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Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k
- mhovd 11mo agoI am surprised that NTP project is not funded, fully or partially, by larger organizations or governments, given the criticality of the project.
- philipwhiuk 11mo agoWhy is research into the protocol useful. Isn't it done?
- junon 11mo agoTime is hard, time synchronization is arguably harder.
- saikia81 11mo agoThe project isn't about research it's about creating a reference implementation
- philipwhiuk 11mo ago> The NTP Project conducts Research and Development in NTP, a protocol designed to synchronize the clocks of computers over a network to a common timebase. Research is put front and centre in their pitch for funding.
- ptero 11mo agoThis is probably research into protocol for time sync. Which works well for some scenarios, but not yet for others and can improve the reference implementation (I guess; I have no hard knowledge there). And given that ntp.org runs servers that so many organizations use they should be near the top of the funding queue for any NTP research. My 2c.
- willis936 11mo agoWhat's the distinction from NIST's internet time service?
- iamkonstantin 11mo agoWe keep coming up with new ways to use it: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20240011919 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20240011919
- freeopinion 11mo agoIt's telling that we can appropriate millions of dollars to transport a decommissioned shuttle from a museum in Virginia to Texas, but NASA can't pitch in the cost of one tank of diesel to the people maintaining what this article claims to be a mission-critical tool?
- NetMageSCW 11mo agoThe claim is false.
- jrmg 11mo agoDon’t think you deserve these downvotes. That was my reaction too. Perhaps they’re coming from people who believe that the money is to support running of time servers (which, to be fair, “Please donate to keep the Network Time Protocol up” certainly implies…) I too would be interested in knowing what the Network Time Foundation is researching, and I think conversation about that is appropriate here. NTP certainly _seems_ like it’s been ‘good enough’ for decades to an uninformed observer, and discussing if and why it’s not would be interesting (and perhaps motivate donations!)
- arccy 11mo agoIt's not really clear why they need this money either?
- simoncion 11mo ago> It's not really clear why they need this money either? Really? The sentence at the top of the Donate page seems pretty clear to me: > Your donation helps Network Time Foundation maintain the NTP website and provide resources and support to NTP developers. Is it unclear to you?
- tdeck 11mo agoIt is kind of vague IMO. Especially since most of the actual NTP infrastructure is run by governments, universities, and companies. https://gist.github.com/mutin-sa/eea1c396b1e610a2da1e5550d94b0453 https://gist.github.com/mutin-sa/eea1c396b1e610a2da1e5550d94... But..it's $1k. This is basically pocket change on an institutional level. I've been part of some very scrappy and poorly funded community organizations and even they took in more than $1k every year. Even if you don't believe NTP maintainers should be paid anything for their work (an opinion I don't hold), it's trivial to spend this amount on modest everyday expenses like renting a venue a couple of times, buying insurance, and paying for hosting and technical resources. EDIT: Here is their 2024 tax return https://www.nwtime.org/about/documents/2024_NTF_IRS_990.pdf https://www.nwtime.org/about/documents/2024_NTF_IRS_990.pdf It looks like they took in more than $200k and spent $100k on "contract services" (I can't tell what that means) and somewhat modest amounts on other things. Unfortunately I need to exit the rabbit hole now.
- simoncion 11mo ago> It is kind of vague IMO. How much more clear can they reasonably be? It seems a big waste of effort to maintain -say- a damnable Trello board with upcoming priorities and roadmaps <strike>and Kickstarter stretch goals</strike> when their bug tracker and mailing list are visible to the public. (Though, it seems that they've recently put the list behind some broken moderation software, so you have to go to -say- the IETF's archive of the thing to read it. "AI" crawlers ruin everything.) EDIT: Do note that that tax return you found is for the Network Time Foundation, not the NTP Project. I don't know if the two are separate entities for tax purposes, but do note that the NTF supports several projects, of which the NTP Project is one. The NTP Project is just for NTP.
- simoncion 11mo agoThe Network Time Foundation (which counts the NTP project among those it provides resources to) lists several corporate Members. But yeah, critical infrastructure usually goes criminally underfunded.
