Google doesn't care that the Picassa system's servers are used for bouncing spam. The spam arrives with a from-envelope address of "<random-id>@photos-server.bounces.google.com". This has been going on for years and reported to Google repeatedly. They don't give a damn.
I bet you my e-mail server has caught this recently. Let's see:
# zgrep photos /var/log/exim4/rejectlog*
/var/log/exim4/rejectlog.17.gz:2016-07-24 04:34:41 H=mail-qk0-f201.google.com [209.85.220.201] F=<3y6eUVwYUADANRSTQeNRSTQe.kkPQeeM.ebMOQ@photos-server.bounces.google.com> rejected RCPT <[email protected]>: Too many components in domain name
[... snip, a number of hits going back to May ... ]
There we go: the most recent spam attempt was on July 24, 2016. Someone tried to use Picassa to spam my ADA MP-1 mailing list.
So that's how I'm catching this stuff now: my rule against too many components in the sender domain is taking care of it, currently, before anything more specific.
My calendar on my phone routinely forgets to remind me, even though clearly the entry says "remind me 1 hour before" and other events with the same reminders work fine.
Are there any good calendar hosting companies where I could pay a few $$ a month for decent features, bug fixes, and service?
5 minutes ago my FastMail calendar sent me an email reminding me of a dental appointment tomorrow morning. FastMail in general seems reliable (except for the long outage they had 3 years ago).
My company pays quite a bit for Google services (including calendar), and I personally have had this problem bite me for meetings which don't show up in the feed until well after they've occurred.
Important question: Are you using Google's Calendar app or are you using the OEM calendar app that came with your phone?
It's an important distinction. The second rate calendar apps pushed out by the phone manufacturer are generally pretty buggy and hardly ever see proper updates for security or bugs.
My iOS calendar, synched with Google calendar, always works. Been depending on that form of reminders for at least two years now, and I can't recall ever being let down by it.
Searching around only returned me smartphone apps that connect to Google Calendar, with a couple of actual alternatives (Zoho, which I'm using as a primary email provider and can't set the freaking timezone right, and Outlook calendar, where I absolutely despise its web design).
It's like nobody's even trying to implement this properly. I'm trying out Yahoo's calendar now.
A German privacy focused mail provider where you also get a calendar. I didn't use the calendar yet but their mail servers are faster than anything else I've seen. And you can encrypt your whole account on their server so that noone but you can read your mails.
My iOS calendar, synched with Google calendar, always works. Been depending on that form of reminders for at least two years now, and I can't recall ever being let down by it.
How can this not get fixed after 10 years? You'd have to assume that googlers use their own Calendar, so why aren't they out with pitchforks to incentivize the programmers? Do the in-house Calendar feeds get refreshed every hour or so?
It's probably a real pain in the ass to fix - with some dumb tech debt reasons why.
But, what's probably contributing the most to it is how Google incentivizes people internally. The promotion process is tied very heavily towards launching new features.
Maintaining existing products is (often) a bit of a career dead end for Googlers. It's safer to chase some new and shiny feature.
Sometimes when I use a Google product other than search I wonder if it's more cynical to believe it's in the state it's in because they don't dogfood it, or because they do but they still don't care.
For all of us HN readers, backspace to go back made intuitive sense from the first time we accidentally hit backspace years ago. However, I imagine for every one of us, there are tens of folks who use computers sparingly and get confused when hitting backspace takes them to a wholly different page. In the end, this might make chrome easier to use for the common man at the expense of a tiny performance hit for power users.
Personally, the amount of time I've spent re-typing data into a browser form because of accidentally pressing the backspace key while a field wasn't focused (usually caused by brushing the touchpad on my laptop) far outweighs the speed benefits I gained from using backspace to navigate back into my browser history over the past 15 years.
However, it would have been nicer for the Chromium developers to allow users to remap key bindings instead of removing the binding and telling users to use an unpublished extension to add the functionality back.
I think that's a different issue. The Chromium change was very intentional to work around an otherwise-unavoidable failure mode users would encounter (some pages don't restore correctly if you navigate off of them, and backspace also meaning "delete previous character" meant that having it overloaded as the "go back a page" operator too often led to undesired navigation events).
Just learn to use ALT+LEFT ARROW (back) and ALT+RIGHT ARROW (forward).
Backspace was problematic because it was too easy to accidentally activate, plus you'd still need to know about ALT+RIGHT ARROW to go forward again which wasn't consistent.
Hotkey use is a very habitual and personal thing. Everyone has a scheme that works for them and it's hard to adapt to something else. So why don't modern browsers just add a screen where you can customize your hotkeys?
Like, you know, the entire video game industry has managed to do for decades?
