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:
I used to work at Google. Its a big company, composed of almost 10^5 employees today. In my experience, they can be trusted to adhere to the letter of their agreements; no more and no less. That's not as bad as it might sound. Plenty of companies consider their contracts to be far more mutable than Google did while I was there.
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.
Thank you for the citation. Nevertheless, I hope that you can clearly see the difference between referring folks to an official company communication, and starting off with "I work at google..." IIRC, there's mandatory annual training about just this sort of thing.
This linked post doesn't say anything about Google Calendar.
It's not necessarily that I doubt you, it's just that the press release is pretty specific that consumer GMail isn't going to be used for ad customization from now on, and it seems like if it was everything in G-Suite that would be mentioned somewhere.
I don't suppose there's a list Google maintains anywhere online that shows which of their own products they use to aid with ad targeting?
That's exactly what makes me nervous. Even someone working at Google isn't entirely sure what user data is or isn't sent to other parts of the company for other uses.
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".
Has Google made any public statements about whether or not calendar data is used for ad targeting? Gmail was used for ad targeting until mid-2017[1] but I haven't seen anything about calendar.
Afaik, it was never used for ad targeting so there was no announcement to make. Just think about it for minute.
What percentage of people actively use Google Calendar? Out of those what percentage put useful information in there? How much commercial value does this information have?
But... why wouldn't they? Google already is heavily invested in doing this kind of parsing because a lot of their calendar entries are integrated with AI that figures out when you need to leave your house, how to add entries dictated over voice, how to auto-add new appointments based on emails without duplicating entries, and so on.
So Google already needs to know how to parse your calendar data in intelligent ways. And the way that data would be integrated into ads is not going to be all that different from the way Gmail data was processed.
Who cares if it's a small fraction of users? It's basically free data, being consumed by technologies that Google already has to build anyway -- and for the few users that do heavily use calendar, you're getting a ton of data on their everyday schedule.
Why build a set of tools that can do all of this parsing and then say, "nah, we're not going to deploy it everywhere."?
> What percentage of people actively use Google Calendar?
I don't know. My hunch is that it's not a fringe product though.
It's been a while since I checked, but I remember either Calendar or Keep being the default calendar app on Android. What percentage of Android owners use the built-in calendar on their phone to set reminders?
I generally expect Google to be using all possible data sources they have access to for ad targeting without explicit statements otherwise like Gmail has received.
You work for Google and are apparently "pretty sure" that Calendar isn't used for ad targeting but don't actually know, how is a consumer supposed to know this stuff?
You have access to their appointment graph from all the calendar invitations sent, especially with attendees list. You have access to meetings I am invited to even though I don't have a google account since my email address appears in invitations.
It's part of the google eco system. It's integrated with android, google assistant, gmail, ... Chromebooks need web-only replacements for Outlook and Office.
It's also a freemium product, because you can pay for gSuite.
Get people to stay logged in to Google. Then when you do your regular google.com searches, Google knows exactly who you are rather than trying to figure it out for an "anonymous" searcher. I'd guess that alone is worth the cost of operating Gmail for free for everyone.
Companies pay €€€ to use it for business. Free version was good introduction.
One reason for using Gmail (which is generating ad money) is the integration with calendar. Getting travel bookings automatically in calendar is useful.
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...
Seriously, multiple downvotes for an accurate recounting of an observed event contradicting a parent assertion, yet no one provides any new info? I don't expect any upvotes, but what am I missing here? Is there something against posting actual data and events?
What you're describing isn't an advertisement, so isn't at all relevant to the discussion.
It's well known (and not at all secret) that google will grab upcoming flight info from emails and put it into your calendar. But this info still isn't used for ad targeting.
However, I was describing the deceptive advertisement that came along with the flight->calendar populating feature (which is fine).
The advertisement that Google added to my calendar was an auto-populated fake hotel reservation.
It was setup to look as if I'd previously reserved rooms but had simply failed to confirm the final ccard info -- the click-thru literally went straight to the enter ccard info page with my "reservation" prepopulated.
This was trying to hijack any other reservation that I might have intended to make (of course it was really obvious to me since we were staying w/relatives).
Let's be clear:
Adding a "need a hotel?" link to my calendar might be ok.
Populating my calendar with an item for a business I've never even contacted is an advertisement.
Falsely claiming I've already made a reservation when I've never even contacted the business is a lie. It is a deceptive practice.
I was genuinely surprised to see this level of both advertising and deception from Google.
What you're describing is a bug. It may be due to something you did and didn't realize, it may be due to something the site you were reserving things on did and didn't realize, it may be due to a bug in how Calendar parses reservation emails. But its a bug somewhere along the process. It's not an intentional advertisement.
So you're being downvoted for claiming to have been the target of an unrealistic sounding advertisement campaign that, it seems, no one else has ever been targeted by. This, at Google scale, is pretty unlikely.