- NetMageSCW 11mo agoExcept they aren’t critical infrastructure which is why no one supports them.
- simoncion 11mo agoAccurate timekeeping is critical infrastructure. So much so, that the US government operates many radio stations whose sole purpose is to provide current time announcements, reference clocks, and other timekeeping-related information. See [0]. Relatedly: surely you're not of the opinion that the various GPS constellations are not critical infrastructure? [0] <https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-services/time-signal-broadcast-stations https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-se...>
- SAI_Peregrinus 11mo agoJust because other timekeeping projects are critical infrastructure doesn't mean that one NTP client is critical infrastructure.
- simoncion 11mo agoSure. I agree with you. You're absolutely correct.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- littlestymaar 11mo agoLarge tech companies and free-riding critical internet commons, name a better duo.
- shaky-carrousel 11mo agoThat would be easily solved by blocking from NTP any ip address belonging to a big tech corp that doesn't pony up.
- ralferoo 11mo agoNot really. The biggest drain on resources historically has come from things like routers that have fixed NTP servers hardcoded in the firmware and every customer ends up using just that one without even knowing they're contributing to the problem. They also can't be blocked as the requests could come from anywhere.
- Aurornis 11mo agoThe big companies have their own NTP pools and even implementations. You can use the public Google or AWS pools if you want. Note that they have their own software, too, so be sure you understand the differences like leap smearing. Blocking FAANG IPs from the NTP Foundation’s pools wouldn’t hurt FAANG at all. It would only hurt people who weren’t aware and used the NTP Foundation’s pool for things.
- aembleton 11mo agoItchy and Scratchy
- xigoi 11mo agohttps://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
- nickelpro 11mo agoThe reference implementation, while historically important, has largely been displaced by more secure/performant implementations (ntpsec, chrony), or by in-house implementations (Amazon, Google). Notably NTPd doesn't support leap-smear, which means those who absolutely must have monotonic time can't use it at all.
- mananaysiempre 11mo ago> Those who absolutely must have monotonic time ... shouldn’t be using a Unix timestamp, or anything else that’s not a count of SI seconds elapsed since a fixed reference point, to begin with.
- bobmcnamara 11mo agoPitch: TAI
- mananaysiempre 11mo agoKind of. If you “absolutely must” have monotonic time, though, and also care about NTP, then just pointing to TAI (in DJB’s naïve definition) or GPS time is not enough. You need to make decisions on whether you, for example, would prefer your imprecise seconds to be more even individually or for the aggregate count to be more accurate (NTP of course gets you the latter by default). Dear Sir[1], you have done metrology. [1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/rachit/post/you-have-built-a-compiler/ https://people.csail.mit.edu/rachit/post/you-have-built-a-co..., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29891428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29891428
- bobmcnamara 11mo agoI really just want the software time to be as good as the underlying hardware clock... ...rather than setting a rather awful minimum performance spec of 10ppm smearing over a leap second day. Three lies: Universal - multiple smear implementations, linear vs cosine off the top of my head. Coordinated - whose in charge here? Google? Facebook? Time - doesn't even try for 1s/s UTC is, for all intents and purposes, yet another human readable time zone. And should be treated as such. The underlying hardware problems I have and understand. Don't need the software making it worse.
- nubinetwork 11mo agoI figured they would be funded by NIST, but the way the US government has been pulling back funding for everything, it didn't surprise me that they need money. Much like Jimmy Wales, I bet if everyone donated 5 bucks they'd be in a much better spot.
- NetMageSCW 11mo agoThey need money because they aren’t important.
- jchw 11mo agoI tried to donate, but apparently I am not human: > 1 error prohibited this submission from being saved: > Looks like you are not a human Good to know.
- autoexec 11mo agoI'm not sure why they'd try so hard to keep bots from paying them anyway. If someone wants to write a bot that constantly pays me good money I'm fine with that. I might rate limit it if the stream of payments coming in can't cover the cost of keeping the server from being DoS'd, but that's not going to inconvenience a human trying to submit a payment one time.
- bmacho 11mo ago[deleted]
- mjhay 11mo agoIs there a problem with fraudsters donating to OSS projects?
