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The maintainer of N.T.P. has gone blind and few people appear to be both capable and willing to oversee this critical yet overlooked protocol
| A handful of researchers were already using the network to connect their distant computers and trade information. But the fidelity of that exchanged data was threatened by a distinct deficiency: the machines did not share a single, reliable synchronized time.
In the early seventies, as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, Mill had written programs that decoded shortwave radio and telegraph signals.
| Later, largely for fun, he’d studied how the clocks in a power grid could wander several seconds in the course of a hot summer’s day. (The extent of their shifts depended not just on the temperature but on whether the grid used coal or hydropower.) Now he concentrated on the problem of keeping time across a far-flung computer network.
| To solve the problem of time synchronization on the ARPANET, Mills built what programmers call a protocol—a collection of rules and procedures that creates a lingua franca for disparate devices. The ARPANET was experimental and capricious: electronics failed regularly, and technological misbehavior was common. His protocol sought to detect and correct for those misdeeds, creating a consensus about the time through an ingenious system of suspicion.
| Mills prided himself on puckish nomenclature, and so his clock-synchronizing system distinguished reliable “truechimers” from misleading “falsetickers.” An operating system named Fuzzball, which he designed, facilitated the early work. Mills called his creation the Network Time Protocol, and N.T.P. soon became a key component of the nascent Internet. Programmers followed its instructions when they wrote timekeeping code for their computers.
| By 1988, Mills had refined N.T.P. to the point where it could synchronize the clocks of connected computers that had been telling vastly differing times to within tens of milliseconds—a fraction of a blink of an eye.
Today, we take global time synchronization for granted. It is critical to the Internet, and therefore to civilization. Vital systems—power grids, financial markets, telecommunications networks—rely on it to keep records and sort cause from effect.
| NTP works in partnership with satellite systems, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), and other technologies to synchronize time. The time kept by precise and closely aligned atomic clocks, for instance, can be broadcast via GPS. to numerous receivers, including those in cell towers; those receivers can be attached to NTP servers that then distribute the time across devices linked together by the Internet. (Atomic clocks can also directly feed the time to NTP servers.)
| For decades, Mills was the person who decided how N.T.P. should work. But his tenure is coming to an end. Mills was born with glaucoma. When he was a child, a surgeon was able to save some of the vision in his left eye. Recently his vision began to fail, and he is now completely blind.
Examining computer code and writing out explanations and corrections have become maddeningly tedious. Drawing diagrams or composing complex mathematical equations is nearly impossible.
| Technology doesn’t stand still. The Internet continues to grow in both scale and complexity; even as its infrastructure ages, we depend upon its functioning to an ever-increasing degree. The continued evolution of the Internet’s time-synchronization system is essential. And yet Mills’s inability to swiftly contribute to N.T.P. has sapped his authority over it. In his absence, only a few people appear to be both capable and willing to oversee the critical yet overlooked software.
| A contest for influence over how clocks are kept in synch across the Internet has begun.
Despite this, he has been spending a couple of hours a day composing a paper that outlines a redesign of the “bare bones” of N.T.P. His aim is to revise and improve its basic model, and to simplify it.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thorny-problem-of-keeping-the-internets-time
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| In 1977, David Mills, an eccentric engineer and computer scientist, took a job at COMSAT, a satellite corporation headquartered in Washington, D.C. Mills was an inveterate tinkerer: he’d once built a hearing aid for a girlfriend’s uncle, and had consulted for Ford on how paper-tape computers might be put into cars. Now, at COMSAT, Mills became involved in the ARPANET, the computer network that would become the precursor to the Internet.