To give a recent similar example from HN, a user was complaining that google was incorrectly tracking their watch history on YouTube. In reality, they had been infected with malware that watched YouTube videos in the background. Your story gives me the same vibe, and that's likely why people are downvoting.
I had never made a reservation, never even searched for a hotel, as we were staying with relatives. So, there is zero chance that it had anything to do with other searches or reservation attempts, and the flights were made directly at the airline site (i.e., not through Google Flights or a travel aggregator).
The advert populated in the same time-frame as the flight; the airline's flight confirmation email to my Gmail acct had clearly been was parsed, and there was nothing in the email having to do with a hotel.
Moreover, when I clicked thru and found the menus, Google settings pages were there, offering to enable/disable the feature, along with describing that the "helpful" auxiliary reservation feature could not be turned off separately, and providing a feedback opportunity.
My recollection is that this advertisement itself also came with a google message about how this was a helpful new feature to complete my travel palns.
Obviously I turned it off, and slammed them in the feedback, in particular how I couldn't manage the sub-features (actual vs advertised reservations) separately.
Neither item ever happened again, which I would expect having turned off the feature. Which also indicates that this was something under Google's control as opposed to an infection or bug.
My guess is that this is a short-lived experiment, gathered a lot of the kind of feedback I gave, and was cut off by one of their smarter managers.
1) This occurred in exactly the same set of minutes since the email direct from the airline arrived and Google parsed it and posted the flight info to my calendar
2) The hotel locations and dates for the fake reservation were exactly matched to the airline travel dates.
It is also possible to win the lottery, but to post such an exactly targeted advertisement is for all practical purposes impossible without access to the email. Only three parties had access to it: The airline, me, and Google.
It is plausible, but I do have scripting & images shut off in my email client, use NoScript in the browser to prevent unknown scripts from executing (where I do sometimes read Gmail), and saw no such link. If Google is executing them on the server side, I've lost control.
The other indication against this is that this only appeared at the same time as the auto-populate for flights appeared, and never after I turned off that service. Yet, I've received many flight confirmations from the same airline.
So, it would have had to have been a short-lived shady link deal between the hotel & airline at exactly the time that Google started auto-populating the flights, then dropped. Possible, and important to consider, but...
There is also Nextcloud which provides for most self-hosting needs in a single package (calendar, tasks, file storage, notes, music, photos, device tracking, etc.)
I swapped out Horde for Roundcube as my default for customers (who didn't want/need groupware, those are M$ and Zimbra), much easier on the eyes. Just as functional IMO.
While self-hosting is a good start, I believe that everyone should be end-to-end encrypting their data. Servers can be hacked and snooped on, and I cringe at the thought of leaving my personal information in the clear on a server, even if it's mine.
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.
I'll add that Microsoft Outlook calendar works really well. or $69/year, Microsoft will sell you an Office 365 account, Outlook email and calendar, all their apps on-line, two desktop-installable licenses for their Office Suite, and 1 TB of OneDrive storage. It's a great deal.
Also, accurately reporting about an arbitrary source of downtime means you're smart enough to avoid the same sources of downtime.
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.
That only indicate the frontend of the service is up and potentially running. Being about to respond to ping and being able to serve HTTP request are two different things, and being able to serve HTTP request vs a fully functional website are two different things. Think about wrong SSL certification, wrong domain mapping between frontend/backend, broken JS/CSS etc.
Most outages aren't so obvious as this one, and any ping will fail intermittently (often because the ping agent has a failure.) Google definitely has loads of pings hitting Google Calendar in various ways. Exposing this monitoring to the public is not practical or really useful. (And would aid would-be attackers.)
> 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.
Wasn't there that time AWS had some outage, but the red-circle picture (for failure) was itself hosted on the unavailable AWS service, so their status page didn't show it as being unavailable? Or am I mis-remembering something/repeating an urban legend?
"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."
It's like with any big company:
they'll have a bunch of SREs and SWEs working on it and trying to solve this asap, but it's probably too technical to give more details than "we're investigating".
It seems with these "Big Provider" outages its a cascading failure across a few systems as opposed to a single point failure which makes debugging a bit harder.
I think you meant "paid customers". Pretty much all the people wrote here are "customers" one way or the other. By "updates" if you meant the message in GSuite Admin account notification section, it's no more insight than what's describing here:
https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=cc...
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.)
How do you think it relates to the failures exactly? Employee quality is down? The servers had someone manually monitoring them and they quit so now the servers are quietly on fire? What's the theory?
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.
I've worked at big companies and small ones. Every place has a small pool of extraordinary technical talent (the 10x or 100x engineers or whatever). It isn't just that these people are geniuses (although some of them def are), its how much context they have around the systems that are critical to the functioning of the Company. They have that context + dedication to have learned about different failure scenarios. They probably have built the automation systems that deploy the services.