- dietr1ch 11mo agoWell fraudsters need to have their time in sync for their business right? Who are you to deny their donations?
- johnisgood 11mo agoMoney is money. How do you know the cash you are using is not "blood money"? Come on.
- op7 11mo agoThen when too many of the fradulent payments get charged back then your payment processor drops you
- michaelt 11mo ago
- bheadmaster 11mo agoIt's sad that a project that literally every company in the world depends on is requiring donations to keep working.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- mapt 11mo agoI feel like a ~$10M/yr foundation to fund hundreds of the "Some Guy In Nebraska" people (https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/) on a modest stipend would be easily worthwhile for any one of the tech giants, even understanding the free rider effect. Some of their thousands of engineers are being paid high six or seven figures, and every single minute of their time spent figuring out how some dependency has changed and broken compatibility adds up very quickly. Just paying them to sit on their hands and not let anything break by some kind of hostile takeover, like an intelligence agency quietly paying people to keep quiet.
- jeffbee 11mo agoIt is apparently "Grossly Overestimate The Reliance of Companies on Open Software and Systems Week" and nobody told me.
- bheadmaster 11mo agoName one company that doesn't depend on NTP.
- jeffbee 11mo agoPerhaps it is just my career experience, but I have never worked at a company that 1) cared about the time and 2) did not have its own clocks and 3) would touch ntpd with a 10-foot pole.
- Aurornis 11mo agoThis donation is for the NTP Foundation for something specific like their website. The big companies who use NTP have their own pools and either use versions of different ntp implantations or their own internal ones. All of these comments assuming cloud providers are using the reference NTP implementation and the public pools have no idea what they’re talking about.
- seb1204 11mo agoWhy not just turn it off and say we need money to turn it in again?
- ramon156 11mo agoTurn what off?
- bilekas 11mo agoTime itself maybe, I know I could use with a little bit of a pause.
- baq 11mo agoReturn to the basement now. No escape.
- rswail 11mo agoI really enjoyed the first part (say 2-3 weeks) of COVID lockdowns, we had the longest in the world here and it got pretty old by the end of it, but the first few weeks, no traffic, no noise, quiet city. It was like a vacation for our heads. Not sure how, but a yearly "lockdown vacation" would be a Good Thing for our cities (IMNSHO).
- theblazehen 11mo agopool.ntp.org dns resolution and any servers that they control, presumably
- rnijveld 11mo agoThe ntp pool is actually independently run and funded and has nothing to do with the NTPd implementation nor the NTP Foundation, other than them allowing the pool to use that DNS name.
- onion2k 11mo agoThat might work, but the second order effect would probably be companies trying to do the work of time synchronisation themselves in case it happened again. That would lead to fragmentation and incompatibility.
- tomashubelbauer 11mo agoI wish when accepting donations, websites would stop caching the total collected amount or give it a super short TTL. I like to see the little progress bar get closer to the goal thanks to my couple of bucks.
- pigbearpig 11mo agoPerhaps they don't have the funds to implement that feature.
- dspillett 11mo agoIf they are only counting fully cleared funds, your payment might not be relevant yet. Some fraud checks are not synchronous, for instance. Though they could fake it: take the current cleared total and add your amount for your display.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- 47282847 11mo agoConfusing. On https://www.nwtime.org/ https://www.nwtime.org/ they use $11,000 as “November 2025 goal“, with $4,675 as current level? Are these goals monthly goals, with the counter being reset? The sites don’t make that clear.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- dependency_2x 11mo agohttps://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dependency_2x.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dependency_2x.png
- lifestyleguru 11mo agoThere are always money and resources in ad tech.
- NetMageSCW 11mo agoExcept these are some (almost scammers) claiming to be a vital pillar but just pointing at the vital piece and saying they help with it.
- clbrmbr 11mo agoThe folks who run the public NTP pool really ought not to make it easier to pay them money to use it commercially. I submitted a request for commercial use via their online form but never received a response.
- homebrewer 11mo agoIt's mostly run by one guy with very limited time. On their forum, I've seen one vendor repeatedly asking for the vendor prefix for three years, only getting the response once, and never actually receiving the prefix.
