Not true, actually. Engineers (remember, trains don't have drivers) actually watch the track ahead of them and respond to various conditions, including animals on track, broken down trains on track, and, perhaps most importantly, idiots standing on the yellow tiles at the station. You've clearly never ridden... or you'd have some idea just how often the engineer has to stop short of the station while the station manager gets on the PA to tell people to get off the yellow tiles, while everyone else waiting to get on the train is deciding whether to pull them back from the track, or push them onto it for delaying the train. Engineers also respond to various issues with the train itself; for example, I was on a car that had a stuck brake once; it took the engineer one stop to determine what the problem was, another to determine which car, and a third to get the attitude of that car and the car on either side of it adjusted such that the affected car remained level while the affected wheel was lifted off the track enough to alleviate the risk of the brake spontaneously combusting without making the train unstable. Once that train reached the end of the line, the affected car was removed, but the engineer had to get it there, first. Even track switching isn't automated on the BART system, so the engineers do that as well.
If there's no system that lets a train detect foreign objects on the track ahead, then there is no hope at all for self-driving cars.
Likewise, passengers too close to the edge of theboarding platform can be solved by the same sliding doors that other automated train systems use. With the added benefit of stopping so many suicides (which, besides the human cost, can cause delays across the entire bart system). And sliding doors will be coming sooner or later, just like the much delayed golden gate bridge suicide barrier.
That said, if trains stopped short of a station just because someone is standing on the yellow tiles, they'd never get into the stations, since people *always* stand on the yellow tiles. And the "station manager"? You mean those people in the booths that are on their cell phones all day? The only thing I've ever seem them do is put an "out of order" sign on a faregate when someone complained that it was broken.
Even track switching isn't automated on the BART system
Well that's part of the problem. Central dispatch should be able to route trains around a disabled train without an operator standing there throw a switch.
math challenged? the thyristors are $1K each. if an operator makes $50K then firing each one nets 50 thyristors.
$50K? Ha! BART has a strong union - the top paid train operator makes $150K (including benefits) BART salarys consistently outrank salaries at other area transit providers.
Now that Rust is available and mature, when do you see banks adopting it? I presume the best banks are already rewriting their software to use Rust. Maybe the stragglers will start using it next year?
When Rust is available and mature enough for banks to consider using it, then there will be another new, even shinier, language around the corner that will address all of the shortcomings of Rust. Which is why banks are still running a lot of Cobol code.
It wasn't a Google Maps error, it was a "failure to identify the address error" by the crew. When you're doing something as destructive as tearing down a house, take a look at the street sign and make sure it matches the address on the work order. Don't blindly follow your GPS.
What collusion? Netflix doesn't want its customers screwed with overage costs, because they might drop netflix. AT$T and Verizon are just mad they didn't get to reap sweet sweet profit from its customers. The only dubious thing is Netflix not sending a polite email to its customers explaining why they are throttled and letting them know it is to stop their phone companies F-ing their A$$holes raw.
Sounds like collusion between Netflix and its customers to deprive AT&T & Verizon out of bandwidth overage charges they deserve.
I hope AT&T & Verizon file a class action suit against those customers to get payment for all of the bandwidth they should have overused.
Let's assume for a moment you've hijacked a USB dongle, you've gotten a ride onto an airgapped computer.......now what?
Are you going to write a visual basic GUI to trace all the IPs simultaneously or something?
So you've taken over a standalone PC. Huzzah. You've haxxored the boxen.
What are you doing with the data you've stolen?
Did you realize that you now have to snag another ride back OFF the machine via another USB stick, ride someplace else, infect THAT machine, and hope it isn't airgapped too, in order to get out again?
Depends what that hacked computer does and what your objectives are.
A couple examples:
If that computer is part of a SCADA system at a power plant, you can have your malware shut down the power plant in 10 days or configure it to self-destruct.
If it's a secure key signing computer, your malware can make it create weak keys.
You don't need to get data off the system for your malware to do harm.
First they prove they can do it by giving them several phones with the same kind of firmware, iOS version, encryption, etc, set up and locked by the FBI with known data with the FBI watching and being informed in detail what is going one each step of the way. Assuming they are successful, they then fly out the team to a controled area, have all their equipment and software inspected. You then put out 5 phones of which one is the real one, and 4 others have fake but known data. As long as the 4 fake phones have the data you are expecting, it is very likely the data from the real one is correct (not altered.)
Of course, if it is a software solution of some sort that is relatively easy to run, the FBI could just buy it and run the tests themselves...