When such people leave, its not the end of the company, someone else (either a person or a group) usually are interested and step up to knowledge transfer before the person leaves and then learn the system.
However, if a critical mass of people leave at or around the same time, crucial knowledge that is necessary for the systems to operate correctly is lost. This may not surface immediately, but when something goes wrong, you will notice it.
I'm not saying this is what happened to Google, IDK. But its very much a possiblity, even at the largest companies. Especially the ones that have somewhat centralized systems, so outages tend to affect a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated services.
What's going on with google lately? First the google cloud outage earlier this month and now this? I wonder if there's some sort of systemic problem they're dealing with
Now I'm curious when the last time Google search went down? they must lose a lot of money everytime that happens. or is that one of those services where they spend ridiculous amounts of money and talent on making sure it never goes down?
It's that second thing. They spend a lot and have a lot of talent behind keeping search up. Also it's an easier problem because it isn't transactional. They can fall back to generic search results if they can't load your custom data, and you'd probably never notice.
Google calendar sort of requires your personal data to function (just like gmail).
I'm guessing that Google search is easier to distribute over a larger set of machines, since the data it uses is static to a large degree and less bound to specific users.
Search also has the possibility of degrading nicely, unlike a calendar. You could store the top million sites in some backup service and drop down to string matching if you had to. Searching for “how to train a hunting dog”? Here’s the Wikipedia page for Dog. Best of luck.
Also I would like to point out an interesting side effect that the #1 result in google for "Google calendar 404" is down with a "Too many requests" error :D
This is especially chaotic for business GSuite users. Wonder if there's an offline/local cache service available for cloud-hosted systems, that would be a good middle-ground between local control and cloud-backed scale.
At the very least, if you had your Google Calendar synced to your mobile device (with the Calendar app) you can still view your meetings offline. You just can't add new ones.
This is the reality of offshoring your business infrastructure to the cloud. Yes, it can fail, and when it does you will have nothing to do but shout into the wind. You have no control over anything that could cause an outage, nor do you have any ability to fix it.
I work somewhere almost entirely integrated with GSuite for everything (Calendar, Gmail, Meet, Chat, Drive, Pixelbooks, etc) and it's a fun time right now.
Writing your own little personal-use web apps can be really nice - not sure how common this is, but I highly recommend it. I did it for tasks, time tracking, invoicing, and personal finances, partly because Google and others kept "upgrading" and screwing up the UI & performance of the tools I was relying on.
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..
I totally concur with the approach of building your own internal tools like this. There is a lot of technical value (and also some unique risks) with DIY tooling that is not usually apparent to the business owner. Being able to expose new APIs and interface things together with other parts of your business in new and open ways is a very powerful and compelling capability. Just knowing that you can do these things in the future is a powerful tool, as it keeps developers' minds more open to consider new integration and automation possibilities. Sure, most turn-key solutions offer some degree of an API and integration options, but if you control the source and CI/CD pipeline of your tools, it's a completely different ball game. I am sure most of us are acutely aware of the downsides of relying on 3rd party APIs at this point.
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.
I wrote my own bookmarking app last year https://github.com/jonschoning/espial ), and pretty sure I re-couped the value I get out of using it every day, being a somewhat obsessive bookmarker/archiver.
That's a cool project, and it's a cool trick to avoid a dependency on a large company's app. Buuut There's always going to be a dependency on your ISP, your web hosting provider's internet access and their hardware uptime/backup schedule, your neighborhood's telephone poles and wires, your utility company, your hosting company's utility company, etc. etc. etc.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and I try not to think about how fragile it all really is all the time.
To circumvent this, you could host something on your LAN using, for example, a Raspberry Pi. To get access from outside that network, you could use some sort of VPN/proxy/tunneling, or you could host another instance with a hosting provider and sync the two.
I used Python / Flask / Apache for server stuff, MySQL & Sqlite for storage, and jQuery & vanilla Javascript for frontend. But I'm sure any web stack would work.
Well I get that shit happens, but what is strange about these recent google incidents is actual downtime. 5 hours for google cloud, and almost 1 hour already for calendar.
Conjecture: Security is a probabilistic thing. They have threat levels which are derived from real-time data and the predictability of behaviour. So if an individual suddenly changes browser or IP they might trip. Or if an entire IP range does the same thing, that might be a hint at a hijack.
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.
Anyone notice that they do not use recaptcha for this page? Apparently old fashioned skewed text works fine to protect google's own services from bots!
Microsoft Outlook for Android shows zero appointments, at least once a week, and nobody posts about it. Shouldn't broken features make headlines regardless of whether the root cause occurs on the client or the server?
2 explanations I can think of:
- This is a backend failure, where all those servers that put together your calendar data and serve it to you as a webpage all use the same database/backend, which is having some sort of error.
