Please Donate to Keep Network Time Protocol Up – Goal 1k

Research is put front and centre in their pitch for funding.

https://gist.github.com/mutin-sa/eea1c396b1e610a2da1e5550d94...

But..it's $1k. This is basically pocket change on an institutional level. I've been part of some very scrappy and poorly funded community organizations and even they took in more than $1k every year. Even if you don't believe NTP maintainers should be paid anything for their work (an opinion I don't hold), it's trivial to spend this amount on modest everyday expenses like renting a venue a couple of times, buying insurance, and paying for hosting and technical resources.

EDIT: Here is their 2024 tax return

https://www.nwtime.org/about/documents/2024_NTF_IRS_990.pdf

It looks like they took in more than $200k and spent $100k on "contract services" (I can't tell what that means) and somewhat modest amounts on other things. Unfortunately I need to exit the rabbit hole now.

and $1000 seems at the same time to be quite a bit of money, but also too little to be for funding people long term.

Thankfully, that's also on the front page:

What they are doing:

> The NTP Project produces an open source Reference Implementation of the NTP standard, maintains the implementation Documentation, and develops the protocol and algorithmic standard that is used to communicate time between systems

And why it matters:

> NTP is what ensures the reliability of billions of devices around the world, under the sea, and even in space

Now, it doesn't explain why a reference implementation is a good thing, but I think that at this point, you have a good enough idea to decide if you want to donate or not.

Edit: However, $1000 seems too low to matter. It may not even pay for the expense of the fundraising itself. I think it is more of an awareness campaign: "look at the protocol we all use, you would think we are talking many millions of dollars, but the truth is, you are off by orders of magnitude"

Relatedly: surely you're not of the opinion that the various GPS constellations are not critical infrastructure?

[0] <https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-se...>

You can use the public Google or AWS pools if you want. Note that they have their own software, too, so be sure you understand the differences like leap smearing.

Blocking FAANG IPs from the NTP Foundation’s pools wouldn’t hurt FAANG at all. It would only hurt people who weren’t aware and used the NTP Foundation’s pool for things.

Listen to my last prayer

Hi-ho-silver-o

Deliver me from nowhere

ntpsec as a project seems to be doing ok. They are releasing new versions, fix reported issues, accept patches, and develop the code publicly. While ntp still has a huge list of acknowledged but unfixed CVEs.

TAI (Temps Atomique International), is UTC without leap seconds and is the source of truth for "what time is it"

I'm finding conflicting reports of being able to actually use TAI on linux but there are several claims of at least specialty setups existing. You would absolutely not want smearing or anything like that in your time synchronization software in this case.

How do you know the cash you are using is not "blood money"? Come on.

You know what else costs money? When someone wants to give you money, and you misidentify them as a bot and refuse their money.

The big companies who use NTP have their own pools and either use versions of different ntp implantations or their own internal ones.

All of these comments assuming cloud providers are using the reference NTP implementation and the public pools have no idea what they’re talking about.

It was like a vacation for our heads.

Not sure how, but a yearly "lockdown vacation" would be a Good Thing for our cities (IMNSHO).

But it seems that his nerding, taken by itself, is pretty solid. Is that not the case?

> Let it fail and see what happens.