The Politics of Time: Daylight Saving Time Rules

The "Pet Peeves Rants" are periodic blog posts about annoying and often non-obvious observations about privacy, security and more generally in technology. No entry is aimed at anyone in particular, as most will reflect repeated sightings of simple idiocies that seem to be normal. Accept them as entertainment, even if you happen to be among the guilty.

Everyone in the US is aware of daylight savings time, also known as DST.

"Spring forward, fall back", goes the saying. We savor that extra hour of sleep in the autumn, and dread the loss of an hour in the spring.

DST is a controversial topic for many, especially for those in technology.

Most computer systems, however, don't run on local time (i.e., "localtime()”) but on standard UTC, which is Coordinated Universal Time.

Yes, it’s “UTC” and not “CUT.”

UTC doesn't do daylight savings. UTC doesn't care if it's Spring or Fall, or if you’re in New York, Cairo or Lhasa. UTC time is the same everywhere at any given moment.

UTC makes it easier to correlate computer systems’ log file activities between different time zones, regardless of the season. It also makes it easier to coordinate meetings between continents.

Need to plan a call for attendees in New York and London? Worrying about whether London is on British Summer Time, or not, isn’t necessary. Arrange the meeting in UTC and let everyone simply figure out the time locally by adding or subtracting their difference with UTC.

Note that UTC is not the same as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) since the UK is also afflicted by daylight savings.

If I can't find "UTC" in some consumer device's local time settings, I'll opt for Reykjavík. They always match UTC, and they don't do DST.

Yes, Iceland. Damn the volcanoes.

That long introduction leads to a major pet peeve for many of us.

If there's a local New York meeting on December at 1 PM, that's EST, Eastern Standard Time. If that meeting is in August at 1 PM, that's EDT, since it's during daylight savings time.

Yet it seems normal for all meetings to be labeled as “EST”, regardless of the month. It's particularly bothersome for technology-related events. I expect better.

Are those opting for "Eastern Time" just unsure of when it’s standard time or daylight savings time?

I understand how many people don't deal with the issue of time as intimately as some of us in technology do.

Time synchronization is a regular topic in networking, in that we need systems to maintain their clocks as close to atomic time as possible using tools like NTP.

It's just perplexing when everyone living in daylight saving time, including those who are regularly late to meetings, are well aware when the clocks change in the Spring and Fall. Yet few seem to also remember that the "D" in EDT stands for Daylight, and the "S" in EST is for Standard.

A final note: I never reply to unsolicited commercial email (UCE), with one exception.

A software consulting firm repeatedly banged on my inbox to propose meetings about their software quality assurance and code review services. They would offer times for calls in EST when it was EDT. My reply to them asked "How could we rely on you to do QA work if you don't know the difference between daylight savings time and standard time?"

I never heard from them again…

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About the author: George is a co-founder and CTO of ClearOPS. By trade, George is a systems administrator out of BSD Unix land, with long-time involvement in privacy-enhancing technologies. By nature, he thrives on creating unorthodox solutions to ordinary problems.

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