- The code that runs on those servers has a bug. They are all at or near the same version, so they all fail. Manual intervention needed to diagnose and fix the bug.
yeh... but, we sorta live and die by the evidence. We can't just blindly assume OP is correct. Thankfully, OP knew that and saved us the hassle or typing it ourselves.
I moved off to Radicale years ago:
https://radicale.org/
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...
I work at google. I am pretty sure google calendar data is not used for ads targeting. The same is true for gmail.
I used to work at Google. Its a big company, composed of almost 10^5 employees today. In my experience, they can be trusted to adhere to the letter of their agreements; no more and no less. That's not as bad as it might sound. Plenty of companies consider their contracts to be far more mutable than Google did while I was there.
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.
So unless you are acting in an official capacity to speak for the gmail and calendar teams, you should hush.
https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
Thank you for the citation. Nevertheless, I hope that you can clearly see the difference between referring folks to an official company communication, and starting off with "I work at google..." IIRC, there's mandatory annual training about just this sort of thing.
This linked post doesn't say anything about Google Calendar.
It's not necessarily that I doubt you, it's just that the press release is pretty specific that consumer GMail isn't going to be used for ad customization from now on, and it seems like if it was everything in G-Suite that would be mentioned somewhere.
I don't suppose there's a list Google maintains anywhere online that shows which of their own products they use to aid with ad targeting?
I see!!! This is the kind of eyes wide shut you folks use to justify working there!
It's so gross.
That's exactly what makes me nervous. Even someone working at Google isn't entirely sure what user data is or isn't sent to other parts of the company for other uses.
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".
Has Google made any public statements about whether or not calendar data is used for ad targeting? Gmail was used for ad targeting until mid-2017[1] but I haven't seen anything about calendar.
[1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
Afaik, it was never used for ad targeting so there was no announcement to make. Just think about it for minute.
What percentage of people actively use Google Calendar? Out of those what percentage put useful information in there? How much commercial value does this information have?
Are you serious?
If I put "Go fishing" into my calendar for next Monday, Google knows:
1) This person fishes.
2) This person probably buys fishing related products.
3) We know this person lives in X and fishes there, and business Y has a website selling similar products.
4) This person is going fishing on a Monday afternoon (for example) so they are probably off work on Mondays or afternoons.
Let's say, I also put in meetings. "Meet with Joe about building a website for his company."
1) This person builds websites
2) Uses hosting services
3) Buys domains
4) Probably codes
5) Must need project management software
6) And all other things typically related to people in this field...
Knowing someone's life this intimately is incredibly valuable.
> Just think about it for minute.
But... why wouldn't they? Google already is heavily invested in doing this kind of parsing because a lot of their calendar entries are integrated with AI that figures out when you need to leave your house, how to add entries dictated over voice, how to auto-add new appointments based on emails without duplicating entries, and so on.
So Google already needs to know how to parse your calendar data in intelligent ways. And the way that data would be integrated into ads is not going to be all that different from the way Gmail data was processed.
Who cares if it's a small fraction of users? It's basically free data, being consumed by technologies that Google already has to build anyway -- and for the few users that do heavily use calendar, you're getting a ton of data on their everyday schedule.
Why build a set of tools that can do all of this parsing and then say, "nah, we're not going to deploy it everywhere."?
> What percentage of people actively use Google Calendar?
I don't know. My hunch is that it's not a fringe product though.
It's been a while since I checked, but I remember either Calendar or Keep being the default calendar app on Android. What percentage of Android owners use the built-in calendar on their phone to set reminders?
I generally expect Google to be using all possible data sources they have access to for ad targeting without explicit statements otherwise like Gmail has received.
You work for Google and are apparently "pretty sure" that Calendar isn't used for ad targeting but don't actually know, how is a consumer supposed to know this stuff?
Your arguments assume best of intentions and a lot of present and past knowledge of the calendar team.
I want to believe you, I like the story you are telling. Unfortunately you like it too and are not being objective.
How much commercial value does this information have?
Enough to make it worth continuing to operate the service, clearly. Do you really want to go down that road?
Google has to process this data first to know that it's not worth it. Unless you can blind guess?
You have access to their appointment graph from all the calendar invitations sent, especially with attendees list. You have access to meetings I am invited to even though I don't have a google account since my email address appears in invitations.
Much of my family uses Google Calendar. Mostly because it's integrated into Android itself.
Do you mean other than the ads inside gmail?
Even ads in gmail are not based on gmail data anymore.
Reminded me of Microsoft ad back when they introduced Office365 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x4_dozWkq0
Then what do they gain from it?
It's part of the google eco system. It's integrated with android, google assistant, gmail, ... Chromebooks need web-only replacements for Outlook and Office.
It's also a freemium product, because you can pay for gSuite.
Get people to stay logged in to Google. Then when you do your regular google.com searches, Google knows exactly who you are rather than trying to figure it out for an "anonymous" searcher. I'd guess that alone is worth the cost of operating Gmail for free for everyone.
Companies pay €€€ to use it for business. Free version was good introduction.