- Theodores 11mo agoSo we have NTP begging to raise a grand yet we have hundreds of billions being spent on AI data centers. NTP might not be able to generate AI cat videos full of hallucinations but it is a vital part of web infrastructure. The same can't be said about today's mega projects.
- iberator 11mo agoPTP is way better than NTP, but it might be possible that reference time is somehow taken from NTP anyway. What I Mean: Reference .gov atomic clock (not radium one) -> NTP -> ? -> ? -> satellite control station -> gps -> PTP Hahaha
- great_wubwub 11mo agoPTP is more precise so it's much harder to synchronize over long distances. Even in data centers it benefits from hop-by-hop participation from the routers involved.
- jhellan 11mo agoThis is true when all network delays between the synchronized device and the time reference are deterministic and accounted for in the configuration. The design of PTP assumes that this is the case. NTP, on the other hand, estimates the network delays to its time references. Is there any reason to believe that PTP would be better in normal networks?
- imglorp 11mo agoThe project has been hungry for years. There was a fork to clean up and secure the implementation: https://ntpsec.org https://ntpsec.org and ideally they would combine forces. Summarized here: https://lwn.net/Articles/713901 https://lwn.net/Articles/713901
- tptacek 11mo agoYeah the ntpsec story, not great. I don't believe they're taken especially seriously. There are people close to Harlan Stenn who believe the project is essentially fraudulent.
- BigTTYGothGF 11mo ago> the project is essentially fraudulent Even if it's not, ESR is involved so it's not serious.
- imglorp 11mo agoSo, I understand first hand ESR might be a little, uh, eccentric, when dealing with humans. But it seems that his nerding, taken by itself, is pretty solid. Is that not the case?
- tptacek 11mo agoNo, I don't think it is.
- acdha 11mo agoIt’s fairly limited: taking over maintenance for popmail or forking NTPSec certainly isn’t nothing but his reputation is built on the Cathedral and Bazaar essay getting attention at the right time in the 90s when open source was really taking off and his subsequent OSI work. I’d wager that an order of magnitude more people heard about fetchmail from his writing rather than the other way around. That’s not to say that his open source projects aren’t useful, only that there are thousands of other developers who’ve done work of similar scale and adoption.
- sathackr 11mo agoThat seems very low for such a high profile site/project I donated an amount but the bar didn't move and is at the same level($395) as before my donation
- sathackr 11mo agoIf you follow the "Foundations work" link at the bottom, you're taken to another page that shows $4,675 of $11,000 November goal.
- sathackr 11mo agoLooks like the first $1000 goal is specifically for maintaining to he NTP website and maybe developers? While the other is a broader goal for the foundation
- Velocifyer 11mo agoThe bar is still at $395. I am suspicious.
- khernandezrt 11mo agoI think someone is manually updating the site to whatever the current donation amount is.
- jacquesm 11mo agoThey should just switch it off for a day or two, I don't think they'll have trouble getting funding after that.
- stego-tech 11mo agoAbsolutely shameful that this project - and many, many others that underpin trillion-dollar tech company valuations - aren’t fully funded already by the major consumers. I’d like to see more projects do a breakdown of total yearly costs (including contributor compensation!), how much existing sponsorships from companies actually cover, and what number they’d need to operate properly (with full-time, paid contributors).
- g-mork 11mo agoI'm not so sure, becoming dependent on corporate funding means importing corporate policy. Is it really necessary for a DEI policy being required to appear on ntp.org, or perhaps the sudden advocacy of some proprietary protocol crapware pushed into public use from out of nowhere? That's pretty much what tends to happen Of course the same thing happens in reverse (see recent python.org refusal to accept federal funding)
- stego-tech 11mo agoNot gonna lie, you had me going in the first sentence and then betrayed your position with: > Is it really necessary for a DEI policy being required to appear…? So ignoring the, well, ignorance of the remainder of your statement, it’s worth pointing out that these entities already publish mission statements, community/contributor guidelines, and a raft of other documentation that governs how they intend to operate as a way of greasing the wheels of operations. Policies are the norm, not the exception, because they dictate the rules of engagement. So yeah, I’m all for groups making clear what they do and do not find acceptable. Transparency is a good thing, be it in code (open source), accounting, policy, or governance. And if more groups opened up their books and laid bare their operations, it’d be easier to tie their outcomes to industrial and governmental bad actors (like AWS, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc) that fail to substantially support these technologies, or demand favors or policy changes in exchange for basic funding. Ideally? Orgs that use open source tech in their products ought to chip in a fixed percentage to ongoing support of that project. If an entity like AWS chipped in, say, 0.01% of revenue from every service that used NTP, then the NTP organization almost certainly wouldn’t require additional funding.
