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Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85 (arstechnica.com)

submitted 10 months ago by jherazob to c/technology

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[–] jarfil 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Most microcontrollers have only recently made the switch to 32bit, some are still 16bit. Particularly those used for IoT, where they might still need to check dates for TLS and other certs, could go belly up on 2038.

With 14 more years of IoT creep, it might as well have more impact than Y2K, like "sorry Dave, I can't open the front door, your key won't be valid for another 136 years".

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Most microcontrollers also don't need wall clock, monotonous time is sufficient. uint32_max counting in seconds gets you 136 years of uptime before the thing wraps which exceeds lifetime, in milliseconds it's 50 days which is well within the warranty window.

And, no, 64bit time_t is generally not an issue for 32-bit platforms: Those upper bits only get touched once every 136 years. OS vendors did step up and change stuff so everything that gets produced now should be fine. And don't even start complaining about memory budget while those things are talking json.

[–] jarfil 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

in milliseconds it's 50 days which is well within the warranty window.

LOL. Stuff like that reminds me how great we have it in the EU, where warranty is 2 years minimum. 🇪🇺😁

Anyway, I'd mostly worry about "really smart" electric engineers rolling out their own time and crypto functions from scratch, because "trust me, I'm an engineer".