Friday, January 13, 2012

Please don't do dates and times like this!

So, you might have read my last post.

And, that covered only one website, namely http://samsclub.com/.

The problem is much, much worse than that. So, this is what happened.

I downloaded the free Camtasia Studio trial for 30 days, and I really, really enjoyed it. But, like all other trials, its time came, it prompted me to drop some Franklins or it wouldn't let me use it. And, I was about to close out the application (hey; I didn't actually need it), when I thought maybe I would try making my system time go back a bit, and see if that did anything.

And it did.


It happily pretended like it was 1/7/12 instead of 1/13/12, and I could continue to use my trials for another 6 days (and, after that I could repeat the same trick again, or, I could just sent it farther back to begin with). That struck me that maybe a lot of other applications depend on system time.

And, I promise you, there are a LOT of them.

Skype is a big one, if you move your time back, and look at Skype conversations and enter in a new one, it goes back onto old conversations.

So, please, please don't get dates and times from the system! You need to get them from a synchronized UTC timeserver.

2 comments:

  1. yay! There are several others, but, I didn't mention them, since I didn't want to stop using them ;)

    I'm pretty sure Rebtel is one, as well.

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