One reason for using Gmail (which is generating ad money) is the integration with calendar. Getting travel bookings automatically in calendar is useful.
what? true for Gmail?
Gmail literally gives me ads related to the email I'm viewing. At least before I started using ad-blocking.
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
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...
Seriously, multiple downvotes for an accurate recounting of an observed event contradicting a parent assertion, yet no one provides any new info? I don't expect any upvotes, but what am I missing here? Is there something against posting actual data and events?
What you're describing isn't an advertisement, so isn't at all relevant to the discussion.
It's well known (and not at all secret) that google will grab upcoming flight info from emails and put it into your calendar. But this info still isn't used for ad targeting.
Thanks for the explanation.
However, I was describing the deceptive advertisement that came along with the flight->calendar populating feature (which is fine).
The advertisement that Google added to my calendar was an auto-populated fake hotel reservation.
It was setup to look as if I'd previously reserved rooms but had simply failed to confirm the final ccard info -- the click-thru literally went straight to the enter ccard info page with my "reservation" prepopulated.
This was trying to hijack any other reservation that I might have intended to make (of course it was really obvious to me since we were staying w/relatives).
Let's be clear:
Adding a "need a hotel?" link to my calendar might be ok.
Populating my calendar with an item for a business I've never even contacted is an advertisement.
Falsely claiming I've already made a reservation when I've never even contacted the business is a lie. It is a deceptive practice.
I was genuinely surprised to see this level of both advertising and deception from Google.
What you're describing is a bug. It may be due to something you did and didn't realize, it may be due to something the site you were reserving things on did and didn't realize, it may be due to a bug in how Calendar parses reservation emails. But its a bug somewhere along the process. It's not an intentional advertisement.
So you're being downvoted for claiming to have been the target of an unrealistic sounding advertisement campaign that, it seems, no one else has ever been targeted by. This, at Google scale, is pretty unlikely.
To give a recent similar example from HN, a user was complaining that google was incorrectly tracking their watch history on YouTube. In reality, they had been infected with malware that watched YouTube videos in the background. Your story gives me the same vibe, and that's likely why people are downvoting.
A bug was my first thought too. Except:
I had never made a reservation, never even searched for a hotel, as we were staying with relatives. So, there is zero chance that it had anything to do with other searches or reservation attempts, and the flights were made directly at the airline site (i.e., not through Google Flights or a travel aggregator).
The advert populated in the same time-frame as the flight; the airline's flight confirmation email to my Gmail acct had clearly been was parsed, and there was nothing in the email having to do with a hotel.
Moreover, when I clicked thru and found the menus, Google settings pages were there, offering to enable/disable the feature, along with describing that the "helpful" auxiliary reservation feature could not be turned off separately, and providing a feedback opportunity.
My recollection is that this advertisement itself also came with a google message about how this was a helpful new feature to complete my travel palns.
Obviously I turned it off, and slammed them in the feedback, in particular how I couldn't manage the sub-features (actual vs advertised reservations) separately.
Neither item ever happened again, which I would expect having turned off the feature. Which also indicates that this was something under Google's control as opposed to an infection or bug.
My guess is that this is a short-lived experiment, gathered a lot of the kind of feedback I gave, and was cut off by one of their smarter managers.
This is not "advertising and deception from Google", it's a spam/scam/phishing campaign.
https://www.wired.com/story/phishing-links-google-calendar-i...
Similar attacks have been directed at iCloud users, too.
Plausible, but unlikely
1) This occurred in exactly the same set of minutes since the email direct from the airline arrived and Google parsed it and posted the flight info to my calendar
2) The hotel locations and dates for the fake reservation were exactly matched to the airline travel dates.
It is also possible to win the lottery, but to post such an exactly targeted advertisement is for all practical purposes impossible without access to the email. Only three parties had access to it: The airline, me, and Google.
Ok, three parties... And it wasn't a shady link in the airline's email?
https://support.google.com/calendar/forum/AAAAd3GaXpEb0_0F6e...
It is plausible, but I do have scripting & images shut off in my email client, use NoScript in the browser to prevent unknown scripts from executing (where I do sometimes read Gmail), and saw no such link. If Google is executing them on the server side, I've lost control.
The other indication against this is that this only appeared at the same time as the auto-populate for flights appeared, and never after I turned off that service. Yet, I've received many flight confirmations from the same airline.
So, it would have had to have been a short-lived shady link deal between the hotel & airline at exactly the time that Google started auto-populating the flights, then dropped. Possible, and important to consider, but...
I did the same, but I use Sandstorm Oasis to host it (https://sandstorm.io/); saves a lot of time spent sysadmining things.
Your link mis-linked. Should be https://sandstorm.io
There is also Nextcloud which provides for most self-hosting needs in a single package (calendar, tasks, file storage, notes, music, photos, device tracking, etc.)
