Grabbing the Date and Time From a Time Server on the Internet

Gregory Lypny gregory.lypny at videotron.ca
Tue Aug 16 12:33:20 EDT 2011


Hi Bob,

Good summary, Bob.  It summarizes nicely the issues that I’m dealing with in creating a client-side student helper app.  Your RealTime function works nicely.  The only thing missing is the year, which again, is something that a user could set manually.

Regards,

Gregory



On Tue, Aug 16, 2011, at 11:44 AM, use-livecode-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:

> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2011 17:04:42 -0700
> From: Bob Sneidar <bobs at twft.com>
> To: How to use LiveCode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>
> Subject: Re: Grabbing the Date and Time From a Time Server on the
> 	Internet
> Message-ID: <71DFE006-B408-43B4-8CEC-AB4F1FE20C39 at twft.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> The Internet Date returns the date and time, along with the current time zone set in your preferences. If the user changes his date and time manually though, it will faithfully return whatever the user enters. Querying a time server on the internet will always return the real date and time. 
> 
> Suppose you had a trial scheme which expired the license after 30 days. The easiest way to defeat that would be to always set the clock back whenever you used the software. But that would be to no avail if you check the RealTime (as I named my function). 
> 
> Also, Windows Clients are sometimes configured to get the date and time from an internal time server running on the network. If that time server service stops functioning and the admin doesn't know it, the time can drift quite a bit aver several weeks. Any app that was critically dependent on knowing the exact time might not work correctly. 
> 
> Someone mentioned that if you were using sql, that you could query the sql server for the date and time. This actually has a real advantage over a time server, as NTP or even HTTP could be blocked by a personal firewall using ports or a blacklist, but no one could firewall off the sql server you need to run your application! 
> 
> Bob




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