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Comment by adastra22

5 days ago

I know this is HN, but the internet is pretty low on the list of things NIST time standards are important for.

19 comments

adastra22

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willis936  5 days ago

But pretty high on the list that NIST NTP is important for (since it leaves the building through the internet).

  • adastra22  5 days ago

    If NIST NTP goes down, the internet doesn’t go down. But atomic clocks drifting does upset many scientific experiments, which would effectively go down for the duration of the outage.

    • willis936  5 days ago

      This is the reason GP listed out all the alternative robust NTP services that are GPS disciplined, freely available, and used as redundant sources by any responsible timekeeper.

      What atomic clocks are disciplined by NTP anyway? Local GPS disciplining is the standard. If you're using NTP you don't need precision or accuracy in your timekeeping.

    • willis936  3 days ago

      Also, I forgot to mention that NIST offers (and many institutions use) a service that provides a local rubidium reference that is GPS disciplined and they give you monthly reports that tell you the offset of the timestamps that were reported so they can be corrected. These services did not suffer interruptions.

_zoltan_  5 days ago

could you list 3 things that you think are more important than the internet? (I know the internet is going to be fine; I just want to understand what you think ranks higher globally...)

  • adastra22  5 days ago

    Mostly scientific stuff like astronomical observations — e.g. did this event observed at one telescope coincide with neutrinos detected at this other observatory.

    Note I didn’t say they are more important than the Internet. That’s a value judgement in any case. I said that NIST level 0 NTp servers are more important to these use cases than they are to the Internet.

  • Izmaki  5 days ago

    The ability for humankind to communicate across the entire globe at nearly 1/4 of the speed of light has drastically accelerated our technological advancement. There is no doubt that the internet is a HUGE addition to society.

    It's not super important when compared to basic needs like plumbing, food, electricity, medical assistance and other silly things we take for granted but are heavily dependent on. We all saw what happened to hospitals during the early stages of the COVID pandemic; we had plenty of internet and electricity but were struggling on the medical part. That was quite bad... I'm not sure if it's any worse if an entire country/continent lost access to the Internet. Quite a lot of our core infrastructure components in society rely on this. And a fair bit of it relies on a common understanding of what time "now" is.

  • makeitdouble  5 days ago

    I think it wont be affected by this but on the top of my head:

    - GPS

    - industrial complex that synchronize operations (we could include trains)

    - telecoms in general (so a level higher than the internet)