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Google and Nasdaq Pursuing Nano-Second Precision In Network Time Protocol (nytimes.com)
"Computer scientists at Stanford University and Google have created technology that can track time down to 100 billionths of a second," reports The New York Times. "It could be just what Wall Street is looking for." Form the report: System engineers at Nasdaq, the New York-based stock exchange, recently began testing an algorithm and software that they hope can synchronize a giant network of computers with that nanosecond precision. They say they have built a prototype, and are in the process of deploying a bigger version. For an exchange like Nasdaq, such refinement is essential to accurately order the millions of stock trades that are placed on their computer systems every second. Ultimately, this is about money. With stock trading now dominated by computers that make buying and selling decisions and execute them with blazing speed, keeping that order also means protecting profits. So-called high frequency trading firms place trades in a fraction of a second, sometimes in a bet that they can move faster than bigger competitors.
Uhm, no. The right way would be to artificially add a random delay of several minutes, with a reproducible generator based on the orders' hashes and some seed known in advance, to avoid foul play. The generator would also need to be based on all previous orders, to avoid gaming the system if the seed is "accidentally" leaked. Details are more complex but it's all well-researched stuff.
That would fix the high frequency trading abuse, which is nothing but pure theft, skimming a fraction from every bona-fide transaction.
Just one of so many simple solutions... if only the high frequency traders wouldn't collude with the rule makers...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
High frequency trading is entirely about subverting any remaining myth of the market or even less so-called "investing".
What absolutely needs to happen is a flat transaction tax on any and all transactions, obliterate this entire train wreck of a financial vehicle from the entire economic equation. Simply out of basic fairness, why do I get charged 10% sales tax when buying a candy bar but not if it's a share of Apple?
A simple 1% tax on transactions would overnight return the stock market to a system for investment rather than clever hacks to milk the real economy. If you don't think your stock is going to grow at least by 1%, you simply shouldn't buy it. An extremely modest 1% transaction tax would instill that sanity into the basic fabric of the marketplace.
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So, in order to facilitate micro-trades, we're going to allow them to trade in terms of less than a second... which is disturbing all by itself when you think that even very fast internet destinations in the U.S. have latency on the order or 100ms or so. Even very slight congestion means that the financial exchanges have to simply trust the timestamps issued by the traders to get the prices and volume correct and cannot depend on the receive sequence.
There's no room for malicious action there at all, and as we all know, the U.S. has absolutely no outside actors interested in manipulating events inside the country for their own ends.
So ultimately, we're going to depend on some sort of time service run by Google and Nasdaq to validate those signatures. The problem there is that both those organizations have and will be aggressively targeted by bad apples the world over. TFA is a little light on the technical aspects of how, exactly, Google and/or Nasdaq is going to ensure that there's no forgery of timestamps. That service goes down... and Google and Nasdaq do have network problems from time to time... and suddenly all transactions are suspect? Heaven forfend that whatever algorithm used to synchronize and sign the transactions down to the nanosecond level is ever cracked. There's going to be a huge economic impetus for even very powerful countries to work on this. Imagine Chinese supercomputers manipulating American stock exchanges for their own benefit. I don't think that's too far fetched.
And we're not just depending on Google or Nasdaq, but on everyone who takes part in issuing and signing these timestamps. Wow, that's a huge amount of attack surface.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
But it would be such a shame, and a blow to the Working Man, if High Frequency Traders can't operate! Think of all the bots that would be put out of work, you insensitive clod!
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
TSN Ethernet can already pull this off in most cases. IEEE 802.1... I've personally seen it do around 100ns sync or better depending on network configuration.
The New York Time article is mostly about how Nasdaq is eager to make more money.
For the technically minded, refer to the paper about the introduced Huygens protocol for network time synchronization precise to the nanosecond.
take glass steagall. For 50 years it did a decent job of preventing the kinds of economic crashes we had in 2008. After 50 years without a major economic crash people came to the conclusion that since we hadn't had a blow up the regulations could go. Seriously, people think because bad things that regulations were passed don't happen anymore we don't need the regulations...
I hate Ronald Reagan with a passion. He and his ilk (Karl Rove & the like) rolled back 100 years of hard fought workers rights in a few decades and turned the working class against the very notion of organizing for their own benefit. They turned "Union" into a dirty word and convinced folks to scrap the whole system because of a few bad apples and some Mafia interference. They were masters at it too. I'm singling him out because he was the spokesman for that crap. Mr "Government's the problem, not the solution". But crap like this is part of a broader trend to weaken the power structures that created and allow the continued existence of a middle class.
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The irony is that while this improves NTP, "modern linux" uses "systemd-timesync" instead which kinda sorta knows how to get the time of day from one server with undefined tolerances, throwing away decades of work by intelligent people that went into making NTP what it is now.
Who cares, right. What did those nerds know about clocks and time anyway.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I hope your weenie falls off.
Getting precise time to better than a ns from GPS is not a trivial task (Hint: ionospheric weather routinely changes the naive answer by more than 10ns) but it is an achievable task. But at that level, everything matters. Is your antenna cable temperature-compensated? What's the temperature coefficient of your receiving hardware? Huygens seems to claim synchronization to the few 10s of ns, which is on the face of it a considerably easier proposition, but sounds interestingly challenging for commodity computers.
Are you kidding me? Woohoo, yet another reason to hate systemd.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
timesync is the best tool because it barely does what you will settle for. Okay. Or are you trying to say that a more precise time will somehow harm your desktops?
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ntp is designed to minimize time jumps, skewing by small amounts more often. timesyncd is just a reinvention of old timed, including unfounded beliefs in predictable network latency, and, yes, clock jumps where none are needed.
because people voted folks into office who repealed it. If congress was stacked with Liz Warrens and Bernie Sanders instead of Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells it never would have been repealed.
Getting rid of the bribes wouldn't hurt, but if the end result is still guys like Ryan, McConnell and other "Small Government" right wingers running the show then nothing changes. We need to convince people government can work so they'll stop voting people into office whose goal is to break government.
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At SLAC and other large accelerator complexes we need to synchronize systems as the few-picosecond level (sub-picosecond for specialized systems), over a few kilometers. For us we have a near speed-of-light beam to allow a clear definition of synchronization (but the synchronization is maintained without the beam), and are now also installing a system that measures the round-trip physical time delay. The latter of course depends critically on the exact cable routing.
For large scale (global) networks, its not obvious exactly what the goal is. Is the goal to ignore all cable delays? If so, I wonder how a computer's local time is certified to be synchronized at the nanosecond level - maybe some sort of GPS based synchronization where the computers position and GPS signal phase is used to determine time? (but what about the nanoseconds of GPS antenna cable?).
It seems like defining what is wanted may be trickier than doing the engineering.
timesync is the best tool because it barely does what you will settle for. Okay. Or are you trying to say that a more precise time will somehow harm your desktops?
Do you demand that your car is capable of half the speed of light? (Although you will never drive it at more than 70 mph because you are a law-abiding citizen).
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
There is already a standard with nanosecond precision (or better).
It's called 1588 PTP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
What do you mean the other side isn't fighting? About half of them are fighting like hell to elect people who will screw them, the country, and the environment to help the rich get richer at the expense of everyone else. Because they've bought into lies about how much they'll personally benefit, or because of some wedge issue like abortion or guns or FUD about security, that politicians don't actually care about beyond them as a mechanism to keep people hating the other side (though both sides love using FUD to take away rights-- this comment isn't to suggest personal liberty is valued by either party).
That's the entire point of Glass-Stegal. To prevent the banks that invest in whatever crazy risks they want to take from being the same as the banks that care if they fail. Like literally make them different entities.
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