Becoming a Time Lord – Implications of Attacking Time Sources

Becoming a Time Lord – Implications of Attacking Time Sources

On or about November 20, 2012 the NTP server at the USA Naval Observatory was rebooted and somehow reverted to the year 2000. The impact, though subtle, propagated downstream to many servers and systems which rely on NTP. Within days of this incident, a paper out of Carnegie Mellon University was released which discussed potential strategies for attacking GPS software, another source of the time standard. Just a day later, Wired magazine published an article discussing Google’s true time API and the importance of time in their data centers. Could this be a coincidence? Is the universe trying to tell me something? And why am I wearing a bow-tie?

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