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I am surprised that NTP project is not funded, fully or partially, by larger organizations or governments, given the criticality of the project.
by mhovd 10mo ago
I am surprised that NTP project is not funded, fully or partially, by larger organizations or governments, given the criticality of the project.
- philipwhiuk 10mo agoWhy is research into the protocol useful. Isn't it done?
- junon 10mo agoTime is hard, time synchronization is arguably harder.
- saikia81 10mo agoThe project isn't about research it's about creating a reference implementation
- philipwhiuk 10mo ago> The NTP Project conducts Research and Development in NTP, a protocol designed to synchronize the clocks of computers over a network to a common timebase. Research is put front and centre in their pitch for funding.
- ptero 10mo agoThis is probably research into protocol for time sync. Which works well for some scenarios, but not yet for others and can improve the reference implementation (I guess; I have no hard knowledge there). And given that ntp.org runs servers that so many organizations use they should be near the top of the funding queue for any NTP research. My 2c.
- willis936 10mo agoWhat's the distinction from NIST's internet time service?
- iamkonstantin 10mo agoWe keep coming up with new ways to use it: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20240011919 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20240011919
- freeopinion 10mo agoIt's telling that we can appropriate millions of dollars to transport a decommissioned shuttle from a museum in Virginia to Texas, but NASA can't pitch in the cost of one tank of diesel to the people maintaining what this article claims to be a mission-critical tool?
- NetMageSCW 10mo agoThe claim is false.
- jrmg 10mo agoDon’t think you deserve these downvotes. That was my reaction too. Perhaps they’re coming from people who believe that the money is to support running of time servers (which, to be fair, “Please donate to keep the Network Time Protocol up” certainly implies…) I too would be interested in knowing what the Network Time Foundation is researching, and I think conversation about that is appropriate here. NTP certainly _seems_ like it’s been ‘good enough’ for decades to an uninformed observer, and discussing if and why it’s not would be interesting (and perhaps motivate donations!)
- simoncion 10mo agoThe Network Time Foundation (which counts the NTP project among those it provides resources to) lists several corporate Members. But yeah, critical infrastructure usually goes criminally underfunded.
- NetMageSCW 10mo agoExcept they aren’t critical infrastructure which is why no one supports them.
- simoncion 10mo agoAccurate timekeeping is critical infrastructure. So much so, that the US government operates many radio stations whose sole purpose is to provide current time announcements, reference clocks, and other timekeeping-related information. See [0]. Relatedly: surely you're not of the opinion that the various GPS constellations are not critical infrastructure? [0] <https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-services/time-signal-broadcast-stations https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-se...>
- SAI_Peregrinus 10mo agoJust because other timekeeping projects are critical infrastructure doesn't mean that one NTP client is critical infrastructure.
- simoncion 10mo agoSure. I agree with you. You're absolutely correct.
- arccy 10mo agoIt's not really clear why they need this money either?
- simoncion 10mo ago> It's not really clear why they need this money either? Really? The sentence at the top of the Donate page seems pretty clear to me: > Your donation helps Network Time Foundation maintain the NTP website and provide resources and support to NTP developers. Is it unclear to you?
- tdeck 10mo agoIt is kind of vague IMO. Especially since most of the actual NTP infrastructure is run by governments, universities, and companies. https://gist.github.com/mutin-sa/eea1c396b1e610a2da1e5550d94b0453 https://gist.github.com/mutin-sa/eea1c396b1e610a2da1e5550d94... But..it's $1k. This is basically pocket change on an institutional level. I've been part of some very scrappy and poorly funded community organizations and even they took in more than $1k every year. Even if you don't believe NTP maintainers should be paid anything for their work (an opinion I don't hold), it's trivial to spend this amount on modest everyday expenses like renting a venue a couple of times, buying insurance, and paying for hosting and technical resources. EDIT: Here is their 2024 tax return https://www.nwtime.org/about/documents/2024_NTF_IRS_990.pdf https://www.nwtime.org/about/documents/2024_NTF_IRS_990.pdf It looks like they took in more than $200k and spent $100k on "contract services" (I can't tell what that means) and somewhat modest amounts on other things. Unfortunately I need to exit the rabbit hole now.
- simoncion 10mo ago> It is kind of vague IMO. How much more clear can they reasonably be? It seems a big waste of effort to maintain -say- a damnable Trello board with upcoming priorities and roadmaps <strike>and Kickstarter stretch goals</strike> when their bug tracker and mailing list are visible to the public. (Though, it seems that they've recently put the list behind some broken moderation software, so you have to go to -say- the IETF's archive of the thing to read it. "AI" crawlers ruin everything.) EDIT: Do note that that tax return you found is for the Network Time Foundation, not the NTP Project. I don't know if the two are separate entities for tax purposes, but do note that the NTF supports several projects, of which the NTP Project is one. The NTP Project is just for NTP.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- littlestymaar 10mo agoLarge tech companies and free-riding critical internet commons, name a better duo.
- aembleton 10mo agoItchy and Scratchy
- shaky-carrousel 10mo agoThat would be easily solved by blocking from NTP any ip address belonging to a big tech corp that doesn't pony up.
- ralferoo 10mo agoNot really. The biggest drain on resources historically has come from things like routers that have fixed NTP servers hardcoded in the firmware and every customer ends up using just that one without even knowing they're contributing to the problem. They also can't be blocked as the requests could come from anywhere.
- Aurornis 10mo agoThe big companies have their own NTP pools and even implementations. You can use the public Google or AWS pools if you want. Note that they have their own software, too, so be sure you understand the differences like leap smearing. Blocking FAANG IPs from the NTP Foundation’s pools wouldn’t hurt FAANG at all. It would only hurt people who weren’t aware and used the NTP Foundation’s pool for things.
- xigoi 10mo agohttps://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
- nickelpro 10mo agoThe reference implementation, while historically important, has largely been displaced by more secure/performant implementations (ntpsec, chrony), or by in-house implementations (Amazon, Google). Notably NTPd doesn't support leap-smear, which means those who absolutely must have monotonic time can't use it at all.
- mananaysiempre 10mo ago> Those who absolutely must have monotonic time ... shouldn’t be using a Unix timestamp, or anything else that’s not a count of SI seconds elapsed since a fixed reference point, to begin with.
- bobmcnamara 10mo agoPitch: TAI
- mananaysiempre 10mo agoKind of. If you “absolutely must” have monotonic time, though, and also care about NTP, then just pointing to TAI (in DJB’s naïve definition) or GPS time is not enough. You need to make decisions on whether you, for example, would prefer your imprecise seconds to be more even individually or for the aggregate count to be more accurate (NTP of course gets you the latter by default). Dear Sir[1], you have done metrology. [1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/rachit/post/you-have-built-a-compiler/ https://people.csail.mit.edu/rachit/post/you-have-built-a-co..., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29891428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29891428
- bobmcnamara 10mo agoI really just want the software time to be as good as the underlying hardware clock... ...rather than setting a rather awful minimum performance spec of 10ppm smearing over a leap second day. Three lies: Universal - multiple smear implementations, linear vs cosine off the top of my head. Coordinated - whose in charge here? Google? Facebook? Time - doesn't even try for 1s/s UTC is, for all intents and purposes, yet another human readable time zone. And should be treated as such. The underlying hardware problems I have and understand. Don't need the software making it worse.
- nubinetwork 10mo agoI figured they would be funded by NIST, but the way the US government has been pulling back funding for everything, it didn't surprise me that they need money. Much like Jimmy Wales, I bet if everyone donated 5 bucks they'd be in a much better spot.
- NetMageSCW 10mo agoThey need money because they aren’t important.