Did Google just shut down Caldav support?
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1. Google Reader on which I relied for my daily dose of news is going the way of the dodo.
2. HN has a story of a person having his Google acct randomly shut down with no warning and no recourse (and I don't have highly-placed friends in Google so for me something like that would mean I'm screwed forever).
3. Calendar services (on which in part my workplace relies to schedule meetings) going down, and absolutely nobody knows what's going on and even where to look for updates or official reaction from Google.
I think it is time to seriously reconsider how reliant I have become on a services of a company that couldn't care less for me. It'd be probably impossible to quit cold turkey but I'm starting to look into the way to minimize the impact of Google on my life (much of which is related to information services).
> I think it is time to seriously reconsider how reliant I have become on a services of a company that couldn't care less for me.
If Google loses their hold over tech people, that will spread quickly.
Or so they like to think. Didn't work that much for Linux on the Desktop though...
Until the past couple of years, most of the tech community has conceded that linux on the desktop was not ready for primetime. Hell, even now, there isn't a consensus and most would not recommend it to those on "the outside."
I honestly don't know if the tech community has a non-proportional influence over those on the outside, but your statement is almost a non-sequitur.
No, I just have a longer perspective. You're probably too young to remember that most of the tech community, their mother and their dogs considered Linux "ready for the primetime" during late 199x.
The time when every other pundit was quoting "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and VCs invested in several Linux distributions (which included relatively established companies like Corel, Novell, et al). There wasn't even OS X (or Google) to keep them amused, it was all Linux and OSS.
It was said to happen "any day now", nay, it was "already happening". Including huge over-valuation for Linux companies, from VA Linux to Eazel and whatever Xamarin was called back then. They abandoned that thinking around 2000-2002, after the dot com crash etc.
Maybe they're being DDoS'd (though with Google's resiliancy), but it's really making me question a lot of things... I was hoping to use my GVoice number for a long time.. but spending the weekend explaining I'm calling from my real cell phone number was just weird.
They are thousands and thousands of such stories. But there's recourse...if you make HN's front page or if you have 150,000+ Twitter followers. For the rest of you: Google is to busy trying to make users click on ads, no time to offer even the most basic support.
Yes, we know. This is brought up on any given technical forum a dozen times a day. You're beating a dead horse at this point.
The years of neglect and the nerfing of Reader during the Google+ launch gave you plenty of forewarning.
> 3. Calendar services (on which in part my workplace relies to schedule meetings) going down, and absolutely nobody knows what's going on and even where to look for updates or official reaction from Google
Go to Google or DDG. Type "google status" and hit enter. Click the very first result.
Now they want me to verify my account using a mobile number. Except that I'm overseas and I don't have global roaming enabled (because otherwise turning on my phone will cost $2 and every text I send costs $2, and I get charged $5/MB for data).
Whether the "verify your account by giving us information we've never demanded from you in the past" is related to my lock-out, or is simply a new demand they started making over the weekend I don't know.
In the meantime I have to find alternatives to Google for everything.
I very recently had this happen to me too, except it took them 3-4 days after I arrived at my destination to disable my account and demand a phone number.
I have two-factor authentication, and I did a very thorough inspection to ensure I had no malware - nope, it's just because my location changed. Their "kill this account" algorithms really need some tweaking.
What kind of insane operator charges you for turning on your phone?
Receiving an SMS while roaming is usually fee. Just turn off data and don't answer any calls.
No, it's not. Depends on the carrier though.
If you have enabled two factor authentication, they do provide 5 "emergency" codes that you can use if you don't have access to your number.
Source: I am travelling out of the country and I have run into the same problem.
> Update March 15, 2013: We worked with the developers who provide 98 percent of our current CalDAV traffic to assure access to the CalDAV API, which means many popular products will not be impacted. We remain committed to supporting open protocols like CalDAV.
This seems like an unrelated, isolated outage. I'm using CalDAV on my iPhone and iPad and haven't had any issues (although I don't use 2-factor authentication like a few of the commenters in the thread).
I used to be all over the Googleverse. I searched using Google, I did email and contact management in GMail, had my calendar in GCal, read my news in GReader, and IMd in Google Talk. And the great thing about these was that they used open standards and I could choose from a multitude of clients for accessin my data.
And then they shut that down one by one. Now, GMail remains the only one of those services that has not been publicly deprecated.
Well, I abandoned ship long ago. Nowadays, Google Hangouts and Google Maps are the only part of Google I use. Occasionally.
Google Reader will shut down in July (http://googleblog.blogspot.de/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cle...)
I thought I read that Google Talk was shutting down XMPP syndication. However, I can't find a source for that, so that might be wrong.
GMail used to sync using ActiveSync, which is useful for contacts sync. It appears this has been shut down already (http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2012/12/winter-cleaning.html)
Something else is not working right. Google may be testing just how much trouble shutting down CalDAV would cause... Or they may simply have made a mistake.
The amount of edge-cases is usually beyond belief.
Our legacy code has an event save method that's a few thousand lines long. It's the one part of the code that we avoid at all costs because a seemingly minor change can break some weird edge case.
We also have a CalDav module that works but also has weird edge cases when different calendars handle things in different ways. For example, you have an event that starts on a Monday, set to repeat on Wed and Fri for 10 occurrences. Do you display the Monday occurrence of the original event even though it's not in the recurrence rule? If so, does it count as one of the 10 occurrences or not? In our testing, iCal, Google Calendar, and Outlook all handle this same case in completely different ways.
Can't imagine what a pain a full on calendar project would be.. I looked at CalDAV at one point, because I wanted something that ran outside of Apple's OS early on, but pretty much dropped the idea less than a week into it.
I don't know why Google is shutting down the caldav support.. guessing that imap for gmail will be on the chopping block soon.
If that were to happen, I'd be shocked. But as a precaution I should probably start doing an IMAP export/sync on a workstation on a regular basis.
It'd be pointless to lose something as easy to backup as mail just because of you having too much faith in a service-provider.
It took me the weekend to setup and secure Kolab. It's GPL, built on top of postfix, has a nice webmail client through Roundcube, and it's actively developed. The current version (3.0) doesn't have CalDav support, but it is on the roadmap for 3.1 in a couple months.
Learned a lot of about anti-spam techniques while setting it up. The config file settings were a little lax for Roundcube, but all-in-all I'm happier with the setup than with Gmail. This CalDav problem was just a random outage, but how long till they make another change that users can't opt out of?
Hopefully it is just an outage that will get fixed.
Edit: resolved http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...