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Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices
61–70 of 100 posts
Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices
#62While this is nice, and much better than using e.g Google, it is even better to use an end-to-end encrypted solution. Messaging has underwent the same transition in the last few years. Trusting the server, even if yours, is just not enough. I created https://www.etesync.com for that purpose exactly, it does end-to-end encrypted sync for Android and desktop for your contacts and calendar.
When communicating with your own server using https, it is already end-to-end encrypted.
While this may feel true, there are a few reasons why it's not.
1. This assumes https can be trusted, that is, MITM is not a possibility. This is a fair assumption for many people, but not for people whore are scared of state actors, which is common for journalists in and citizens of some countries. - This can be mitigated to an extent with certificate pinning, but I don't think all software support it (correctly?) and it's another thing to get wrong.
2. This assumes your server is trusted. It is not. If it's hosted in a remote location (e.g. VPS or even metal in a server farm), it can't be trusted. If it's at your home, based on how much of a target you are, it can't be trusted. Even if your server is physically secure, this assumes it won't be hacked, and you should never assume a public facing server won't be.
Of course this all depends on your threat models, and this may not apply to you, but https to your own server is definitely not the same, and given that adding end-to-end is almost "free" for most users, it's a good idea to error on the side of safety and just do it.
Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices
#63Something I've been looking for is a web service and android app that I can self-host that will allow me to read and send SMSs from my desktop. The important thing here is self hosted. I think something like this would be really useful. I've seen services that provide this via a 3rd party hosted service but I don't trust someone at some random company not to read my messages.
Send an email to:
@
For example, with Verizon:
8185551212@vtext.com
Doesn't address the self hosting part but this is an easy way to send SMS from a desktop/laptop.
Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
As with many things open source a couple of years is a long, long time; Nextcloud has improved a lot as far as I can tell, for me it's decently usable and surprisingly problem free. How's Sogo with regards to maintainability and upgradability?
Sogo: zero maintenance. No problem upgrades. It's really, really, nice.
sogo does not release stable packages anymore (it's only for paid users which is basically businesses). How are you updating sogo?
Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices
#65While this is nice, and much better than using e.g Google, it is even better to use an end-to-end encrypted solution. Messaging has underwent the same transition in the last few years. Trusting the server, even if yours, is just not enough. I created https://www.etesync.com for that purpose exactly, it does end-to-end encrypted sync for Android and desktop for your contacts and calendar.
Looks really cool! I have been looking for a solution similar to this one. Signed up.
One thing that I miss though is a nice web interface for calendar and contacts. Especially if I want to do some sort of cleanup of data. Is this functionality planned? Or is there some open source web calendaring software that you would recommend?
Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices
#66I've been looking a Zimbra [https://www.zimbra.com/] for a while. I like the general idea of the product. Even the free version is feature-filled. My only problem with it is that it seems to be a resource hog. You'd have to get a fairly fat Linode to run it.
I've used garden variety email hosting auto-magically setup on VPS's from such luminaries as GoDaddy without problems for many years. I have never worried about how to setup an email server, just get a cheap VPS, setup email addresses and you are good to go. Given this experience I have to admit to not understanding why Zimbra is so fat.
Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices
#67After spending way too much time messing around with stuff like DAV and syncing using same, my current scheduling and reminder system is based on this: * https://www.roaringpenguin.com/products/remind/ Every day at 6am my server runs a cron job. If there are appointments I get an email and an SMS. The server also makes a unique noise over the house PA system (I live alone) but that is mostly because I can.
What exactly was wrong with a DAV server? I can't imagine it being more complicated than what you've settled with.
DAV was always incredibly unreliable when you tried to host it yourself. Remember the original web servers + browsers, as one would support some new feature and another would break it? It was like that.
SyncML was pretty rock solid and interoperable when you could find support for it, but the damn thing was such a nightmare to implement that the only open source implementations were buried inside groupware solutions.
Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried used Owncloud... and stopped. I tried using radicale... and stopped. The software was fragile, slow, and broke often. Maybe it's better now (a few years later). But at the time it was negatively impacting productivity. I've moved to Sogo. Zero problems after install. File sync is Resilio. Bittorrent sync was unusable, the new re-branded (and fixed) Resilio works fine. Just my $0.02
As with many things open source a couple of years is a long, long time; Nextcloud has improved a lot as far as I can tell, for me it's decently usable and surprisingly problem free. How's Sogo with regards to maintainability and upgradability?
I have been researching this space recently, what turned me off was them scanning ports and then reporting to ISPs, supposedly because people were running vulnerable versions, but reporting could make problems for users because some ISPs don't allow servers on home connections.
And here's the money quote: "The effort has been quite successful. Of the tens of thousands server owners who were informed, over 5% had upgraded already in the first ten days."[1] In other words 95% were left vulnerable and they were responsible for it. Does not inspire trust.
[1] https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-releases-security-scann...
Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices
#69While this is nice, and much better than using e.g Google, it is even better to use an end-to-end encrypted solution. Messaging has underwent the same transition in the last few years. Trusting the server, even if yours, is just not enough. I created https://www.etesync.com for that purpose exactly, it does end-to-end encrypted sync for Android and desktop for your contacts and calendar.
Looks really cool! I have been looking for a solution similar to this one. Signed up. One thing that I miss though is a nice web interface for calendar and contacts. Especially if I want to do some sort of cleanup of data. Is this functionality planned? Or is there some open source web calendaring software that you would recommend?
Glad you like it.
I've also been looking for such a solution for years, and except for the short-lived Flock by the Open Whisper Systems people, I couldn't find anything. That's why I finally decided to create it almost a year ago.
Edit: you just edited your reply while I was writing mine, to answer your additional question:
For a variety of reasons, the browser is not a safe environment for such an application, at least not currently. There is however a CalDAV/CardDAV gateway (beta) that you can host locally and essentially use any application that supports those to quickly edit your data, or alternatively, if you are a programmer, there's an open source (like everything from EteSync) python API (both low-level and high-level) that you can use to manipulate the data.
Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices
#70Something I've been looking for is a web service and android app that I can self-host that will allow me to read and send SMSs from my desktop. The important thing here is self hosted. I think something like this would be really useful. I've seen services that provide this via a 3rd party hosted service but I don't trust someone at some random company not to read my messages.
> I think something like this would be really useful. I've seen services that provide this via a 3rd party hosted service but I don't trust someone at some random company not to read my messages.
... do you know how SMS works? Specifically that it is sent in plaintext for anyone who cares to listen anywhere along the path?
Maybe try Signal. It has a desktop app.