it well, and then lining it with “smooth aluminum foil”. This worked, and it didn’t… Being that you need to refridgerate this for 4 or more hours, the butter solidifies, making it near impossible to remove from the loaf pan. It’s also very dificult to get the foil smooth enough to create a visually appealing result. I think that the foil isn’t a bad idea, but I would use something that wouldn’t harden quite as much next time I do it (Spray oil?) Ideally you could use a silicone or non-stick loaf pan and avoid both the lubricant and the foil.
Taste and Presentation: It was wonderful. Not too sweet, and nice and cold on a hot summer evening. The cherry sauce pushes it over the top! I would consider putting in a bit more kirsche in the sauce, but it was really great exactly as written. Even after sitting out it didn’t melt, and seems to taste just as fresh the day after. After the tough time I had removing it from the pan, the loaf didnt look perfect, but once cut and served it looked very appetizing.
I will make this again, and recommend it as an excellent end to a summer meal.
China, Spam, SPF, and Freedom to mail
Posted by Extremulus in Tech on July 24, 2006
Hello Friends,
This weekend, I was reading through the copious list of emails I subscribe to when I stumbled upon an article at ARS Technica concerning China’s recently passed law requiring e-mail servers to have a license. When considered in the context of an authoritarian regime, it’s a bit chilling. Spending more time thinking about it though, and doing that thing I do at work (Internet crime fighter!) it started to look like not such a bad idea…
The whole spam problem comes down to a few inherent design problems:
- E-mail protocols were designed at a time when the number of machines on the Internet could be counted with fewer than 3 digits.
- Only universities and research institutions were online; you didn’t need to confirm the sender’s identity (and when someone forged a message it was for entertainment purposes and considered a great prank).
- The volume of mail was low, filtering was unnecessary, and individuals who abused the system were either booted off, or made into pariahs.
- DNS cannot be used reliably to determine anything. It can only passably be argued that it does forward lookups properly.
Which all leads to my dilemma: licensing of email servers is a very interesting idea when not used for the wrong reasons. The most useful way of determining the legitimacy of an email today is the reputation of the sending organization/mailer/person. But there is no reliable mechanism to determine this, and no way for your reputation to follow you. Today it is accomplished by using IP addresses, which invariably leads to more mistaken identity, rather than truly securing email traffic. IPs change and organizations are compromised, resulting in their IP addresses appearing to be bad (Stolen Identity anyone?), not to mention IPs are very easily forged.
Technologies like SPF are interesting, but there is still no way to actually hold the owners of the domains using SPF responsible for their abuse of the system. Any spammer worth his salt can publish a valid SPF record without allowing you to know who they are… And so they abuse it, and you decide that domain is not reputable and they buy another domain and publish another valid SPF record to hit you again. It’s cheap, fast, and easy.
So, you might say, why trust a domain with no reputation? Well as of July 21st, 2006 there are 72,680,308 registered domains (http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/) that are valid. Do you want to miss out on email from ~70 million domains because you haven’t seen them?
Licensing domains when the purpose is censorship and control is wrong. There is no doubt that if we implemented something similar, the politicians would warp it into a scheme that none of us would like… But it does stimulate some neurons in my brain that suggest, that as a world community we might begin to find ways to tame the wild wild web.