- Velocifyer 11mo agoMost NTP users use better implementations that NTPd (like chrony)
- gnarlouse 11mo agoI’m confused—why such a small donation amount?
- juliusceasar 11mo agoI refuse to donate. Trillion dollar companies depend leech on it and yet refuse to spend money on it. Let it fail and see what happens.
- Barbing 11mo agoAnyone know whether NTP already asks the biggest names for donations?
- sph 11mo agoHarsh but true. Any of the FAANGs could cough up a million dollars and let the thing run for 1000 months. I’m too poor to have too much revenue that I need to donate some away to pay fewer taxes. That’s a problem corporations have.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- jahnu 11mo agoEven a single highly paid employee of a FAANG, many of whom frequent this very forum, could pay for a year without breaking the bank.
- throwaway838112 11mo agoThey would rather downvote you than giving away $100
- NetMageSCW 11mo agoBecause it is factually wrong, which would have taken seconds to discover.
- codingdave 11mo ago100% true, but they shouldn't have to. If FAANG is using it, they should fund it. I don't want to work in a culture where the employees pay for the corporations' tools.
- Bender 11mo agoRather than money one can donate NTP servers to the pool. [1] It can be a fun learning exercise in setting up a stable stratum-2 time server. One can create graphs from the optional logs. Why bother? Many of the rabbit holes one could venture down in learning to set up a stable time server can also benefit application servers in terms of latency, responsiveness, learning how to get clients to share resources and so much more. Rather than trying to find cooperative stratum-1 servers, one can start by using each of the Google, Facebook and Apple public stratum-1 servers [2] to get started. They get beat up a lot but most of them are stable most of the time. Ask your favorite LLM how to set up a public NTP server using NTPD or Chrony. For extra credit play with each of them. [1] - https://www.ntppool.org/en/join.html https://www.ntppool.org/en/join.html [2] - # grep -E "facebo|goog|appl" /etc/hosts 17.253.16.253 time.apple.com 129.134.28.123 time1.facebook.com 129.134.29.123 time2.facebook.com 129.134.25.123 time3.facebook.com 129.134.26.123 time4.facebook.com 129.134.27.123 time5.facebook.com 216.239.35.0 time1.google.com 216.239.35.4 time2.google.com 216.239.35.8 time3.google.com 216.239.35.12 time4.google.com
- tonyarkles 11mo agoOne of the really nifty things about having a stratum-1 time server on-site (because... reasons) is those graphs. You can very readily see the subtle temperature-dependence of timing crystals. At the facility I was at there was a large cycle every day during the week and then smaller cycle on each weekend day. Our HVAC system didn't heat/cool the building as much on the weekend when no one was there so the temperature swing -> frequency swing was smaller. Really drives home one of my favourite half-jokes: every sensor is a temperature sensor; some of them measure other things too.
- dboreham 11mo agoWe ran a public NTP server for many years. Then, details hazy, but I think there was a UDP amplification vulnerability that was exploited which upset our transit provider so we took it down. Might be fun to try again though.
- Analemma_ 11mo ago
- marginalx 11mo agoThe domain ntp.org is a very visible one, why not add a "Donors" page and say everyone who donates 250+ gets to show their company name as a sponsor on that page? This usually gets the attention of corporates and makes it easy to make the case internally as well, they all love to sponsor!
