Achilles Heelart 1
Our digital world has two very serious weak spots meaning, without
them we lose everything. Interestingly, we never really concern
ourselves with either one of them! What are they? Electric power and
time.
Oh, but the power is always on... Nope, the power grid is simple and
complex at the same time. Did you know that all the power consumed at
any one given time is realtime generated to match the load. If various
loads rise or fall the generation stations have to follow that load.
If not, the voltage rises or drops, the currents can become oscillator
and reek havoc. If generation speed gets off, the 60 or 50 cycles
frequency transformers depend on, varies. Many electric clocks use the
power line frequency to run a motor and turn the hands of a clock to
keep us on schedule.
And excellent resource, if you want to know more about all things
electric, is Delmar's "Standard Textbook of Electricity."
Time Wounds All Heels
Silly, I know, but we forget how important time is to digital
electronics. Timing is not even shown on TX/RX diagrams or circuit
descriptions. A couple of factoids to better understand what a digital
stream is: A clock pulse stream of twice the frequency of the data
stream must be present because each 1 or 0 has to be read in the middle
of each data pulse, therefore the clock has to have a rising edge in the
middle and to do that, it has to be twice the frequency - a bandwidth
issue not even mentioned in text books - AND Two, be in perfect sync.
The other fact that bears on this is timing used in network services
comes in through the backdoor via atomic clock accuracy broadcasts
around the Internet to sync computers to work together. Without it, data
can't be read correctly! These timing datagrams are read in between all
other incoming data and used to sync a local clock in each and every
network computer and router.
GPS is an excellent source of timing, as well as the before mentioned
Internet that has a system of servers that can be accessed that
distribute timestamps from the atomic clock at the U.S. Navy Observatory
via NTP - Network Time Protocol.
Okay, so everybody has their machines sync'd to a common time and off
that can have a local clock line up with incoming data. After all,
that's the point. But...denial of service hacks can interrupt the time
stamps, issue fake timing, alter the basis of reading data. Oh, now I
have your attention!
What could possibly go wrong? Ask the Bitcoin community. All financial
transactions over the Internet, by law, have to be accurately
timestamped to avoid fraud. Any video issued in a court of law as
evidence in a crime has to prove valid timestamp certification. Timing
not only makes reading data possibly, it also affects the use of that
data. Clocks are King.