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The people holding up the internet | Data Drop

sheets.works · 2,822 words · saved by 3 readers

Four billion phones ask one text file what time it is. One lecturer keeps it in his spare time. We counted the rest.

Billions of phones run on code looked after by a handful of people. We counted them from the code itself. Read it as a plain page Your alarm, a boarding pass, a meeting in another country, the day your salary lands: anything on your phone that shows a time has to know where you are. Underneath sit every Android phone, every iPhone and most of the servers on the internet. They all get local time from one text file, the time zone database, which holds every clock rule a government has ever announced. Paul Eggert, a lecturer at UCLA, keeps that file up to date in his spare time. Paul Eggert…

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