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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Are certificates usually/often issued to expire at the end of a given calendar year? On the one hand, that would explain this happening on Dec 31.

But it's slightly weird because it's not yet the new year in UTC. This was posted several hours before that happening, and we've still got over 2 hours to go... (And the cinema is in New York, with almost 8 hours to go in local time, so it's not a local timezone issue either.)

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This is Sony, and it is the new year in Japan.

Sony is a Japanese company but it's also a multinational company consisting of hundreds of companies they aquired over the years all over the globe. It's therefore a relatively small chance is has something to do with Japan specifically.

It likely depends on where the programmer who has the original cert issued was... so quite likely Japan, given the evidence

This is the most likely, yup. The certs are unlikely to have a precise end-of-year expiration. It will be whatever the expiration is for the last certs loaded.

10 years in cinema IoT, here. Features are encrypted by Key Delivery Messages (KDM), and those are per cinema server/projector "marriage". No KDM will be considered valid if the server certs are expired.

This should make 2024 interesting for me.

(fyi)Japan Standard Time(JST) is UTC+9, single zone and no DST. Not sure of absolute time but Tweet is showing "Jan 1, 2024 at 2:19" timestamp on my JST phone.

The Dolby/Doremi servers certificate ended the Dec 31 too. Our maintenance subcontractor updated them few weeks ago. SO I guess it is common for the industry. Then it is an industry which often play 365d/year so, it's just another sunday/monday. (Add to this our weeks doesn't start Sunday/Monday, but Wednesday for France by example, and Friday for the US, day of the release of new movies)

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