Friday December 08, 2006
Dear Politicians all over the world, Re Daylight Saving Dear Politician,
PLEASE stop messing around with your countries rules for Daylight Saving changes. Have you got any idea how much pain, time and financial cost your actions have on those people how have to use computers and those who have to develop for them and maintain them.
I suspect you don't because if you did you would stop messing around with the Daylight Saving definitions for your area of jurstiction.
To give you just a tiny insight into this pain I'm ranting on this blog to show you just a tiny bit of the effort that is involved when you put such changes into law. I'm not even going to touch on the impact to embedded devices like digital video recorders and clocks in all sorts of appliances - including medical ones.
Operating System vendors and vendors of products that have knowledge of dates have to be made aware of the change. They have to change their product and produce updates/patches and make those available to all their customers. The customers administration staff then have to be aware that they need these and to schedule the appropriate maintenance to test, install and deploy these changes in time for the change to happen.
In some environments any change to the systems involves a lot of change management and is very costly, particularly in critical infrastructure, government, financial and medical deployments.
If that was all there was it would be bad but it is worse than that! The people who support the end customers need to answer questions every time this happens, when will the patches be available, what happens to the date stamps of my already existing files ? What about my audit logs ?
As a security person that last one is very important to me. In a UNIX environment like Solaris most applications will let the system do the time keeping in UTC/GMT but sometimes they write times to log files in a human readable format. When daylight saving happens the dates change as the human sees them in some cases. This can be important for security and compliance auditing. It can make it harder for people to reason about when certain events happened, which can be critical during investigations.
So for SOX sake!
STOP IT!
( Dec 08 2006, 12:06:25 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [1]Comments are closed for this entry.
This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.
Now, which politicians do I need to bribe to stop any more of this nonsense?
Posted by Tim Vernum on December 13, 2006 at 02:30 AM GMT #