Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

shilin.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 80 posts

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#41

Post by kookiburra »

Over2Chars wrote: post #34
kookiburra wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, though self hosting can be too hard for everyday non tech users. I think the fact that Proton exists, regardless of all their issues, is still a good thing and a move in the right direction

I am a fan of proton, but we should always be ready for the bad news that forces us into another provider or self-hosting. Sooner or later it always happens. Like lavabit or anon-penet.fi, cases where things go tits up for non-provider related reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer

By the way, I wrote this article just last week - https://ownerofhappy.org/encrypted-email-bad

I actually agree, and personally I don't love how they advertise such foolproof security. It's dangerous especially when their non technical users don't understand the consequences. I've had multiple friends using Proton who think it's 100% private even when emailing a gmail user.

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#42

Post by makeitdouble »

karamanolev wrote: post #35
thih9 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s difficult to maintain basic features in a popular calendar, at least according to the ms exchange team blog: > calendaring is particularly tricky. Why’s that? Well, consider time zones for a start – a meeting you set up isn’t necessarily in the same time as it is for me, and then you also invited people, from a whole bunch of other time zones (did you know some time zones are 30 mins off, not a full hour?) (…) h…

Eh, I don't buy that. Storage in UTC and converting to a local timezone for display / notification purposes has been the standard practice for a looong time. What I would believe, I don't know if true, is that different applications support subtly different feature sets, integration has varying levels of support and correctness and so on. Additionally, I feel like vendors are incentivized to offer good support within…

UTC storage is standard practice, but not the best practice nor something that solves all the major issues a good application should be dealing with.

I'd qualify it as "good enough to not get fired" grade of decision, for people who don't care that much about calendaring in the first place or have the luxury ignore complex cases (we're back to "why are calendars so hard?")

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#43

Post by jamalaramala »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #33
godelski wrote: post #25

A bit off topic but why are calendars so hard? I recently moved from android to apple and I'm just really impressed no one does a dedupe operation on calendars. Seriously, who works on these things? I'll write you the regex if you really really need it but damn, if you're going to push fancy AI on me to make my life easier at least take care of all the annoying trivial bullshit that makes my life harder.

This is really a good question. Progress with calendars has stopped 10-15 years ago, the only major innovation relevant to it was Calendly, but that’s it. I guess it’s hard to imagine new features or even incremental quality updates as a viable business idea.

> I guess it’s hard to imagine new features or even incremental quality updates as a viable business idea.

There is market for privacy; but the missing piece, after so many years, is how to synchronize calendars in a seamless way.

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#44

Post by haakonhr »

pluies wrote: post #37
karamanolev wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I don't buy that. Storage in UTC and converting to a local timezone for display / notification purposes has been the standard practice for a looong time. What I would believe, I don't know if true, is that different applications support subtly different feature sets, integration has varying levels of support and correctness and so on. Additionally, I feel like vendors are incentivized to offer good support within…

> Storage in UTC and converting to a local timezone for display / notification purposes has been the standard practice for a looong time. All good until summer time kicks in and your recurring 9am meeting now starts at 8am, oops.

But summertime is a (at least here) a separate timezone, e.g., CET vs CEST

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#45

Post by ivan_gammel »

haakonhr wrote: post #44
pluies wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Storage in UTC and converting to a local timezone for display / notification purposes has been the standard practice for a looong time. All good until summer time kicks in and your recurring 9am meeting now starts at 8am, oops.

But summertime is a (at least here) a separate timezone, e.g., CET vs CEST

Timezones change.

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#46

Post by ivan_gammel »

jamalaramala wrote: post #43
ivan_gammel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really a good question. Progress with calendars has stopped 10-15 years ago, the only major innovation relevant to it was Calendly, but that’s it. I guess it’s hard to imagine new features or even incremental quality updates as a viable business idea.

> I guess it’s hard to imagine new features or even incremental quality updates as a viable business idea. There is market for privacy; but the missing piece, after so many years, is how to synchronize calendars in a seamless way.

It’s not just that. Manual entry is still a thing happening too often. Yes, some apps allow to put your booking in a calendar, but that doesn’t cover all use cases. You call, make an appointment — getting an ical via SMS after the call would be great. You open a website, then check there the opening hours or schedule, taking that information to your calendar app would be great. Etc etc.

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#47

Post by Over2Chars »

kookiburra wrote: post #41
Over2Chars wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a fan of proton, but we should always be ready for the bad news that forces us into another provider or self-hosting. Sooner or later it always happens. Like lavabit or anon-penet.fi, cases where things go tits up for non-provider related reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer

By the way, I wrote this article just last week - https://ownerofhappy.org/encrypted-email-bad I actually agree, and personally I don't love how they advertise such foolproof security. It's dangerous especially when their non technical users don't understand the consequences. I've had multiple friends using Proton who think it's 100% private even when emailing a gmail user.

I remember reading someone talking about how Proton couldn't be that secure (ultimately) because they relied on a javascript front end.

I recalled this when I read some crypto security efforts were focused on removing any javascript dependencies. I was like... hmmmm.....

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#48

Post by EduardoBautista »

rekoil wrote: post #28
freddie_mercury wrote: post #13

A lot of this reads like "I wish Proton Calendar wasn't encrypted on their servers." But that's like the entire value prop of using Proton Calendar over the many other options out there, isn't it?

While I agree with you in general, E2EE can't be a blanket excuse for building bad applications. If your E2EE applications can't deal with data encryption in a way that makes them comparable to competitors non-E2EE products from a usability aspect, then they are still bad applications, regardless if we know that E2EE does make it all way harder. I love Proton, but there are aspects of E2EE that they haven't worked ar…

The issue is that the open protocols IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV weren't built with E2EE in mind. This is the big reason why you can't use 3rd party calendar clients with Proton.

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#49

Post by jamalaramala »

Curiously, the easiest Google product to move away from is "google" (search):

I have been using DuckDuckGo for years, both for searching and browsing. I love the ability to burn the cookies after each session!

But I haven't been able to replace Gmail, Calendar and Maps (which are quite good products IMO).

It's quite ironic that "google" (search) has become one of Google's worst products.

Re: I failed moving my Google calendar to Proton

#50

Post by jamalaramala »

kookiburra wrote: post #29

I started out using Proton calendar but ended up discovering the dates are actually not encrypted, which I think is quite an oversight. Haven't found a replacement unfortunately so it might just be the best option for the cloud. For now a local notepad calendar it is!

Why would one encrypt dates? They are public domain!!!
Post reply on HN