291–295 of 295 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds kind of unethical. Or is the reasoning, you could have found it on Google anyway, so you might as well do it the easy way?
Just because I have access to resources that you don't doesn't mean I should do the work for you. That's an entirely new level of wokeness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My first thought was that it was from something like an airline/travel upsell team that somehow sneaked through, but my interaction w/Google convinced me otherwise (sorry I don't recall all the details, as it was years ago). Google definitely made clear that if I wanted to accept them auto-populating my calendar with the flights in my email, I also had to accept the fake hotel bookings and lying "...confirm?" message…
It just feels more likely to me that the answer you got ("you just need to turn off this feature totally to avoid this") didn't mean Google was using it themselves to generate that "ad," but that it was someone basically taking advantage of the existence of the mail-to-calendar feature unscrupulously, and Google didn't have any controls you could use to stop that other than just turning the feature off. That's still…
Items 1, 2, and 3 are ok, and are the feature
The fake reservation and "confirm" requests are straight-up deceptive trade practices - an attempt to steal money and change my travel plans by deceptive means.
For a moment, let's go with your idea that Google didn't do #4 & #5.
First, questions: When did I give Google permission to open up my calendar for anyone in the world to populate? Considering the levels of spam in email, telephony, & text, what idiot thought that was a good idea?
Aside from the deceptive trade practice, this is also a massive security risk - with everyone's calendar open to the world, and without advance warning, it'd be straightforward to route a person into a variety of dangerous situations if they aren't extremely careful - this is way beyond 'click the link ransomware', and up to 'go to the appointment in your ostensibly secure calendar and get kidnapped'. These are just a few quick examples.
So, either Google themselves is directly implementing deceptive trade practices, or they are stupidly enabeling all kinds of new cybercrime.
In short, if Google is actually enabling this kind of access for random 3rd parties, it is a WORSE intrusion than if they are merely doing it themselves.
Either way, I'd expect far more responsible thinking from such a supposedly mature company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but for every person I tell that they had a data breach causing them to phish their customers through calendar, I can poison 50 people in each organization, then they can poison 50 and so forth... let's call it exponential growth of the DELL-20 coronavirus.
And each of those 10 successes tells 50, Don’t you get it?! They wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work, and you are vastly outnumbered. It’s not right, it’s bloody annoying, but it’s there and it’s not going away. Google needs to fix the root problem, so that the spammy behaviour is not possible.
And what of the efficacy compared to the negative reputation gained from such practices? How do they measure that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FreeNAS /partial sarcasm
I’ve run FreeNAS as well, but I found there was something strange about the involvement of iXsystems I couldn’t put my finger on. It just didn’t seem professionally done on the web site, or the web GUI. It was 98% of the way there functionality-wise, but the GUI was just overwhelming. Personal preference I guess. Perhaps there are other themes, and being open source, I’m sure it can be configured to my liking. I am g…