Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85

Blxter@lemmy.zip to Technology@lemmy.world – 886 points –
Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85
arstechnica.com
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Shit. That thing is supposedly hard to understand.

Very. And he was going blind, too. I read a marvellous interview with him not too long ago, I'll see if I can find it.

Ah, here it is: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thorny-problem-of-keeping-the-internets-time

Wow! What an interesting read about someone I've never heard of, but whose work has impacted daily life in so many ways. Its amazing how many systems rely on accurately telling time and the intricate solution that NTP is.

Dang. NTP is that, isn't it

image magic

The Internet would not collapse without images. Usability would be bad in many cases, but it would still work. Now imagine your clients don't know the time and cannot verify if a certificate is still valid?

I don't know the time right now and I barely function.

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Hard to understand but at least there's multiple implementations other than ntpd, like Chrony and systemd-timesyncd.

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