ACacqq·Dec 20, 2016
Thanks! The whole thread there is worth reading:
https://github.com/jbenet/ios-ntp/issues/47
The original author writes:
" I wrote this library a long time ago for the iPhone 3GS and earlier. At that time, as best I could tell, the iPhone obtained its time from the phone company and, for me in South-East Michigan, it was not unusual for the iPhone time to be at up to two minutes variance from true time. Since my app was predicting the location of the International Space Station and a two minute error represented about 600 miles, I wrote this library so people wouldn't be staring at the wrong side of the sky!"
"Since then, the world has changed. First, iOS devices use the NTP protocol as a time source -- I stopped using my own library years ago because iPhones were delivering sub-second accurate times natively."
"I've thought for a while t
Read the rest
hat this library had passed its "sell-by" date and was of minimal value; this Snapchat incident (about which I've heard only a little, and that obliquely), makes me want to remove it. I've been involved in network software, on and off, for about forty years and regard myself as a good net citizen."
The defaults up to now were really, really bad. His correction now is to remove the list. But if then the users just use any list, they are doing it wrong again. For effectively all the scenarios in practice, just time.apple.com instead of any other list and the limited number of IP addresses used from there, by default 1, should be enough for the iOS apps, or even better that they use their own servers. The swift library with the similar goals, mentioned elsewhere, has that IP-limiting loop, this library probably not.