[time-nuts] Re: Where do people get the time?

[John Hawkinson]

Adam Space <time.isanapp at gmail.com> wrote on Mon, 27 Dec 2021
at 14:10:45 EST in <CAJiJePpk7q9Y7d2Tw6_Ruk+=bEPA+PjTvu21aS1kmKr4GOXXOw at mail.gmail.com>:

> As a younger person I appreciate this write-up. It is interesting to see
> the progression. Nowadays, phones are synchronized to within a second
> easily, and probably within 10ms

Would this were true, but it's not and you cannot rely on it.

Most notably for me is when I have my cellphone set to sync time to the network, every few months websites stop working and I look and it's bceuase the date has been reset back to 2011 or 2003 and so SSL certificate validity ranges are exceeded. And this with a major US telephone vendor whose corporate parents were RBOCs and a major handset manufacturer, flaw most recently seen in mid-2021. I suppose it's probably just a handful of cell sites that are misconfigured, but good luck getting it fixed.

> With computers too, I would bet that most come out of the box with
> some sort of NTP setup that at the very least keeps them within a
> few seconds, depending on how often the default polling interval
> is.

This is a lot closer to truth, but there's still a lot to go wrong.

Still, it's correct that if you care to get the time to within a tenth of second, which is all most people need, using a computer in a deliberate fashion is the easiest way to get there.

--
jhawk at alum.mit.edu
John Hawkinson