The mod in this situation isn't an employee, it looks like.
On the plus side, this has made them open up a tiny bit. And, if you expose your QNAP to the internet, there's a risk of getting malware. This is what made me give up on the added features.Īlso, be aware that some added features have moved to a subscription model. For example, you can set up VLANs and you can bind services to specific physical network interfaces, but you can't bind a service to a VLAN interface. I've just found too many odd limitations with the device to use it for much more than that. The only bit of smarts I use is the Hybrid Backup Sync utility to back up important folders to external drives and, when I get around to setting it up, some kind of off-site backup. I basically use it as a dumb storage server (NFS, SMB, and iSCSI) and for that it works really well. I've got a QNAP TS-451 and it works, but I don't find that the added features are really worth anything. 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.Įither way, I'd expect far more responsible thinking from such a supposedly mature company. So, either Google themselves is directly implementing deceptive trade practices, or they are stupidly enabeling all kinds of new cybercrime. 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.įor a moment, let's go with your idea that Google didn't do #4 & #5.įirst, 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?Īside 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'. Items 1, 2, and 3 are ok, and are the feature Um, google is 1) automatically reading my mail, 2) noticing that I made an air travel reservation, 3) populating my calendar with the relevant times, 4) populating my calendar with a fake hotel reservation disguised to look as if I made it, and 5) sending both email and calendar notifications that I'd failed to confirm that fake reservation. Sadly, it is also another bad example to magnify the stereotype of technology people with no ethical grounding (broadly, I don't think it's true, but it happens enough that it smears all of us). That was just so far beyond crossing the line that I want nothing to do with any such feature. They presume to make a booking, populate it into my calendar, then send an email & alert in the calendar claiming that I failed to confirm the booking that they claim that I made - flat-out lying to me, hoping I'm just in too much of a rush to notice that their booking was not one that I'd intended. I'd be mildly ok with Google sending an offer email resembling: "Here's a potentially good hotel for your trip, would you like to book this, confirm, and insert in calendar?" (ya, it's spam, but at least sort of on-topic).īut what Google was doing is highly offensive and dishonest. 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?" messages and manually delete them. 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).