ICANN takes control of Internet Time Keeping

Summary: On networks, making sure that everyone is on the same millisecond is vital, so when the master r time-zone database was shutdown due to a trivial lawsuit threat everyone on the Internet was facing a major problem. ICANN, though, is going to take care of the trouble.

“Does anyone really know what time it is? Does anyone really care?” Well, even if you don’t remember this popular Chicago song, if you’re on the Internet you do care. Many network services, such as authentication, depend on everyone agreeing on the exact time. So when a lawsuit threatened the Internet’s authoritative source for time-zone data this had the potential to really foul up everyone’s network time.

What happened was David Olson, the volunteer who had run the public domain Time Zone and Daylight Saving Time Database was sued by–I’m not making this up–an astrology software company called AstroLab for, they claimed, using data from their ACS Atlas program.   Full Read