I'm using a cheap Hostgator webhosting as a pretty good alternative to GMail, Calendar and Contacts.
I synchronize my information between Thunderbird (Windows), Android (DavX and GMail app) and of course, they provide a nice web interface (Horde)
> they provide a nice web interface (Horde)
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder :)
https://www.horde.org/apps/webmail/screenshots
It's not beautiful, but it actually looks nice IMO.
I swapped out Horde for Roundcube as my default for customers (who didn't want/need groupware, those are M$ and Zimbra), much easier on the eyes. Just as functional IMO.
While self-hosting is a good start, I believe that everyone should be end-to-end encrypting their data. Servers can be hacked and snooped on, and I cringe at the thought of leaving my personal information in the clear on a server, even if it's mine.
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.
1: https://www.etesync.com
I'll add that Microsoft Outlook calendar works really well. or $69/year, Microsoft will sell you an Office 365 account, Outlook email and calendar, all their apps on-line, two desktop-installable licenses for their Office Suite, and 1 TB of OneDrive storage. It's a great deal.
And 1 hour of skype-to-phone a month.
Out of the fire into the frying pan.
Wow you are so cool
I guess it's time for all the Google engineers to put their LeetCode skills to the test.
Google services have a good track record of uptime. You don't complain on the countless hours of uptime. HN hate at it again
<insert joke about inverting a binary tree>
Man, June has just flown by. I can't believe it's 404 Error already.
Surprised nothing shows up on https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status for it. What's the point of a status site that doesn't reflect the status?
Status pages are not driven by automation, they are driven by PMs. Amazon, Google... all of the big players work them this way.
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.
Also, accurately reporting about an arbitrary source of downtime means you're smart enough to avoid the same sources of downtime.
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.
You could just ping the servers once a minute and tell if they're up or not. No need to know why they've gone down.
That only indicate the frontend of the service is up and potentially running. Being about to respond to ping and being able to serve HTTP request are two different things, and being able to serve HTTP request vs a fully functional website are two different things. Think about wrong SSL certification, wrong domain mapping between frontend/backend, broken JS/CSS etc.
This outage is a great example. I can ping Google Calendar servers and I get an HTTP response. SSL also works like a charm.
And yet everybody agrees it's down.
Most outages aren't so obvious as this one, and any ping will fail intermittently (often because the ping agent has a failure.) Google definitely has loads of pings hitting Google Calendar in various ways. Exposing this monitoring to the public is not practical or really useful. (And would aid would-be attackers.)
it's there now.
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.
Hmm, I don't see anything there yet for me.
It's amazing how many of these status pages don't actually work in many situations.
Wasn't there that time AWS had some outage, but the red-circle picture (for failure) was itself hosted on the unavailable AWS service, so their status page didn't show it as being unavailable? Or am I mis-remembering something/repeating an urban legend?
Nah, you're remembering correctly, this happened. The failure icon was hosted on S3, but S3 was down. It was a great moment.
Here's their tweet about it: https://twitter.com/awscloud/status/836656664635846656
Thank you for confirming, and the citation!
Yep, the icons were hosted on S3, which was unavailable
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/01/aws_s3_outage/
Yes, that was the S3 outage last year...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13756111
These pages at Google/Amazon/Netflix are updated by the incident response team, so it's a manual task.
Edited my comment to just say the same thing. Haha What's the point of them then?
It's certainly helpful to know that Google is aware of the problem and fixing it.
I guess technically the "server" is responding, so...
On that page's footer:
> ©2019 Google - Last updated: June 18, 2019 at 3:12:13 PM UTC+1
Looks like it was last updated before the outage.
"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."
Over an hour into the outage, still no word at all from Google on the status page apart from "We're investigating"
It's like with any big company: they'll have a bunch of SREs and SWEs working on it and trying to solve this asap, but it's probably too technical to give more details than "we're investigating".
It seems with these "Big Provider" outages its a cascading failure across a few systems as opposed to a single point failure which makes debugging a bit harder.
They provide updates to customers, but I'm under NDA with them.
I think you meant "paid customers". Pretty much all the people wrote here are "customers" one way or the other. By "updates" if you meant the message in GSuite Admin account notification section, it's no more insight than what's describing here: https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=cc...
"You're not the customer; you're the product."
That, by the way, and surprisingly for me, it seems it's a quote from 1973:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/16/product/
Yeah, paid customers. Not sure why I've been downvoted.
The engineers there obviously have info before the public status page gets updated.
Just got 4 calls from different departments and two people coming here saying the internet is broken ("Google calendar is broken company wide!").
(Please introduce more meaningful error messages, Google)
I'm assuming they never thought they'd need such an error page
It spits a 404 for me haha, and an ugly 404 at that ( https://twitter.com/omarbaqueiro/status/1140991483740336128 )
Google Calendar being down for nearly an hour settles it. No meetings today. Everyone is free to 'work from home'!
