stymaster
Doctor MemoryRIP the man who was the absolute incarnation of XKCD's "one random dude holding up the entire internet". You may never have heard of David Mills, but your entire goddamn world depends on what he did.
Shawn Hooper (he/him)@memory I guess it was his time....
@shawnhooper “Too soon!” (Because of clock skew, one assumes.)
Carl Malamud@memory people used to call him up on the phone and say "Hi Dave! Do you know what time it is?" :)
@carlmalamud It's a good thing I never knew his phone number. The temptation would have been overwhelming.
Jonathan Eggers@memory This brings back memories of troubleshooting AD login issues and realizing the DC wasn't properly updating time and having to manually set NTP servers via w32tm.exe.
mathew@jseggers @memory I’m here to offer the sad news that AD login issues due to time skew were still a problem in 2023. (And are probably still a problem in 2024, but we haven’t had a support ticket about it this year so far, possibly because I put a detailed explanation of why it’s AD’s fault in our support portal knowledge base.)
Cheesecakes as a Service 👨🏾⚡@memory For real. I went so long without knowing how much stuff relies on NTP.
Mackaj
Chuck Darwin@memory
RIP: David Mills
In 1977, Mills began working at #COMSAT.
There he worked on synchronizing the clocks of computers connected to #ARPANET, inventing the Network Time Protocol. #NTP
He told The New Yorker in 2022 that he enjoyed working on synchronized time because no one else was working on it, giving him his own "little fief".
In the mid-2000s, Mills turned over full control of the NTP reference implementation to Harlan Stenn.
Mills was the chairman of the Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures Task Force ( #GADS ) and the first chairman of the Internet Architecture Task Force.
He invented the DEC LSI-11 based #Fuzzball router that was used for the 56 kbit/s NSFNET (1985), inspired the author of #ping for BSD (1983), and had the first #FTP implementation. He authored numerous #RFCs.
Aviva Gary@memory I'm just here for the pic 🍿
Ross of Ottawa
Barry Goldman
Nyx@memory That was a really amazing read! thanks you for share!
Deus@memory He's being flowered with tributes. Currently Trending no #1 on the Fediverse with an Ars article too.
AlisonW ♿🏳️🌈♾️@memory
He was Mr Time.
He was Mr Time.
AGF : poemproducer
Toby@memory No disrespect meant to Dr. Mills here, the single person keeping the protocol going for the last 20 years has been a man named Harlan Stenn.
Dr. David Mills had been blind for a considerable amount of time and was no longer able to re-read old code to be able to explain it to others. Stenn has thanklessly been continuing Mills's vision and receiving far more vitriol: all of the contempt of being the single person keeping a critical piece of software relevant, with none of the respect, adoration, or name recognition of being that code's original developer and proponent.
Alexander The 1st@xenotrope @memory Blind or not, going from a Bus Factor of 2 down to 1 is still pretty significant; especially since now we definitely can't ask Mills for help, and will be relying on Stenn until someone else takes up the mantle of the codebase... ideally multiple people at the same time this time.
:David Campey@AT1ST @memory Not entirely. Mills has been uninvolved in NTP administration for many years. Not only was he not able to contribute code, most of his guidance towards Stenn became less helpful over time as well.
Here's an article that goes into more detail. Not only is one guy not in charge anymore of how NTP is implemented, companies like Google are making significant changes to how they manage time without any protocol standardization process at all.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thorny-problem-of-keeping-the-internets-time
Worse still, folks like Eric S. Raymond have decided to become self-appointed saviors and have swooped in to rewrite NTP as "NTPSec" and added extensions to the original protocol without Stenn's or Mill's knowledge or blessing.
but is it a good thhing, re resilience...
Society has never been more synchronized.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-thorny-problem-of-keeping-the-internets-time
Soozcat
deKay
Dr David Mills@deKay It came as a shock to me to find out I'd died.
Anne-Marie de Jong@memory
Uitstekende weergave.
Uitstekende weergave.
jon crowcroft
Nihl L'Amas@memory Hello I am a billionaire and I wish to purchase NTP because timekeeping is too woke.
@memory dave could tell you the temperature in your machine room from the rate of change of clock skew from his fuzzball NTP servers...crazy cool tinkerer
Douglas Caldwell