denis bider

It is finally expected that reputable websites use TLS for all connections. Google, Bing, Facebook, Reddit, many smaller websites, even this blog – we all use HTTPS by default. This protects the privacy and integrity of internet browsing from intrusion near the user, or between the user and server.

At the same time, though, a security threat is encroaching from the server direction. Increasingly, no one except a few large corporations has control over their servers anymore. Even data that needs to conform to HIPAA security requirements is being moved into "the cloud" – which is to say, onto computers managed by a few companies. This is primarily the largest cloud provider, Amazon; trailed by Microsoft, IBM, and Google.

It's not just that the servers reside at these large providers in the form of virtual machines which can potentially be accessed by the provider, or any government that can compel them. It's also that increasingly, servers are being abstracted away. Am…

I used to rely on the Calendar app on my Samsung Galaxy. Then, something changed. Maybe it's that I upgraded the phone; maybe an update broke the calendar functionality. Either way, for some reason, alerts now no longer work.

I was supposed to be on a call today. It was scheduled a week in advance, so I used the Calendar app. The event was set up, and was configured to alert me 30 minutes before. The time zone was correct. The phone was on; sound was on; and the app was permitted to alert and show notifications.

There was no alert. I was not present on the call, and this may have cost my company business.

I remembered this happening once before, but at that time I figured I must have configured something incorrectly. This time, I double checked. An alert should have happened, and did not.

My wife uses a different Samsung Galaxy with the same app, and has also experienced alerts that don't occur.

I tried switching the Samsung Calendar app for the Google Calendar app. But the sa…