Saving NTP: The protocol that keeps time across the internet

[securitybreach]

SEATTLE -- We're foolish. We live our lives on the internet and we take it for granted. We don't realize that the internet is fragile as a Chihuly glass sculpture. As 2014 OpenSSL Heartbleed security security hole showed, vital internet infrastructure programs are being left unsupported.

 

NNTP is essential to the internet. Without it, servers and PCs wouldn't know what time it is. That, in turn, would mean backups would fail, financial transactions would go awry, and many fundamental network services wouldn't work. The primary time-keepers of the net are stratum-0 devices, i.e. atomic clocks. These are connected to other devices with NTP, which in turn set the time for everything online.

 

While the stratum devices belong to government agencies and corporations, NTP itself is a free project. It has only one manager, Harlan Stenn, and, until recently, he was running NTP on a shoestring from his home......

 

http://www.zdnet.com...funding-of-ntp/

[ebrke]

I was reading another article about NTP some months ago. All the huge banks and financial institutions depend on it for online trading, financial transactions, etc., and at that time none of them had stepped up to do anything about supporting it.

[securitybreach]

I was reading another article about NTP some months ago. All the huge banks and financial institutions depend on it for online trading, financial transactions, etc., and at that time none of them had stepped up to do anything about supporting it.

 

Yeah, I remember that article and I thought the same thing. Here huge companies are using his code but yet he hasn't made any money hardly at all from it. I am glad the Linux Foundation stepped up and started helping him out. He was gonna abandon NTP at one time as he was sick of not getting any credit.