So this hacking team is so elite they can break into a phone that no one else can, but they somehow are fooled by some fake data?
How do you maintain chain of custody of the evidence if you hand it over to a company that's not governed by our laws?
If the Israeli company recovers data that gives them leads to other suspected terrorists, does the FBI have legal authority to pursue those leads when the information was "extracted" by a foreign company and it may or may not be fabricated? The only proof that they have that the information was really on the phone is because this company said so.
And yet, styrofoam cup sales outnumber ceramic stein sales by orders of magnitude. Most people simply don't care about having a "luxury experience" in every aspect of their life. I could pay triple the price on a tablet, and have aluminium instead of plastic, and a nicer build quality.... Thats great and all, but you'll find that most people have a budget, and plastic is good enough. For the same price as an iPad, I could buy a cheap tablet, and a cheap TV, and have in the end, the enjoyment of both items, that do 90% as good a job as a high-end tablet or high-end tv. Optimizing cheapness always matters.
Styrofoam cups are used once and discarded, ceramic beer steins could be used for generations.
Similarly, cheap Chinese Android tablets may not last as long as iPads, so higher purchase numbers doesn't mean a corresponding increase in users.
This is Seattle: many studies have shown that it has a severe lack of single women. His problem is likely not so much him, but the lack of a dating pool. You're assuming that he actually touts his Ferrari and condo in his personals ads; that may or may not be true, but I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he doesn't, and he's smartly waiting until he picks up a date before she sees he's driving an older Ferrari. I haven't been all that successful with dating either, but even I know enough to not post pictures of my car or talk about my car in my profiles (though I don't have a Ferrari or anything terribly flashy either, just a very sensible but still quick Mazda3 with a bike rack). If you want a quality woman, you have to show pictures of yourself that show what you really look like, and show you doing fun things or going fun places she might enjoy (but don't overdo it with cliché crap like Machu Pichu), not photos showing off your possessions or your washboard abs.
He brought up his Ferrari and Condo here, as if they were some kind of selling point -- he's definitely bringing it up with women.
As for 22 flights of stairs, have you never heard of an elevator????
Well, I'll admit that I've never known anyone with a 22 story condo, do those always come with elevators?
Let's see; 500 dates in, say, 1200 days comes out to another date every 2.4 days. Assuming that a date often consists of dinner and maybe a movie, we'll say it occupies about 4 hours per date.
If she's doing a 4 hour dinner+movie date for every first date, no wonder she's frustrated - when online dating, a first date should be something quick and easy to end early if it's not going well -- like drinks or coffee, so when it's clear that the date is not working out, you can bail early before investing too much time.
That said, she should be spending most of her time in screening profiles and sending a few emails to figure out basic compatibility, even a couple phone calls. Once she's done that, then there's no way that she can weed out 500 of her personally screened matches in a single date.
I suspect she's fallen into the "supermarket mentality", treating guys as good in a supermarket and wanting to taste test them all, so even when she finds someone she likes, she knows that the next guy might be better, so she turns into a serial dater, never able to settle down with any one guy for enough time to really get to know him.
When I was online dating, I went on around 50 dates in 3 years. Maybe 25% of them were single-date dates (no "chemistry" despite everything looking good on paper), the rest ranged from a few days to a few weeks, (with a few that lasted a month or more). Eventually I took a break from online dating and ending up meeting my wife in real life.
If you think Seattle is bad, you should try Bellevue.
Went to a club there last Saturday, and there were literally no women other than the waitresses. I've lived here for twenty-two years, and not a one of my male friends has had a girlfriend, much less married. I love the job options here, and I'm saving enough to retire when I'm fifty, but it sucks being alone with zero chance of finding someone. I've tried Plenty of Fish and match.com. After sending hundreds of messages, I've never even gotten a date. I've got a flashy car (Ferrari 360, older but still nice) and a 22-story condo overlooking Lake Washington and downtown Seattle, but I haven't even met a girl to even try to impress.
Perhaps you're looking for the wrong type of girl - not all girls are going to be impressed by your Ferarri, plus I imagine that unless a girl is particularly athletic, she's not going to want to climb 22 flights of stairs from your livingroom to the bedroom.
Why doesn't the US government spec out a secure phone? They can specify the hardware and software and ensure it meets all their needs perfectly. And then have some (friend of the government) contractor make half a million of them (for a high price).
The FBI seems to think that iPhones are completely unhackable even with all of the resources of the US government, so that might be a good place to start.