- rnijveld 11mo agoAs someone working on an NTP implementation (specifically ntpd-rs) I have to add some context to this: I do believe that donating to the Network Time Foundation is fine, but it is not required to keep the Network Time Protocol up in any way. Firstly, the most important reason the ntp.org domain name is so well known is because of the NTP pool, which is an entirely separate project (the Network Time Foundation calls it an associated project), which was allowed to use the `pool.ntp.org` domain name, but does not directly receive significant funding from the Network Time Foundation as far as I understand (I do not know the details of the domain name arrangement). That pool project was developed independently of the Network Time Foundation and is run by a different group of volunteers, mostly being developed and maintained by Ask Bjørn Hansen and hosting servers entirely consisting of (sometimes professional) volunteer operators. This is what many NTP implementations, specifically many Linux distributions, use as their standard source of time. But it does not appear to depend much on the Network Time Foundation for continued existence. Secondly, despite all the claims made on the Network Time Foundation site, the IETF took over development and maintenance of the NTP protocol for something like two decades now already under the NTP working group. This was all done with the Network Time Foundation fully agreeing this was the way forward. But for some reason they still consider themselves exempted from any process that the IETF uses and consider themselves as the true developers of the protocol. They constantly frustrate the processes that the IETF uses, claiming that they should receive special treatment as being the 'reference implementation'. Meanwhile, the IETF NTP WG does not have a concept of the reference implementation at all, instead considering all NTP implementations equal. Aside from this frustrating stance, the Network Time Foundation also didn't do much work on trying to forward the standard at all, instead relying on the status quo from the late 90s and early 2000s. Meanwhile the IETF NTP WG worked on standardizing a way to secure NTP traffic (with regular NTP traffic being relatively easy to man in the middle, with older implementations even being so predictable that faking responses didn't even need reading the requests). That much more secure standard, NTS, was fully standardized in September of 2020, but the Network Time Foundation continues to not implement this standard. All of this has resulted in almost every Linux distribution that I know of replacing their ntpd implementation with NTPsec (with ntpd not even being available as an alternative anymore for installation). Meanwhile people also started working on NTPv5, in order to remove some of the unsafe and badly defined parts of the standard, and in general bring the spec back up to date. As part of this process, it was decided some time ago that in contrast to the previous NTP standards, the algorithms specifying what a client should do in order to synchronize the time should be removed from the standard (the algorithms specified in the previous standards were not being used by any implementation, not even the ntpd implementation by the Network Time Foundation itself). NTPv5 instead focuses on the wire format of NTP packets and the simple interactions between parties. Yet despite there having been a consensus call on this, and despite no current implementation following the exact algorithm as specified in NTPv4, the Network Time Foundation continues to frustrate the process by claiming that these algorithms are an essential part of the standard. All of this frustration was also a large part of why the PTP protocol was eventually developed at the IEEE. That is to say: even though the operating mode of PTP is often quite different to that of NTP these days, the information that needs to be transferred is essentially the same, and the packets could have trivially been defined to be the same as long as NTP had built in a little bit of additional flexibility a little bit earlier. This would have also helped NTP in the end (with for example hardware timestamping only being implemented for PTP right now, even though it could have been just as useful in NTP), and with PTP now also aiming to introduce a simpler client-server model via CSPTP that looks a whole lot like what NTP was trying to achieve all this time with its most used operating mode. It is my belief that the Network Time Foundation continues to push themselves in a corner of more and more irrelevance even though that did not need to be. The historical significance of David Mills' ntpd implementation is definitely there, and we should applaud the initial efforts and their focus on keeping the protocol open and widely available. And I do believe that the current people at the Network Time Foundation could still provide more than enough valuable input in the standardization process, but they cannot claim anymore to be the sole developers of the NTP protocol. Times have changed, there are now multiple implementations with an equally valid claim. Especially with GNSS (specifically GPS) being under attack more and more these days, we need alternative ways of synchronizing computer clocks to a standard time in a secure way. NTP and NTS are perfectly positioned to take on that task and we need to make sure that we keep the standard up to date for our evolving world. Edit: if you want something else to donate to, I would consider donating to the IETF, NTPsec, or maybe donating some time to the NTP pool. I would also link to donations for Chrony (one of the other major NTP server implementations) but they do not appear to offer anything. Linking to my own project's donation page does not seem fair considering the contents of this post.
