7 ms·
Can anybody expand on the implications of this? Being unfamiliar with it, it's hard to tell if this is a minor blip that happens all the time, or if it's poten
by cdfuller 11mo ago
Can anybody expand on the implications of this?
Being unfamiliar with it, it's hard to tell if this is a minor blip that happens all the time, or if it's potentially a major issue that could cause cascading errors equal to the hype of Y2K.
- ThrowawayTestr 11mo agoIf your computer was using it as your time server and you didn't have alternatives configured your clock my have drifted a few seconds.
- Roark66 11mo agoI never checked it, but how much a typical's pc/server's clock does actually drift over a week or a month? I always thought it's well under a second.
- bhouston 11mo agoClocks do drift. Seconds a week is definitely possible. I think there are varying quality of internal clocks in electronic devices, and the cheaper the quality the more drift there is. I think small cheap microcontrollers can drift seconds per day.
- ycui1986 11mo agocheap microcontrollers use RC oscillators. If they only drift a few seconds a day, that would be an achievement by itself. RC oscillator is poor enough that early days USB communication would fail if running on RC clock.
- 1970-01-01 11mo agoI've seen some new ThinkPads lose a minute a month and others (the old ThinkPads) keep within a second of NTP over an entire year. It depends.
- layer8 11mo agoSeveral seconds per week is normal. Oscillator accuracy is roughly on the order of 10 PPM, which would correspond to 6 seconds per week.
- soared 11mo agoI have an extremely cheap and extremely low power automatic cat feed - it’s been on 2 D batteries for 18 months. I just reset it after it had drifted 19 minutes, so about 1 minute a month, or 15 seconds a week!
- franklyworks 11mo agoTime engineers are very paranoid. I expect large problems can't occur due to a single provider misbehaving.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- autarch 11mo agoTime travel is extremely dangerous right now. I highly recommend deferring time travel plans except for extreme temporal emergencies.
- yawpitch 11mo agoDefine “extreme”?
- fuzztester 11mo agoSame for database transaction roll back and roll forward actions. And most enterprises, including banks, use databases. So by bad luck, you may get a couple of transactions reversed in order of time, such as a $20 debit incorrectly happening before a $10 credit, when your bank balance was only $10 prior to both those transactions. So your balance temporarily goes negative. Now imagine if all those amounts were ten thousand times higher ...
- ill13 11mo agoTo clear, most banks "sort" transactions from to high to low to create more NSF fees on purpose. That purpose equates to over $12 billion in fees for 2024 https://finhealthnetwork.org/research/overdraft-nsf-fees-bigger-burden-than-previously-estimated/ https://finhealthnetwork.org/research/overdraft-nsf-fees-big...
- ssl-3 11mo agoAwful stuff. I was just starting off in life (kid, girl, job, apartment, bank, debit card, bills) when I made a 63-cent error with my bank account. Which is to say: If all of the negative debits and all of the positive credits were summed, then the account would have been in the negative by 63 cents. I screwed up. And in a fair and just world, I'd owe the bank some extra tithing for quite clearly having spent some money that I very definitely did not have. Maybe $20 for the error and $10 per day spent in the red, plus the 63 cents, or something along those lines. But it wasn't that way. Because the transactions were processed in batches that were re-ordered to be highest-first, I discovered that I owed the bank a little more than $430. At the time (around 25 years ago, now) that was an absolute mountain of money to me. The banker at the branch I went into was unapologetic and crass about the fees. Looking over my transactions, they said "You know how to do math, right? You should have known that the account was overdrawn, but you were just out spending money willy-nilly all over town anyway." I replied with something like "I made a single error of 63 cents. The rest of what you said is an invention." This went back and forth for a bit before I successfully managed to leave the building without any handcuffs, fire trucks, or ambulances becoming involved -- and I still owed them more than $430. The lesson I learned was very simple: Seriously, fuck those guys. ($12 billion in 2024, huh? That's all? Maybe the no-fee fintechs are winning.)
- Animats 11mo agoGoogle has their own fleet of atomic clocks and time servers. So does AWS. So does Microsoft. So does Ubuntu. They're not going to drift enough for months to cause trouble. So the Internet can ride through this, mostly. The main problem will be services that assume at least one of the NIST time servers is up. Somewhere, there's going to be something that won't work right when all the NIST NTP servers are down. But what?
- adastra22 11mo agoI know this is HN, but the internet is pretty low on the list of things NIST time standards are important for.
- willis936 11mo agoBut pretty high on the list that NIST NTP is important for (since it leaves the building through the internet).
- adastra22 11mo agoIf NIST NTP goes down, the internet doesn’t go down. But atomic clocks drifting does upset many scientific experiments, which would effectively go down for the duration of the outage.
- willis936 11mo agoThis is the reason GP listed out all the alternative robust NTP services that are GPS disciplined, freely available, and used as redundant sources by any responsible timekeeper. What atomic clocks are disciplined by NTP anyway? Local GPS disciplining is the standard. If you're using NTP you don't need precision or accuracy in your timekeeping.
- szundi 11mo ago[dead]
- 11mo ago
- jhart99 11mo agoNIST maintains several time standards. Gaithersburg MD is still up and I assume Hawaii is as well. Other than potential damage to equipment from loss of power (turbo molecular vacuum pumps and oil diffusion pumps might end up failing in interesting ways if not shut down properly) it will just take some time for the clocks to be recalibrated against the other NIST standards.
- 1970-01-01 11mo ago>Can anybody expand on the implications of this? The answer is no. Anyone claiming this will have an impact on infrastructure has no evidence backing it up. Table top exercises at best.
- cramcgrab 11mo agoI’d say everybody moving off NIST boulder NTP.
- meindnoch 11mo agoUnix timestamp resets to zero.
- __turbobrew__ 11mo agoI always wanted to see what the 70s were like, heres to hoping it happens.
- estimator7292 11mo agoNo noteworthy impact at all. The NTP network has hundreds to thousands of redundant servers and hundreds of redundant reference clocks. The network will route around the damage with no real effects. Maybe a few microseconds of jitter as you have to ask a more distant server for the time.
- ncr100 11mo agoSongs with lyrics such as, "What time is it?" will have no clap back. Perhaps, "We don't know." will become popular?