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Blog Editor’s Notes: Really, really interesting piece about the importance of time that also shows the dangers of getting time from only one source.
We think it would be a great idea if Americans, like folks in China, Russia, and South Korea, could get authoritative time from the government via multiple diverse sources.
If you haven’t yet read, check out our white paper “A Resilient National Timing Architecture.”
BTW – we changed the title of this post from what ZDNet had to make it a little bit clearer what the article was about.
Thanks to a nasty GPSD bug, real-life time travel trouble arrives this weekend
On October 24, 2021, some time-keeping systems are going to take a trip back in time to March 2012, unless you update your GPSD programs.
“Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?”
Actually, if you use computers for pretty much anything, you do. Oh, you may not know it if you’re not a system or network administrator, but security, identification, networks, everything that makes the internet go depends on accurate time-keeping. Some systems rely on Global Positioning Systems (GPS) appliances and the GPSD daemon to tell the exact time, and a nasty bug’s been uncovered in GPSD that’s going to pop up on October 24, 2021. If left unpatched, it’s going to switch your time to some time in March 2012, and your system will crash with a resounding kaboom. Here’s how it works.
