----- Original Message ----- > From: "John Gilmore" <g...@toad.com>
> Am I confused? Getting the time over a multi-gigabit Internet from a > national time standard agency such as NIST (or your local country's > equivalent) should produce far better accuracy and stability than > relying on locally received GPS signals. GPS uses very weak radio > signals which are regularly spoofed by all sorts of bad actors: > > https://www.gps.gov/spectrum/jamming/ > > for all sorts of reasons (like misleading drone navigation): > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident > > Depending on satnav systems creates a large single point of failure for > worldwide civilian infrastructure. > > Jamming GPS with subtly fake time data near big data centers seems like > an easy move that would cause all sorts of distributed algorithms to > start failing in unusual ways. And in a more serious wartime attack, > many or most GPS satellites themselves would be destroyed or disabled. Maybe I'm getting too old, but it seems to me like the time when Internet systems design engineers did *not* need to design like a nation-state actor might affect their systems by combat attack... ended a couple decades ago. And if your bean-counters tell you it's not cost-effective to make it that tight, maybe it's time to change jobs? Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://www.bcp38.info 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA BCP38: Ask For It By Name! +1 727 647 1274
