I use it with Thunderbird, and DavDroid (now DavX) to handle all my events and contacts (SMS contacts even show up correctly in Hangouts on Android phones)
I realize GCal is rarely ever down, but they do harvest all your data to sell you shit.
Here's a basic Dockerfile for Radicale if you want to try it out:
https://github.com/sumdog/bee2/tree/master/dockerfiles/Radic...
But it does mean that you can't take any individual employee's word about what they are doing today. Individuals change. Managers change. People come and go. A fundamental part of the company mythos is that you as an individual know more about what goes on in the company than you really do. So unless you are acting in an official capacity to speak for the gmail and calendar teams, you should hush.
If the letter of their agreements permits GOOG to use your data for <X> purpose, then as a user of the service you should assume that they are.
Plenty of other tech companies have lied, changed their policies, or just plain screwed up. Privacy and security are hard, and everybody has their hands out. As a consumer, there's no way for me to verify anything.
As Woz said (sort of), "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window." When I make a backup to an external FW disk on my desk, or sync my phone with my computer over a USB cable, I know exactly what data is going where. The whole point of The Cloud being a cloud is that we don't know what's happening in it. It's inherent to the architecture. "Trust but verify" minus the "verify".
[1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
About 2yrs ago I booked a flight to my relatives for a Christmas trip and pasted the info into my Google calendar. Within hours, I got google calendar notices about not having confirmed my hotel reservation. It was VERY annoying as it was borderline deceptive, presented as if I'd already gone through the whole reservation process but failed to confirm.
It was definitely a Google notice, and a Google confirmation process when I clicked through to confirm if I wanted this service. I shut it off as best I could find and told them I wanted no part of any such deceptive marketing, even though I would perhaps have wanted a service that made it clear that I was being offered an option, not a fake reminder.
I saw nothing of it since, but then I'd shut it off, so I should have no data. So, it seems that Google has siloed projects that not all employees know about...
I synchronize my information between Thunderbird (Windows), Android (DavX and GMail app) and of course, they provide a nice web interface (Horde)
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder :)
That's why I created EteSync[1] a secure, end-to-end encrypted, and privacy respecting sync solution that seamlessly integrates with existing apps and feels just like a Google account.
And I'm not surprised, since actually reporting it as down has a lot of political blowback (not to mention contract blowback) within the company.
Not that this can't have been an obvious reason (deleting all the servers in a datacenter or similarly trivial but severe) but it's likely impossible to ensure status page accuracy.
https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=cc...
> We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Calendar. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are unable to access Google Calendar.
> ©2019 Google - Last updated: June 18, 2019 at 3:12:13 PM UTC+1
Looks like it was last updated before the outage.
(Please introduce more meaningful error messages, Google)
Previous one was only 15 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077421
My opinion is worth nothing but Google feels like a crumbling cookie now.. it used to be a cool addition to one's life.
Nothing but anecdote, but a lot of my friends at Facebook and Google are eyeing the exits.
They’ve made good money and can afford to go somewhere better aligned with their values. They’re also each remarkably talented.
These outages may be a reflection of that exodus. (Counterfactual: we started our careers at the same time and are nearing a natural switching point simultaneously.)
Hint: companies at Google's scale do not have a single point of failure where employees slowly trickling in or out can impact their infrastructure in this way. You would see many more failures in this case. The tenure for the average employee is ~2 years.
Google calendar sort of requires your personal data to function (just like gmail).
Each took about a day to write, and is customized exactly the way I like it; if I need a shortcut key, a weird little feature, etc. I can do it. I'm kind of an optimization / performance nut too, so they all run uber-fast, no perceptible delay from click to page / screen loaded (Sqlite is great for these kinds of things). Data is totally private and under your control. It's really nice.
However, calendar was complicated enough that I just use Google's. Might be time to rethink..
Also, Sqlite is a database engine to be seriously reckoned with if you know how to run a few magic PRAGMAs on your initial connection. I am still in awe of what can be achieved in terms of throughput and latency by a single connection on a WAL-journaled Sqlite db. If you don't need your app or service to scale beyond a single process per logical deployment, I cannot see any justification for using another engine.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and I try not to think about how fragile it all really is all the time.
I thought google can do better.
Not Found
Error 404
About 1 in 15 times I'm managing to load it at the moment.
Looks like some instances are live; but capacity is evidently a fraction of what it should be.
Probably a lot of users are trying to refresh calendar right now (which will probably hit the calendar service).
If they put ddos protection in front of it, it won't hit the calendar service but the ddos-protection-service.
My guess is that something bad has happened centrally, which tripped the security heuristics as an unexpected event at a very high level. It then elevated the security for a very large number of users.
I'm sure they are fine, this product is not a personal page with guestbook for your 20 friends and gifs on shared hosting plan.