- cpburns2009 11mo agoThe GitHub sponsors page provides slightly more information than ntp.org and nwtime.org. https://github.com/sponsors/nwtime https://github.com/sponsors/nwtime
- emsign 11mo ago$1 Trillion for AI but we the people have to keep this foundation of the internet running. This is all one big shit show.
- righthand 11mo agoHonestly the XSLT mocking and bad faith arguments have convinced me as an individual I shouldn’t care about technologies so much. If NTP is so important, one of the billion dollar corpos can foot the bill since they know best about what is valuable.
- Aurornis 11mo agoThis was submitted with a title that doesn’t match the page and is not even accurste (Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up) is not correct. This donation page is not for the public NTP pool. It’s for the NTP Project organization and their web page. All of the angry comments from people who think NTP will stop working if the donation bar doesn’t get to $1000 are misinformed. Also note that the bar isn’t updating. It’s been stuck at $365 for myself and others despite donations coming in.
- mmmpetrichor 11mo agoI think maybe the title of this topic post is the main source of misinformation.
- Aurornis 11mo agoIt’s definitely the title. The title is a plain and simple lie.
- gastonmorixe 11mo agoyeah. Lesson learned: never share on HN late at night without paying more attention. I’m sorry guys. It wasn’t my intention at all, I was trying to learn about time syncing and thought they really needed help to keep the site and devs support up. 2 months left and 1k goal looked sad and perfect for us to help. I failed in the title badly and no idea what they are doing by changing the goal. I will dig deeper later. It was 100% my fault. Stop donating. I only hope they are not a scam. :/
- jrmg 11mo agoYou’re right, people are plainly commenting based on the title. The goal has now mysteriously changed to a goal of $4000.
- calvinmorrison 11mo agonothing could be LESS mysterious
- calibas 11mo agoSome of the comments here seem overly negative and critical. They support billions of devices and are only asking for $4,000 in donations per year.
- NetMageSCW 11mo agoThey support no devices. Read more carefully.
- calibas 11mo agoIt's almost certain NTP is what's synchronizing time on your system right now. And yes, they're separate from the NTP Pool Project, which runs the actual servers, but the Network Time Foundation supports the software that billions of devices run on.
- calibas 11mo agoNever mind, they keep upping the max every time they reach it. Now it's an $11,000 goal...
- 1970-01-01 11mo agoI hate to say it, but a number that low means ads are the answer. Even a YouTube video showing how to set up NTP would cover this cost if you recommend it to all users. Asking for money isn't respectable at this low number.
- NoSalt 11mo agoOk Musk, Bezos, Gates, etc. ... reach into those deeeeeeeep pockets of yours and fund something that I KNOW you use.
- almosthere 11mo agoit must be fake if it wanted 1k and now 4k. dont donate
- jcalvinowens 11mo agoMeh. NTP is just an awkward less accurate frontend for GPS these days. It's so easy to run your own NTP server. You can set up a pretty decent one using GPS PPS for like $200. My home ntp server is good for +/- 1us if you believe its ntpq stats... This isn't like DNS. Everyone can run their own local NTP and that's fine. The only true shared infrastructure is the GPS constellation.
- knadh 11mo agoWe've allocated $60,000 to NTP from FLOSS/fund [1]. It happened in May, but the disbursal is pending owing to paperwork [2]. We hope it'll go through in the next couple of months. [1] https://floss.fund/projects/2025/ https://floss.fund/projects/2025/ [2] https://floss.fund/blog/second-tranche-2025-anniversary/#what-has-not-been-great https://floss.fund/blog/second-tranche-2025-anniversary/#wha...
- VoidWhisperer 11mo agoThe combination of the moving goalposts for donations (they changed it from $1000 goal to $4000 after hitting their goal[0]) and the fact that they have have a large donation like this pending but simply haven't completed the paperwork kind of rubs me the wrong way a little bit. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20251112110436/https://www.ntp.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20251112110436/https://www.ntp.o...
- knadh 11mo agoThe delay is on our side while we wait for regulatory approvals (India) for cross-border disbursements, I must clarify. The issues are described in the post I linked [2].