ragged blog

Techdirt: Daylight Savings Change Could Spell Doom For The World (Well, For An Hour, Anyway)
I’m sure everyone feels this is being overblown due to the ‘overblown’ Y2K issue, however….

Whilst the issue is WELL known in areas where the change is occuring, it is NOT well known in other areas.

The issue will come with international time based billing services, and I can be almost certain that issues will occur, and it will cost people money.

Furthermore, there isn’t such a good fix for this problem – time servers have fixed slotted time zones, they will not be aware of the change, and with many time dependant services out there, one will have to:

- patch the time server, and client
- stop time correction services
- correct all interactions with all other proprietary systems

I know of at least 20 telecommunications networks globally that due to lack of support for the networks (X.25 based paknet, some Smartzone systems and many others) these software issues will not be fixed, and I also know of at least a few areas where major billing mistakes could arise as a product of the time alterations.

The biggest issue will occur in the instances where ‘automatic time correction’ occurs, as it is more like to become ‘automatic time mis-correction’ from now on – leading to a loss of ‘base-truth’ in the logs – which means the billing information cannot be reliably recovered.

In this event the carriers loose legal standing to bill for that usage, as most would require ‘base-truth’ proof that calls occured, which is now no longer held to be reliable.

Life or death issue? I hope not…

Expensive? Most probably.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the dangers occuring with GPS and Time based encryption services. Oh dear.