Clinton didn't want to read her email on a computer in her SCIF...she wanted her BlackBerry. It was good enough for everyone else in the government, but it wasn't good enough for her.
Apparently a BlackBerry was good enough for the president -- what's not clear is why it wasn't good enough for the secretary of state.
From @SFBART: BART was built to transport far fewer people, and much of our system has reached the end of its useful life. This is our reality.
BART has been continually expanding while deferring maintenance on the rest of the system, and that policy has finally come home to roost -- much of their infrastructure is over 40 years old and they can't defer maintenance forever. But by continually expanding, they've made themselves too big to fail (and they've gotten more counties on the hook to keep the service running), so they'll get bailed out one way or another.
Yes and no. The craft is intended to survive the fire, but will later burn up in re-entry.
That's not part of the experiment, that's the expected return mode of the spacecraft, so that would happen regardless of whether they conducted the experiment or not.
They are setting off the fire inside a box inside the spacecraft. They are storing the data during the burn and transmitting it after the burn, so clearly they expect the spacecraft to survive.
Ah, you mean simply infect enough phones and control their vote to unlock. Yep, that particular risk is the challenge.
No need for Malware when you can just control the phones - there are 21M government (federal+state+local) workers, so just have them all install "device management software" that can send unlock codes.
Imagine that device encryption keys were disintegrated across a peer-to-peer network such that a high number of users could unanimously authorize the unlocking of a single device. The idea is that it would be possible to unlock a protected phone, but it would require a mass consensus.
Doesn't that have the same weakness as Tor? Control (or monitor) enough exit nodes and you can do traffic analysis.
Own (or control) enough phones and you can unlock any phone.
Honest question: I know it's off topic here, but what about all the stories that the baseband was this separate processor that had the keys to the kingdom and could do anything, defeat all security, etc..?
If the phone is powered off, accessing memory is not going to be of any help.
Is this whole fight just smoke and mirrors? Or is the whole secure enclave different, and if so, are there any non-apple phones with similar protection? Or does the secure enclave just protect you in this particular case (third party in posession of a locked phone)? My understanding was you could get the baseband (if you had access via the operator side of things) to do whatever, hence access unencrypted pages in memory while the phone was in use at least, and the private key if it ever made it there. I come at it from the point of view that the baseband can easily be exploited by the operator.
If the situation is as described in a recent statement attributed to Tim Cook, then this is a completely fake issue. In summary, that quote said it would only take a few man-months to produce the software that the FBI wants. If so, then it is barely conceivable the FBI lacks the resources to have created it already, and it is dead certain that the NSA (and foreign counterparts) already have it.
So why the charade? Evidently to make suckers (AKA you and me) think that there is still some privacy out here where the peasants live.
Also, perhaps because they've decided it's politically expedient to make Apple look bad with this juicy and loaded situation.
Creating the software is only half the battle -- they also need the signing keys so they can get the software onto the device.
The problem here is that even just one single incorrect downmod can take a perfectly fine comment and hide it by default.
The problem is that many moderators equate "I don't agree with you" as "Troll", so lots of high quality comments get modded down without any reason other the moderator doesn't agree with you.
Maybe meta moderation was once a good mitigation, but the moderation quality has really suffered in recent years, and I suspect meta moderation has suffered too.
For those purposes, it really doesn't matter if the clocks are a little fast or slow. You only need sub-second accuracy with electronic devices that communicate with each other. If all the wall clocks in a complex are two minutes fast, who's going to care?
We used to have a few cheap clocks around the office, and one of them would slowly drift - after a month it'd be 5 minutes off. And all manually set clocks are guaranteed to be off by an hour twice a year due to DST.
It doesn't take much labor savings to make an automatic setting clock worth the investment.
If you're in a facility that doesn't allow phones inside for security reasons, that wall clock, or wristwatch, is a handy thing.
Everyone has cell phones, but everyone also wants clocks. Humans!? What are you gonna do with them and their inconsistent ways until we're all replaced by robots (with their own built-in clocks)!?
I think the problem that you're having with finding such a device is that it's simply not necessary at this point. People use their phones and such for the time. If they're buying an alarm clock, it's generally accurate enough as is, and if they're putting a wall clock up they're doing it for the ambiance as much as having the time available.
GPS indoors is iffy anyways.
