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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

The headline is kind of clickbait, almost no clocks in daily life get their base clock frequency from powerlines.

Edit: Nevermind

In Holland on the first day of the month we set off all the war alarms for a minute to test if they still function. This month a lot of them failed, caused by the power frequency

Imagine for a second that North Korea or US were involved in the electricity dispute in question... And because of that, as you say, Holland wan't test it's war alarm (which is vital infrastructure I guess) I wonder what would be the position of EU...

Do you really think the US is not involved in this dispute?

ahahaha conspiration !!!

it's not really a conspiracy when energy payment squabbles are smacking you in the face in the news..

https://www.export.gov/article?id=Kosovo-Energy

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-russia-gaz...

etc etc etc

Oh god, I hope no Germans are reading this, it would be their perfect time to strike...

Where this procedure is in effect, there's a different signal for "test" and "emergency". The opposite situation is more common - we've had a couple of cases where the person in charge actually initiated the emergency protocol instead of the expected test protocol.

Not true. I experience this right now with the integrated clock in my stove. Applies to a lot of clocks in kitchen appliances.

What I read in this thread, heaters and whatnot too - at least kitchen clocks are visible and people would just reset them.

Also my digital clock radio is affected, I didn't know it was using AC like that until now

You might want to look around a bit, your assumption is incorrect: there's a surprising amount of appliances that are not IoT, but do rely on such unexpected side channels such as AC-as-a-clock - not everything has a network port, a quartz oscillator or even a GPS receiver, but most appliances do have a power plug.

It might interest you that you can use the power plug to connect the device to the internet.

Again, you are assuming that everything has enough power to run a networking stack, or even that there is Turing-equivalent hardware to run anything at all. (Yes, yes, I know this is HN, where any device is fit for a computer; most of the world isn't.) My water heater from late 1990s has a cleverly wired set of transistors - not even chips, the logic is literally wired into the product: cheap yet resilient. Connecting that to the internet would need adding some sort of computing device, adding several orders of magnitude in complexity (you can ping it and now it's also brittle, yay).

(I assume that you mean "to the local network, which is then connected via more conventional means, oh, and did I mention you need yet another computer to route data to the remote end?" - from what I've seen, attempts at WAN-over-power have largely been abandoned, even industrial IoT went for LoRa and friends. And from what I've experienced, LAN-over-power is a last-resort desperate hack: better than nothing at all, but barely better than two cans on a string w/r/t packet loss.)

I'm not assuming anything, I'm not participating in this discussion (and I agree with you). I'm just sharing an interesting information for the GP because it's not well known. You're right that it's not really usable in production; but it's nice for some simple home automation.

Ok, thanks for the correction. I thought I had overlooked some new development in the WAN-over-power :)

That is definitely interesting, do you know where I could find more info on it?

Sure, it's called "Powerline networking", you can find cheap modems that you connect to your internet connection and then you can use other modems as clients.

yeah except the one in my oven, in my microwave and in my coffee machine... all late by exactly the same amount.

Basically every device that is connected to main power and has a clock skips an internal quartz based circuit. Usually, this gives much higher precision for the same price point because frequency is typically controlled very, very tightly.

same for me, drove me nuts. Fortunately my PC looks at atomic clocks...

Your PC also has a quartz oscillator and battery backing, there's no way it synchronizes time from AC power.

sure, I just meant my PC has a very sophisticated (hence fragile) way of keeping its time accurate.

And forget about battery backing, it's a desktop and its bios battery is long dead :-) (hence the atomic clock)

Once you do synchronize it off the net, it's still the quartz oscillator keeping the local beat, as it were :)

I synchronize with ntp every 500 million cpu cycles :p

IIRC modern operatings systems use counters in the CPU for timekeeping instead of directly accessing the RTC

Well, the CPU is somewhat beyond my ken. You are right, of course - yet I think there would be another oscillator driving the clock generator as well. Turtles all the way down ;)

The clocks thing isn't quite true but you're right that it's a badly editorialized clickbait title. The linked press release never mentions anything as dramatic as 'an energy war in the Balkans' nor does the actual title reflect what's been posted on HN at all.

The clock thing is true, albeit simplified: I didn't have enough characters to say which type of clocks.

Regarding "an energy war in the Balkans", I could have said "an electricity dispute between Serbia and Kosovo", but again, I wouldn't have had enough characters.

I'm not sure the title was that bad, or that editorialized.

It was bad and editorialized, which is why the mods changed it. You could have just summarized the original title, as the site guidelines ask you to.

This is untrue given the examples in the article such as oven clocks

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