Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even worse, some use Linux as their desktop OS. Imagine that...
It just works in 2023.
It does. As long as you carefully select HW.
Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
41–50 of 169 posts
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#42While this Windows feature does sound quite bonkers as described, it is also baffling to me that the timekeeping on computers is such a mess; would it really be that difficult to have my multithousand dollar computer keep time at least as well as a dollar-store quartz watch? Have time already set in factory, and be correct to within few hours at least; enough to do networking and more accurate time syncing safely.
The problem of computer timekeeping lives on the margins. Your computer is probably more accurate than the quartz watch, but there's all sorts of ways that timekeeping can fail even on a system that's accurately counting time when on. Many of these have to do with early boot or unattended scenarios where trustworthy sources of time data are scarce or difficult to reach. e.g. maybe the motherboard clock chip is five m…
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Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#43While this Windows feature does sound quite bonkers as described, it is also baffling to me that the timekeeping on computers is such a mess; would it really be that difficult to have my multithousand dollar computer keep time at least as well as a dollar-store quartz watch? Have time already set in factory, and be correct to within few hours at least; enough to do networking and more accurate time syncing safely.
Computers do do this. The problem is that some computers are quite old and the battery that keeps the real-time clock running has gone flat. That means if the computer is powered off it forgets what time it is.
If your quartz watch battery goes flat you replace it straight away because a watch with a flat battery is 100% useless. But if the battery on your motherboard goes flat you don't even notice, so why would you replace it? To a layperson, "my computer's time is always wrong" is not likely to be caused by a random flat battery that they didn't know existed.
Microsoft came up with this "Secure Time" system so that even computers with flat batteries would be able to work out what time it is, but obviously it is kind of weird and sometimes makes wrong decisions.
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
NTP is trivially MITM. Secure NTP is basically not deployed anywhere. Someone with a google.com cert that's valid other than expiration is probably google and probably has a working clock.
You can always use a gpsd(4) compatible USB dongle as the time source.
Or run their own NTP server. That's what I do in my home network.
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#45While this Windows feature does sound quite bonkers as described, it is also baffling to me that the timekeeping on computers is such a mess; would it really be that difficult to have my multithousand dollar computer keep time at least as well as a dollar-store quartz watch? Have time already set in factory, and be correct to within few hours at least; enough to do networking and more accurate time syncing safely.
Computers do do this. The problem is that some computers are quite old and the battery that keeps the real-time clock running has gone flat. That means if the computer is powered off it forgets what time it is. If your quartz watch battery goes flat you replace it straight away because a watch with a flat battery is 100% useless. But if the battery on your motherboard goes flat you don't even notice, so why would you…
Timepieces last a decade on a shirt button sized battery. Surely you can afford a bit larger battery on a motherboard, probably even a rechargeable one, make the clock sufficiently autonomous from the rest of the system, and make the motherboard not boot when it doesn't have the battery, so you can leave it unattended for a while.
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#46I can't imagine the sequence of horrible decisions that led to doing this. Like, why would the time service ever want to depend on all this insanity when if it has a network and everything else is bizarro world, just like scrape the time and date text from weather.gov. Or just accept that absent NTP, w32time maybe just shouldn't try to set the clock to whatever a circus clown tells it? This sort of reminds me how the…
> ...if it has a network... But that network is not trusted. Imagine this: You boot a machine for the first time, and the system clock tells you it's January 1, 1970. You might know when your OS was built, so you could maybe hard-code some sanity checks there, but you basically don't know what the date is. You want to communicate securely with weather.gov? Sure, you can do that over SSL/TLS. You send it a list of cip…
But this isn't just impacting machines at first boot. This is enabled in an on-going fashion.
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
NTP is trivially MITM. Secure NTP is basically not deployed anywhere. Someone with a google.com cert that's valid other than expiration is probably google and probably has a working clock.
You can always use a gpsd(4) compatible USB dongle as the time source.
Sure, if you have such a dongle, and it has sufficient view of the sky. Adding a 'free' https based sanity check on top of NTP seems like a good balance of cost vs reward.
gps (and friends) is a nice way to get access to a very accurate timesource, but it's not always worth the cost.
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#48I can't imagine the sequence of horrible decisions that led to doing this. Like, why would the time service ever want to depend on all this insanity when if it has a network and everything else is bizarro world, just like scrape the time and date text from weather.gov. Or just accept that absent NTP, w32time maybe just shouldn't try to set the clock to whatever a circus clown tells it? This sort of reminds me how the…
> ...if it has a network... But that network is not trusted. Imagine this: You boot a machine for the first time, and the system clock tells you it's January 1, 1970. You might know when your OS was built, so you could maybe hard-code some sanity checks there, but you basically don't know what the date is. You want to communicate securely with weather.gov? Sure, you can do that over SSL/TLS. You send it a list of cip…
Man it's like you and the other respondent want to be helpful but didn't read the next sentence after that bit of hyperbole.
If all available time sources are not trustable and none of the existing answers make sense, do not try to set the clock! Coming up with more complicated ways to use untrustable data is not an improvement.
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#49I wonder if this feature might be “infectious”: if a handful of servers wind up with the wrong time, and start propagating that wrong time in their server handshakes, it might cause a cascade of other servers to reset their times too.
In any case, it seems like a poor solution especially given that random timestamps can occasionally look valid (they’re random!).
The problem they’re trying to solve seems to be to obtain a trustworthy timestamp in the presence of a potentially hostile network - one that could be presenting expired, cracked certificates for every connection to arbitrarily tamper with all SSL connections. It’s not a trivial problem, for sure, but resetting perfectly valid clocks using this algorithm seems like a strict downgrade….
Re: Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
It just works in 2023.
It does. As long as you carefully select HW.
let me present you the Windows 11 supported CPU list:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi...
anything earlier than 8th gen core? fuck you