Perhaps for home use, but after repeated requests, my office finally put up wall clocks in all of the conference rooms and common areas. They use some central syncing mechanism, but I'm not sure if it's wifi or proprietary radio.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true, actually. Engineers (remember, trains don't have drivers) actually watch the track ahead of them and respond to various conditions, including animals on track, broken down trains on track, and, perhaps most importantly, idiots standing on the yellow tiles at the station. You've clearly never ridden... or you'd have some idea just how often the engineer has to stop short of the station while the station manager gets on the PA to tell people to get off the yellow tiles, while everyone else waiting to get on the train is deciding whether to pull them back from the track, or push them onto it for delaying the train. Engineers also respond to various issues with the train itself; for example, I was on a car that had a stuck brake once; it took the engineer one stop to determine what the problem was, another to determine which car, and a third to get the attitude of that car and the car on either side of it adjusted such that the affected car remained level while the affected wheel was lifted off the track enough to alleviate the risk of the brake spontaneously combusting without making the train unstable. Once that train reached the end of the line, the affected car was removed, but the engineer had to get it there, first. Even track switching isn't automated on the BART system, so the engineers do that as well.
If there's no system that lets a train detect foreign objects on the track ahead, then there is no hope at all for self-driving cars.
Likewise, passengers too close to the edge of theboarding platform can be solved by the same sliding doors that other automated train systems use. With the added benefit of stopping so many suicides (which, besides the human cost, can cause delays across the entire bart system). And sliding doors will be coming sooner or later, just like the much delayed golden gate bridge suicide barrier.
That said, if trains stopped short of a station just because someone is standing on the yellow tiles, they'd never get into the stations, since people *always* stand on the yellow tiles. And the "station manager"? You mean those people in the booths that are on their cell phones all day? The only thing I've ever seem them do is put an "out of order" sign on a faregate when someone complained that it was broken.
Even track switching isn't automated on the BART system
Well that's part of the problem. Central dispatch should be able to route trains around a disabled train without an operator standing there throw a switch.
math challenged? the thyristors are $1K each. if an operator makes $50K then firing each one nets 50 thyristors.
$50K? Ha! BART has a strong union - the top paid train operator makes $150K (including benefits) BART salarys consistently outrank salaries at other area transit providers.
Now that Rust is available and mature, when do you see banks adopting it? I presume the best banks are already rewriting their software to use Rust. Maybe the stragglers will start using it next year?
When Rust is available and mature enough for banks to consider using it, then there will be another new, even shinier, language around the corner that will address all of the shortcomings of Rust. Which is why banks are still running a lot of Cobol code.
It wasn't a Google Maps error, it was a "failure to identify the address error" by the crew. When you're doing something as destructive as tearing down a house, take a look at the street sign and make sure it matches the address on the work order. Don't blindly follow your GPS.
Obligatory GPS scene from "The Office":
https://youtu.be/n5lbShWEGQ0
What collusion? Netflix doesn't want its customers screwed with overage costs, because they might drop netflix. AT$T and Verizon are just mad they didn't get to reap sweet sweet profit from its customers. The only dubious thing is Netflix not sending a polite email to its customers explaining why they are throttled and letting them know it is to stop their phone companies F-ing their A$$holes raw.
Sounds like collusion between Netflix and its customers to deprive AT&T & Verizon out of bandwidth overage charges they deserve.
I hope AT&T & Verizon file a class action suit against those customers to get payment for all of the bandwidth they should have overused.
Let's assume for a moment you've hijacked a USB dongle, you've gotten a ride onto an airgapped computer. ......now what?
Are you going to write a visual basic GUI to trace all the IPs simultaneously or something?
So you've taken over a standalone PC. Huzzah. You've haxxored the boxen.
What are you doing with the data you've stolen?
Did you realize that you now have to snag another ride back OFF the machine via another USB stick, ride someplace else, infect THAT machine, and hope it isn't airgapped too, in order to get out again?
Depends what that hacked computer does and what your objectives are.
A couple examples:
You don't need to get data off the system for your malware to do harm.
First they prove they can do it by giving them several phones with the same kind of firmware, iOS version, encryption, etc, set up and locked by the FBI with known data with the FBI watching and being informed in detail what is going one each step of the way. Assuming they are successful, they then fly out the team to a controled area, have all their equipment and software inspected. You then put out 5 phones of which one is the real one, and 4 others have fake but known data. As long as the 4 fake phones have the data you are expecting, it is very likely the data from the real one is correct (not altered.)
Of course, if it is a software solution of some sort that is relatively easy to run, the FBI could just buy it and run the tests themselves...
So this hacking team is so elite they can break into a phone that no one else can, but they somehow are fooled by some fake data?
