On 2019/12/09 13:16, Tim Kuijsten wrote: > > Nor do you bring up the traffic to the IP addresses offered by > > pool.ntp.org. That traffic has a pattern easily distinguished as > > "system startup". > > > > What's the difference? There isn't. Yet you brought up only google. > > I can understand why someone would be ok with sending some packets > to small players like pool.ntp.org and not be ok with sending packets > to extremely big and powerful companies that are in the business > of surveillance capitalism. Divide and conquer! >
I don't see how pool.ntp.org can be described as a small player when it comes to public NTP servers? 3 of the 4 hosts I currently get from them are large transit ISPs (NTT, TATA, Interoute). Plus of course you have no idea in advance who you are getting. If you are concerned about people using this information to evaluate things like how many machines you have running OpenBSD or how often they reboot, run your own NTP server with an internet upstream and point clients there. Or if you don't want people on the network path between you and public NTP servers to figure out that you're running OpenBSD at all from your time queries, GNSS modules are pretty cheap nowadays so you can run your own stratum 1 easily enough.