Better yet, allow everyone to work remotely every day and discover how much more productive they are.
This is the 2nd time a Google product has been down in the last month. What is going on there?
Previous one was only 15 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077421
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_clumping
Ikr, Instagram recently went down too, what's going on with FANG recently? Back a few years ago things like this would be unheard of
In what year exactly did none of Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and Google have a service outage like this?
As the person most closely responsible for Netflix’s nines from 2011-2014, definitely not 2011-2014!
We worked hard and managed to keep it pretty high, but in all that time I think we only had two or three perfect weeks worldwide.
And with the chrome/adblock mess it feels a lot worse.
My opinion is worth nothing but Google feels like a crumbling cookie now.. it used to be a cool addition to one's life.
Welp it still is.
> What is going on there?
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.)
How do you think it relates to the failures exactly? Employee quality is down? The servers had someone manually monitoring them and they quit so now the servers are quietly on fire? What's the theory?
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.
I think this is a dangerous assumption to make.
I've worked at big companies and small ones. Every place has a small pool of extraordinary technical talent (the 10x or 100x engineers or whatever). It isn't just that these people are geniuses (although some of them def are), its how much context they have around the systems that are critical to the functioning of the Company. They have that context + dedication to have learned about different failure scenarios. They probably have built the automation systems that deploy the services.
When such people leave, its not the end of the company, someone else (either a person or a group) usually are interested and step up to knowledge transfer before the person leaves and then learn the system.
However, if a critical mass of people leave at or around the same time, crucial knowledge that is necessary for the systems to operate correctly is lost. This may not surface immediately, but when something goes wrong, you will notice it.
I'm not saying this is what happened to Google, IDK. But its very much a possiblity, even at the largest companies. Especially the ones that have somewhat centralized systems, so outages tend to affect a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated services.
Are you suggesting that quality of services offered is invariant of employee quality?
What's going on with google lately? First the google cloud outage earlier this month and now this? I wonder if there's some sort of systemic problem they're dealing with
Now I'm curious when the last time Google search went down? they must lose a lot of money everytime that happens. or is that one of those services where they spend ridiculous amounts of money and talent on making sure it never goes down?
It's that second thing. They spend a lot and have a lot of talent behind keeping search up. Also it's an easier problem because it isn't transactional. They can fall back to generic search results if they can't load your custom data, and you'd probably never notice.
Google calendar sort of requires your personal data to function (just like gmail).
I'm guessing that Google search is easier to distribute over a larger set of machines, since the data it uses is static to a large degree and less bound to specific users.
Search also has the possibility of degrading nicely, unlike a calendar. You could store the top million sites in some backup service and drop down to string matching if you had to. Searching for “how to train a hunting dog”? Here’s the Wikipedia page for Dog. Best of luck.
I hope that their problems will be limited to just outages, and they will not start spilling user information.
Ever since John Giannandrea left Google, seems like Google's product movements have been a little rough. Not sure if it's coincidence.
He led search and research. It has absolutely nothing to do with the calendar and cloud outages.
Also I would like to point out an interesting side effect that the #1 result in google for "Google calendar 404" is down with a "Too many requests" error :D
This is especially chaotic for business GSuite users. Wonder if there's an offline/local cache service available for cloud-hosted systems, that would be a good middle-ground between local control and cloud-backed scale.
At the very least, if you had your Google Calendar synced to your mobile device (with the Calendar app) you can still view your meetings offline. You just can't add new ones.
This is the reality of offshoring your business infrastructure to the cloud. Yes, it can fail, and when it does you will have nothing to do but shout into the wind. You have no control over anything that could cause an outage, nor do you have any ability to fix it.
I work somewhere almost entirely integrated with GSuite for everything (Calendar, Gmail, Meet, Chat, Drive, Pixelbooks, etc) and it's a fun time right now.
This is one of the many reasons why I don't use web apps. Google Calendar is just a dumb pipe connecting various instances of Fantastical for me.
Nope, business/enterprise is producing 404 as well.
Checker Plus caches calendar entries offline.
Writing your own little personal-use web apps can be really nice - not sure how common this is, but I highly recommend it. I did it for tasks, time tracking, invoicing, and personal finances, partly because Google and others kept "upgrading" and screwing up the UI & performance of the tools I was relying on.
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..
I totally concur with the approach of building your own internal tools like this. There is a lot of technical value (and also some unique risks) with DIY tooling that is not usually apparent to the business owner. Being able to expose new APIs and interface things together with other parts of your business in new and open ways is a very powerful and compelling capability. Just knowing that you can do these things in the future is a powerful tool, as it keeps developers' minds more open to consider new integration and automation possibilities. Sure, most turn-key solutions offer some degree of an API and integration options, but if you control the source and CI/CD pipeline of your tools, it's a completely different ball game. I am sure most of us are acutely aware of the downsides of relying on 3rd party APIs at this point.
