----- Original Message -----
From: "John Gilmore" <gnu@toad.com>
Am I confused? Getting the time over a multi-gigabit Internet from a national time standard agency such as NIST (or your local country's equivalent) should produce far better accuracy and stability than relying on locally received GPS signals. GPS uses very weak radio signals which are regularly spoofed by all sorts of bad actors:
https://www.gps.gov/spectrum/jamming/
for all sorts of reasons (like misleading drone navigation):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident
Depending on satnav systems creates a large single point of failure for worldwide civilian infrastructure.
Jamming GPS with subtly fake time data near big data centers seems like an easy move that would cause all sorts of distributed algorithms to start failing in unusual ways. And in a more serious wartime attack, many or most GPS satellites themselves would be destroyed or disabled.
Maybe I'm getting too old, but it seems to me like the time when Internet systems design engineers did *not* need to design like a nation-state actor might affect their systems by combat attack... ended a couple decades ago. And if your bean-counters tell you it's not cost-effective to make it that tight, maybe it's time to change jobs? Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://www.bcp38.info 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA BCP38: Ask For It By Name! +1 727 647 1274