Definitely the first thing I thought of as well. My experience with this change has been so negative I've actually been seriously considering going back to Firefox, all these years later.
Place a text file at ~/.calendar/calendar with one event per row, containing the date and the title separated by a tab. Type calendar and you'll get a list of what's coming up in the next few days. You're done.
Being a venerable UNIX utility there are of course a variety of options (switch to view X days in the future, support for including external calendars, support for recurrence, etc.). Weirdly, it lacks any concept of start and end time, but this is easy enough to simply include in your appointment's title. And no free/busy or special sharing mechanism (though you could certainly compose your calendar of several files and expose them on a web server easily enough).
It's not about to replace a full-blown calendar app for power users, but if you're the type of person who has a fairly light meeting schedule and spends a lot of time in a terminal... I was immediately done with all other calendar software and consequently all the problems of said software when I stumbled across this thing.
I have personal experience with this. Because of the lack of reliable iCal sync, a project I worked on had to spend over a week and a half of developer hours implementing, troubleshooting, and maintaining Google Calendar API integration for our users. It's the source of no shortage of pain for this app as it is a sideline feature, but has just enough demand that Google integration cannot be dropped.
Google doesn't want to support iCal because they want to have everyone use their API.
Github has a similar thing, a issue which has been open for over three years and has received innumerable upvotes[0] with essentially no official response as far as I can tell.
Pretty funny how an ambiguous date format ("1/5/10") led to two interpretations of how long ago this was (6 or 10 years ago).
To clarify: at the time of initially writing this comment, there were only two comments in this thread: the parent of this comment, which said it was 6 years ago; and another, which said it was 10 years ago. I don't know or care whether it was legitimate for either to come to the conclusion they did, I just thought it was funny, and that it was most likely due to the super-short date format inside the link. Can we move on please?
As someone who builds a scheduling product which offers an iCalendar feed for Google Calendar (among others), I have to face this issue on a weekly basis.
The most plausible explanation I came up with (and what I tell my users) is that Calendar is maintained by a small team in Switzerland for which this isn't a priority. I don't blame anyone, if true. It might not be easy to fix with little resources.
The fact that some feeds sync faster than others (Facebook events) and syncs speed up as time passes, makes for a weird case.
Outlook.com or iCloud/iCal sync properly. One of those offer a way out for my users if critical.
I think Google cares, but they're not communicating it very well. I would hesitate before building a feature that might kick off a relatively complicated process with a lot of external factors whenever a user wants. It seems very complicated and without much positive benefit for the average user.
Is this just a problem when subscribing to calendars published through Google? In other words, if I host an iCal calendar on my own server, will subscribers see changes immediately when they refresh their Google Calendar client?
The previous title, “Google just don't care” violates the guidelines by being editorialized. Please use the original title unless it's misleading or clickbait.
[+] [-] kazinator|9 years ago|reply
I bet you my e-mail server has caught this recently. Let's see:
There we go: the most recent spam attempt was on July 24, 2016. Someone tried to use Picassa to spam my ADA MP-1 mailing list.So that's how I'm catching this stuff now: my rule against too many components in the sender domain is taking care of it, currently, before anything more specific.
Here is one 2012-dated discussion about this:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/bQd_kZl...
It goes back before that, though, to at least 2010.
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|9 years ago|reply
This isn't like when Google actually broke the telephony in the Nexus 4 and then finally closed the issue with a middle finger: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82949
[+] [-] jjnoakes|9 years ago|reply
My calendar on my phone routinely forgets to remind me, even though clearly the entry says "remind me 1 hour before" and other events with the same reminders work fine.
Are there any good calendar hosting companies where I could pay a few $$ a month for decent features, bug fixes, and service?
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|9 years ago|reply
My company pays quite a bit for Google services (including calendar), and I personally have had this problem bite me for meetings which don't show up in the feed until well after they've occurred.
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|9 years ago|reply
It's an important distinction. The second rate calendar apps pushed out by the phone manufacturer are generally pretty buggy and hardly ever see proper updates for security or bugs.
Solution: Download Google Calendar from the Play Store here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
Open it up and give it access to your calendar, contacts, etc as requested. Then go and disable the calendar app that came with your phone.
[+] [-] banach|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r3bl|9 years ago|reply
Searching around only returned me smartphone apps that connect to Google Calendar, with a couple of actual alternatives (Zoho, which I'm using as a primary email provider and can't set the freaking timezone right, and Outlook calendar, where I absolutely despise its web design).
It's like nobody's even trying to implement this properly. I'm trying out Yahoo's calendar now.
