The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time (New Yorker)

The New Yorker has alengthy article on the Network Time Protocol and its creator DavidMills.

Coders sometimes joke, morbidly, about the bus factor." How manypeople need to get hit by a bus before a given project isendangered? It's difficult to determine the bus factor for N.T.P.,and time synchronization more broadly, especially now thatcompanies such as Google have developed their own N.T.P.-inspiredproprietary code. But it seems reasonable to say that N.T.P.'s busfactor is rather small.