How do you maintain chain of custody of the evidence if you hand it over to a company that's not governed by our laws?
If the Israeli company recovers data that gives them leads to other suspected terrorists, does the FBI have legal authority to pursue those leads when the information was "extracted" by a foreign company and it may or may not be fabricated? The only proof that they have that the information was really on the phone is because this company said so.
And yet, styrofoam cup sales outnumber ceramic stein sales by orders of magnitude. Most people simply don't care about having a "luxury experience" in every aspect of their life. I could pay triple the price on a tablet, and have aluminium instead of plastic, and a nicer build quality.... Thats great and all, but you'll find that most people have a budget, and plastic is good enough. For the same price as an iPad, I could buy a cheap tablet, and a cheap TV, and have in the end, the enjoyment of both items, that do 90% as good a job as a high-end tablet or high-end tv. Optimizing cheapness always matters.
Styrofoam cups are used once and discarded, ceramic beer steins could be used for generations.
Similarly, cheap Chinese Android tablets may not last as long as iPads, so higher purchase numbers doesn't mean a corresponding increase in users.
This is Seattle: many studies have shown that it has a severe lack of single women. His problem is likely not so much him, but the lack of a dating pool. You're assuming that he actually touts his Ferrari and condo in his personals ads; that may or may not be true, but I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he doesn't, and he's smartly waiting until he picks up a date before she sees he's driving an older Ferrari. I haven't been all that successful with dating either, but even I know enough to not post pictures of my car or talk about my car in my profiles (though I don't have a Ferrari or anything terribly flashy either, just a very sensible but still quick Mazda3 with a bike rack). If you want a quality woman, you have to show pictures of yourself that show what you really look like, and show you doing fun things or going fun places she might enjoy (but don't overdo it with cliché crap like Machu Pichu), not photos showing off your possessions or your washboard abs.
He brought up his Ferrari and Condo here, as if they were some kind of selling point -- he's definitely bringing it up with women.
As for 22 flights of stairs, have you never heard of an elevator????
Well, I'll admit that I've never known anyone with a 22 story condo, do those always come with elevators?
Let's see; 500 dates in, say, 1200 days comes out to another date every 2.4 days.
Assuming that a date often consists of dinner and maybe a movie, we'll say it occupies about 4 hours per date.
If she's doing a 4 hour dinner+movie date for every first date, no wonder she's frustrated - when online dating, a first date should be something quick and easy to end early if it's not going well -- like drinks or coffee, so when it's clear that the date is not working out, you can bail early before investing too much time.
That said, she should be spending most of her time in screening profiles and sending a few emails to figure out basic compatibility, even a couple phone calls. Once she's done that, then there's no way that she can weed out 500 of her personally screened matches in a single date.
I suspect she's fallen into the "supermarket mentality", treating guys as good in a supermarket and wanting to taste test them all, so even when she finds someone she likes, she knows that the next guy might be better, so she turns into a serial dater, never able to settle down with any one guy for enough time to really get to know him.
When I was online dating, I went on around 50 dates in 3 years. Maybe 25% of them were single-date dates (no "chemistry" despite everything looking good on paper), the rest ranged from a few days to a few weeks, (with a few that lasted a month or more). Eventually I took a break from online dating and ending up meeting my wife in real life.
If you think Seattle is bad, you should try Bellevue.
Went to a club there last Saturday, and there were literally no women other than the waitresses. I've lived here for twenty-two years, and not a one of my male friends has had a girlfriend, much less married. I love the job options here, and I'm saving enough to retire when I'm fifty, but it sucks being alone with zero chance of finding someone. I've tried Plenty of Fish and match.com. After sending hundreds of messages, I've never even gotten a date. I've got a flashy car (Ferrari 360, older but still nice) and a 22-story condo overlooking Lake Washington and downtown Seattle, but I haven't even met a girl to even try to impress.
Perhaps you're looking for the wrong type of girl - not all girls are going to be impressed by your Ferarri, plus I imagine that unless a girl is particularly athletic, she's not going to want to climb 22 flights of stairs from your livingroom to the bedroom.
Why doesn't the US government spec out a secure phone? They can specify the hardware and software and ensure it meets all their needs perfectly. And then have some (friend of the government) contractor make half a million of them (for a high price).
The FBI seems to think that iPhones are completely unhackable even with all of the resources of the US government, so that might be a good place to start.
Clinton didn't want to read her email on a computer in her SCIF...she wanted her BlackBerry. It was good enough for everyone else in the government, but it wasn't good enough for her.