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.
I wrote my own bookmarking app last year https://github.com/jonschoning/espial ), and pretty sure I re-couped the value I get out of using it every day, being a somewhat obsessive bookmarker/archiver.
That's a cool project, and it's a cool trick to avoid a dependency on a large company's app. Buuut There's always going to be a dependency on your ISP, your web hosting provider's internet access and their hardware uptime/backup schedule, your neighborhood's telephone poles and wires, your utility company, your hosting company's utility company, etc. etc. etc.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and I try not to think about how fragile it all really is all the time.
To circumvent this, you could host something on your LAN using, for example, a Raspberry Pi. To get access from outside that network, you could use some sort of VPN/proxy/tunneling, or you could host another instance with a hosting provider and sync the two.
My calendar app looks like this (granted I have a continuous write patch for nano but that's it): alias note="nano ~/notes.txt"
What tools did you use to write the apps? I assume you had access to a good web toolkit?
I used Python / Flask / Apache for server stuff, MySQL & Sqlite for storage, and jQuery & vanilla Javascript for frontend. But I'm sure any web stack would work.
Google Meeting dial-ins aren't working for this reason, I suppose. Had a meeting this morning and no one could dial in or use Hangouts.
For both the free and paid plans. I look forward to my tens of cents refund!
As a user of the g suite legacy free edition, I'm outraged!
Shushhhhh, I've still got my fingers crossed they don't notice us.
Well I get that shit happens, but what is strange about these recent google incidents is actual downtime. 5 hours for google cloud, and almost 1 hour already for calendar.
I thought google can do better.
Same in Wisconsin
Intermittent 404/200 in Italy.
Intermittent 404s and 500s in NYC.
I don't use Calendar but was able to spam F5 and after a few times, you seem to get in.
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.
I assume the mobile app is still working for people? (Mine is)
Probably cached?
It first exhibited a lot of blank calendar pages for the end of 2019 onward, though June and July 2019 were still there. Then complete 404.
Yep, both consumer and Gsuite calendars are down.
Google Calendar down in Malta too. Same 404.
That explains why I couldn't book my client's appointment. API is throwing "503 Backend Error."
Non-technical user here: why does Google make me use Captcha if it doesn't work? Error 503, etc. afterwards.
It's ddos protection.
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.
Conjecture: Security is a probabilistic thing. They have threat levels which are derived from real-time data and the predictability of behaviour. So if an individual suddenly changes browser or IP they might trip. Or if an entire IP range does the same thing, that might be a hint at a hijack.
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.
404 in the UK.
Same from India.
Seems like the whole backend is down as meet.google.com isn't showing scheduled meetings either
Also not available in Germany.
YEAH BABY 404's DAY OFF
404's 503's aside, should we speculate as to what the issue is?
Yes, wildly.
Almost 2 hours down. What a way to discontinue another product, Google!
Thought something was wrong with Fantastical. It was Google then.
First months after July disappeared, then it went 404 in NY area.
When is Google calendar expected to become available again?
Came here to confirm it's not just me! Still down.
Anyone notice that they do not use recaptcha for this page? Apparently old fashioned skewed text works fine to protect google's own services from bots!
I hope it’s not the work of bughunters
Rough past couple of weeks for Google.
404 in Germany
Looks like it's back up for me
Calendar is loading, but not my events o_O
404s here in Maine at 11:02a.
Down in the bay area as well
404 Spain
404 from India as well.
404 in Hungary aswell
404 in Argentina too
404 in Canada too.
404 in Poland too.
404 in Brazil too
404 in India too
When does Google expect the calendar to become available?
Microsoft Outlook for Android shows zero appointments, at least once a week, and nobody posts about it. Shouldn't broken features make headlines regardless of whether the root cause occurs on the client or the server?
Feminism?
Why no server backup best practices? There should be 2ndary and tertiary servers ready instantly.
2 explanations I can think of: - This is a backend failure, where all those servers that put together your calendar data and serve it to you as a webpage all use the same database/backend, which is having some sort of error. - The code that runs on those servers has a bug. They are all at or near the same version, so they all fail. Manual intervention needed to diagnose and fix the bug.
Instagram is down too, coincidence? (https://downdetector.com/status/instagram)
works for me :|
OP: Might be worth removing the link URL from this post so that we don't hammer their servers while they're trying to fix it for us.
Is this a joke? I seriously doubt the HN traffic is even 0.1% of people banging refresh right now.
You’re probably right about the traffic, but there’s no need to be unkind/sarcastic about it. I wish more people thought not to link down services.
yeh... but, we sorta live and die by the evidence. We can't just blindly assume OP is correct. Thankfully, OP knew that and saved us the hassle or typing it ourselves.
Well, that's quite an insulting comment for the calendar team at G.
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.
Today, I imagine it's the mildest insult they're receiving.
You can be sure they are using circuit breakers etc. to avoid that.