Jason Pearce

Translation: My favorite restaurant in all of Indiana closed.

German restaurant in Zionsville closes

Gisela’s Kaffeekranzchen, a German restaurant at 112 S. Main St. in Zionsville, has closed, according to the Indy Ethnic Food newsletter. No one could be reached at the restaurant. — Indianapolis Star

This German restaurant resided in an attic in downtown Zionsville, a quaint town 10 minutes northwest of Indianapolis. The place had maybe 10 tables, a kitchen that resided in its own little hut (with fake roof), and exposed rafters. The mother waited on everyone while the son cooked.

The food was good, but the location, atmosphere, and German family is what won me over years ago; and now they are gone, beendet, nicht mehr.

So if Gisela’s was my favorite restaurant in Indiana, what’s my favorite restaurant in all of the world? Easy. It’s the Olde Hansa Restaurant in downtown Tallinn, Estonia (food | restaurant).

Phishing is a type of deception designed to steal your identity by convincing you to provide it under false pretenses. Phishing schemes appear to come from popular websites you trust. In this case, the message came from Symantec.

From: Symantec Corporation [mailto:symantecd@ecmailing.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 5:06 PM
To: Pearce, Jason
Subject: Technology Seminar in Indianapolis on March 15 - Register Today

The body of the email was promoting an upcoming conference. It included a Register Now link, which took you to a veritas.com URL (a subsidiary of Symantec) but a Symantec logo and design. The site collected personal information and was not secure.

Additional indicators that the email might be a phishing attempt include:

1. Images resided on veritas.com
2. Most links went to veritas.com
3. The body of the email said to contact webmaster@symantec.com for questions
4. The email was from “Symantec Corporation symantecd@ecmailing.com”
5. www.ecmailing.com does not bring up a website
6. www.ecmailing.com is registered to a company called Creative Automation
7. Creative Automation’s email and domain servers don’t even use or reference ecmailing.com

Though I was aware Veritas and Symantec are the same companies, I suspect some might not be aware. But I don’t know who Creative Automation or ecmailing.com are, and don’t trust them. Frankly, there were too many indicators that this was a phishing attempt, I had to ask.

So I sent an email to webmaster@symantec.com asking if the email was legit or not. In two hours they replied and said it was. But when I asked them how I was to know that an email from Symantec or Veritas is a valid email when it doesn’t come from either @symatec.com or @veritas.com domains, they’ve offered no reply.

You’d think that a company that launched it’s Symantec Internet Threat Meter wouldn’t send an email that resembles many phishing characteristics on the very same day. Perhaps Symantec should read its own Online Fraud: Phishing advice.

What does the Creative Commons “NonCommercial” license mean? It seems I’m not the only one confused.

Pictured here is the ceiling of a Washington, DC subway/metro station. I took this photo last year while traveling on business. The photo resides within Flickr and is enjoying an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence.

This week, many Flickr photographers received an email from Schmap, a start-up that will soon offer destination guides. Schmap’s email stated my photo was short-listed for inclusion in an upcoming guide, and gave me an option to submit or withdraw my photo from their final selection phase.

So they were nice enough to ask. They didn’t have to ask, since my photo has a Creative Commons license — or did they?

The question at hand is, “Is Schmap considered commercial or noncommercial?” Well, they don’t even know.

Their website said, “The creative commons license that you’ve assigned your photo(s) provides for non-commerical use. While all of our Schmap destination guides will be FREE to download, some photographers might nevertheless consider these to be commercial (advertising revenue will support free distribution to our readers).” And then some Terms of Submission followed.

Since they didn’t know, Schmap decided to play it safe by treating my image more like it was protected by copyright and that I was agreeing to a new terms of use by granting them certain permissions.

Three out of Creative Commons’ six licenses restrict the licensed content from commerical use, which reads “Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.”

Creative Commons fails to better define what Commercial means. Does it mean people pay for a content or service directly? What if the content or service is subsidized through advertising? And how about nonprofits, are they commerical entities or not?

I don’t know these answers and perhaps neither does Schmap, which is why they asked.