[+] [-] QuantumRoar|9 years ago|reply
A German privacy focused mail provider where you also get a calendar. I didn't use the calendar yet but their mail servers are faster than anything else I've seen. And you can encrypt your whole account on their server so that noone but you can read your mails.
Edit: their English website is https://posteo.de/en
[+] [-] raisedbyninjas|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] may|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aelinsaar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] banach|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scholia|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nevir|9 years ago|reply
But, what's probably contributing the most to it is how Google incentivizes people internally. The promotion process is tied very heavily towards launching new features.
Maintaining existing products is (often) a bit of a career dead end for Googlers. It's safer to chase some new and shiny feature.
[+] [-] gdulli|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smhg|9 years ago|reply
My naive assumption is that they prioritize by popularity?
[+] [-] simonsarris|9 years ago|reply
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608016...
[+] [-] adt2bt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alyandon|9 years ago|reply
However, it would have been nicer for the Chromium developers to allow users to remap key bindings instead of removing the binding and telling users to use an unpublished extension to add the functionality back.
[+] [-] damieng|9 years ago|reply
Backspace isn't a navigation function. It's to delete the last character. We have navigation keys they're called cursors.
Glad to see the back of backspace.
[+] [-] fixermark|9 years ago|reply
Incidentally, aren't there already Chrome extensions to change the behavior to what it was originally? [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/backspace-as-backf...]
[+] [-] Someone1234|9 years ago|reply
Backspace was problematic because it was too easy to accidentally activate, plus you'd still need to know about ALT+RIGHT ARROW to go forward again which wasn't consistent.
They were right to remove it. Terrible hotkey.
[+] [-] apatters|9 years ago|reply
Like, you know, the entire video game industry has managed to do for decades?
[+] [-] kyledrake|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lima|9 years ago|reply
It's easy to see how people would loose data by accidentally using backspace. I'm fine with Alt-Left and Right click -> Back.
The right click -> back method sounds clunky, but it's actually extremely convenient.
[+] [-] arafa|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therealmarv|9 years ago|reply
I'm happy backspace is gone. It's non standard UX behaviour in comparison to other browsers like Safari & Firefox etc.
Better use alt+arrow keys (this works also in all other browsers).
[+] [-] liareye|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apatters|9 years ago|reply
http://www.computerhope.com/unix/ucalande.htm
Place a text file at ~/.calendar/calendar with one event per row, containing the date and the title separated by a tab. Type calendar and you'll get a list of what's coming up in the next few days. You're done.
Being a venerable UNIX utility there are of course a variety of options (switch to view X days in the future, support for including external calendars, support for recurrence, etc.). Weirdly, it lacks any concept of start and end time, but this is easy enough to simply include in your appointment's title. And no free/busy or special sharing mechanism (though you could certainly compose your calendar of several files and expose them on a web server easily enough).
It's not about to replace a full-blown calendar app for power users, but if you're the type of person who has a fairly light meeting schedule and spends a lot of time in a terminal... I was immediately done with all other calendar software and consequently all the problems of said software when I stumbled across this thing.
[+] [-] leephillips|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rietta|9 years ago|reply
I have personal experience with this. Because of the lack of reliable iCal sync, a project I worked on had to spend over a week and a half of developer hours implementing, troubleshooting, and maintaining Google Calendar API integration for our users. It's the source of no shortage of pain for this app as it is a sideline feature, but has just enough demand that Google integration cannot be dropped.
Google doesn't want to support iCal because they want to have everyone use their API.
[+] [-] Artemis2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkpad20|9 years ago|reply
[0]: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/18
[+] [-] tranv94|9 years ago|reply
poor guy
[+] [-] baptou12|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdegutis|9 years ago|reply
To clarify: at the time of initially writing this comment, there were only two comments in this thread: the parent of this comment, which said it was 6 years ago; and another, which said it was 10 years ago. I don't know or care whether it was legitimate for either to come to the conclusion they did, I just thought it was funny, and that it was most likely due to the super-short date format inside the link. Can we move on please?
[+] [-] mark-r|9 years ago|reply
This might seem like a flippant comment, but it explains a lot of the observations I've made of Google over the years.
[+] [-] raverbashing|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smhg|9 years ago|reply
The most plausible explanation I came up with (and what I tell my users) is that Calendar is maintained by a small team in Switzerland for which this isn't a priority. I don't blame anyone, if true. It might not be easy to fix with little resources.
The fact that some feeds sync faster than others (Facebook events) and syncs speed up as time passes, makes for a weird case.
Outlook.com or iCloud/iCal sync properly. One of those offer a way out for my users if critical.
[+] [-] jeffrand|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leephillips|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] TheLarch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therealmarv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usmannk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sctb|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] baptou12|9 years ago|reply