Apparently a BlackBerry was good enough for the president -- what's not clear is why it wasn't good enough for the secretary of state.
BART already tweeted the reason behind the breakdowns:
From @SFBART:
BART was built to transport far fewer people, and much of our system has reached the end of its useful life. This is our reality.
BART has been continually expanding while deferring maintenance on the rest of the system, and that policy has finally come home to roost -- much of their infrastructure is over 40 years old and they can't defer maintenance forever. But by continually expanding, they've made themselves too big to fail (and they've gotten more counties on the hook to keep the service running), so they'll get bailed out one way or another.
Yes and no. The craft is intended to survive the fire, but will later burn up in re-entry.
That's not part of the experiment, that's the expected return mode of the spacecraft, so that would happen regardless of whether they conducted the experiment or not.
They are setting off the fire inside a box inside the spacecraft. They are storing the data during the burn and transmitting it after the burn, so clearly they expect the spacecraft to survive.
Ah, you mean simply infect enough phones and control their vote to unlock. Yep, that particular risk is the challenge.
No need for Malware when you can just control the phones - there are 21M government (federal+state+local) workers, so just have them all install "device management software" that can send unlock codes.
Imagine that device encryption keys were disintegrated across a peer-to-peer network such that a high number of users could unanimously authorize the unlocking of a single device. The idea is that it would be possible to unlock a protected phone, but it would require a mass consensus.
Doesn't that have the same weakness as Tor? Control (or monitor) enough exit nodes and you can do traffic analysis.
Own (or control) enough phones and you can unlock any phone.
Honest question: I know it's off topic here, but what about all the stories that the baseband was this separate processor that had the keys to the kingdom and could do anything, defeat all security, etc..?
(See https://mobile.slashdot.org/st... for instance)
If the phone is powered off, accessing memory is not going to be of any help.
Is this whole fight just smoke and mirrors? Or is the whole secure enclave different, and if so, are there any non-apple phones with similar protection?
Or does the secure enclave just protect you in this particular case (third party in posession of a locked phone)? My understanding was you could get the baseband (if you had access via the operator side of things) to do whatever, hence access unencrypted pages in memory while the phone was in use at least, and the private key if it ever made it there. I come at it from the point of view that the baseband can easily be exploited by the operator.
I would greatly appreciate any informed insight.
If the situation is as described in a recent statement attributed to Tim Cook, then this is a completely fake issue. In summary, that quote said it would only take a few man-months to produce the software that the FBI wants. If so, then it is barely conceivable the FBI lacks the resources to have created it already, and it is dead certain that the NSA (and foreign counterparts) already have it.
So why the charade? Evidently to make suckers (AKA you and me) think that there is still some privacy out here where the peasants live.
Also, perhaps because they've decided it's politically expedient to make Apple look bad with this juicy and loaded situation.
Creating the software is only half the battle -- they also need the signing keys so they can get the software onto the device.
The problem here is that even just one single incorrect downmod can take a perfectly fine comment and hide it by default.
The problem is that many moderators equate "I don't agree with you" as "Troll", so lots of high quality comments get modded down without any reason other the moderator doesn't agree with you.
Maybe meta moderation was once a good mitigation, but the moderation quality has really suffered in recent years, and I suspect meta moderation has suffered too.
For those purposes, it really doesn't matter if the clocks are a little fast or slow. You only need sub-second accuracy with electronic devices that communicate with each other. If all the wall clocks in a complex are two minutes fast, who's going to care?
We used to have a few cheap clocks around the office, and one of them would slowly drift - after a month it'd be 5 minutes off. And all manually set clocks are guaranteed to be off by an hour twice a year due to DST.
It doesn't take much labor savings to make an automatic setting clock worth the investment.
If you're in a facility that doesn't allow phones inside for security reasons, that wall clock, or wristwatch, is a handy thing.
Everyone has cell phones, but everyone also wants clocks. Humans!? What are you gonna do with them and their inconsistent ways until we're all replaced by robots (with their own built-in clocks)!?
I think the problem that you're having with finding such a device is that it's simply not necessary at this point. People use their phones and such for the time. If they're buying an alarm clock, it's generally accurate enough as is, and if they're putting a wall clock up they're doing it for the ambiance as much as having the time available.
GPS indoors is iffy anyways.
Perhaps for home use, but after repeated requests, my office finally put up wall clocks in all of the conference rooms and common areas. They use some central syncing mechanism, but I'm not sure if it's wifi or proprietary radio.