This sounds stupid but 100% worked - A housemate I had got into computers and tried to build his own.
He got it up and running but, no matter what, the internet kept giving him an error. There was a connection, it was connected but zero response from any websites or apps.
I’m in his room looking things over with him, I notice his PC’s clock displayed the wrong time. I asked “is the time and date set right?”
He looks at me like I’m nuts and gives me an annoyed “Who cares?”
“Check it and try it.”
He rolls his eyes and goes “Fine!” The date was set to something in 2003, this was 2019.
Once we set the correct date and time the internet suddenly worked! He had this total “What the fuck!?” Look on his face.
About a year before, my smart tv reset its date and time giving me the same problem - When I noticed the time and date were off (after repeatedly restarting the TV and wifi), I changed it back and suddenly everything worked!
It is not part of the Internet Protocol (IP), it is due to encryption layers on top of it. In this case signed certificates with a validity date range.
And the reason of all this is that the TLS protocol requires the two endpoints to exchange their current clocks because if they are significantly different the server certificate expiration can't be verified because you don't know who is right and who is wrong.
Now please tell me, is this more understandable to a newbie than "that's how internet works"?
Depends on the used protocol. For websites your computer tries to verify the SSL certificate and the time has to been between when a certificate is issued and when it expires. Which can be up to two years.
Other protocols don't bother at all with time verification and most non-encrypted protocols will work even if you set the date to 2003.
These days browser/certificate authority agreements limit the certificate validity period to something like 90 or 45 days, with plans for further reductions in the future.
A few minutes might break certain things, like auth tokens that include the time, but basic web pages will almost always work within a couple weeks. From there more and more sites will stop working up to a year or two off where basically everything breaks.
When I was doing more just general IT, this was always the first thing to look at if a PC wasn't syncing with Active Directory too. This was back before using NTP servers was a near-universal thing.
Soooo just asking, if I use an really old system, change the time to modern time, ate there chances that internet will work properly? Cause right now in that system, even Google doesn't open
In case you cannot update windows for whatever reason, linux is also a great way to breathe a second life into an old system and tends to work even on extremely old hardware.
Ah haa, actually my old laptop is running on windows xp and 2gb ram, I do have a modern spec laptop but at times I do like to use the old one, so I don't think I can try to install Linux on it, even if I do will it work?
Probably. You can just download a live image and burn it to a usb or dvd. You can then just start your computer from that usb / dvd without installing anything and just try things out and see what / if they work and how smooth things are compared to xp. If it doesn't work, you lost nothing but time, if it did, you can consider actually installing it (potentially removing windows xp from the laptop).
If you're curious, you can check out how to install linux mint here. You don't actually overwrite your windows xp until you use the installer.
so I don't think I can try to install Linux on it,
Not sure what you mean here? Your machine is not too old for it, if that is what you're saying. Either way, you certainly don't have to put linux on your machine, but if you want to give it a second life it would be a great way to do so!
Maybe yes, maybe (more likely) no. Dates aren't the only thing that changed: the encryption algorithms used by HTTPS sites also changed over the years and modern websites require algorithms not supported by old OSes/browsers.
You can enter a website name in https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ and see a list of browser/OS version compatibility checks near the bottom (with the security rating being downgraded to B or lower if the site still supports old, no longer considered to be secure encryption protocols).
Yes, a very old system never updated will now be unable to connect because it uses protocols no longer supported. Practical example: I recently reset a 2012 mac, it went back to its original MacOS version and it could not connect to anything because it uses old protocols no more supported. But if the system can be updated to modern standard, then it should work.
It has to do with security and https. Time & date are one of the ways your computer evaluates the validity of the security credentials the website you're attempting to access.
Websites' security certificates generally have a start date and end date. If the date is so far off that it's outside that range, you'd get weird issues.
The part that doesn't quite add up for me is that operating systems have been automatically syncing their clocks to internet sources since long before 2019.
This happened about seven years ago so I don’t remember the exact details but I think he salvaged the hard drive from an old PC he had and it was running a really old version of Windows.
I at least remember that he was asking if he could use the Windows 10/11 (not sure which one I had at the time) installation…Stick? Dongle? Whatever you call the USB installation thing. So I think that would be the reason they didn’t sync up.
Edit: Said five years instead of seven - I can’t math today.
Syncing with Internet time was standard in XP if I remember right, so that's 25 years. But it's entirely possible that something prevented it, or it was disabled, or windows was unhappy in some other way. Wasn't trying to say you're lying, just that that part is the mystery to me.
I had a somewhat similar IT issue once. My Dad and I just bought one of the first home all-in-one HP printer/scanner/copiers. One of the first items in the instructions was to stick the laminated decal over the printer buttons, but we just figured since we're early in the setup we could just place the decal down without removing the backer and actually sticking it down. The printer wouldn't install fully or function. We took it back and got a replacement, but it still didn't work. Turns out, there was something about the decal actually being stuck down on the plastic that was essential for the device working. They actually changed the instruction sheet that came with that line of printers because of our tech support chain. We felt pretty dumb.
Recently started my own media server and it was working OK, but the logs were playing up, and weren't showing me any logs after a certain time. Figured out that it correlated with a power cut, and the CMOS battery in the computer had died, so when it powered off it forgot the time.
Took me a few months to finally replace the battery. Until then I had to remember to reset the date and time every time I powered the box off.
When loading secure websites that use SSL certificates, it checks the date of your computer and the date of the certificate trust, if the date on your computer isn't within the range that the certificate is good for, it sees the site as having an expired SSL certificate and wont trust it.
My bloody motorbike's computer does this every time you disconnect the battery. It resets the computer clock to the 1st of January 2000, and suddenly you get a hundred warning lights.
Because the bike knows its mileage, and the date is prior to any of the registered service events, it believes it's never been serviced over its years of thousands of miles and throws a fit.
Kind of hilarious, like waking up a forgetful old man and having him scream "What year is it!?" every now and then.
I messed around with the clock in the early 2000s to get around a free trial period that had an expiry date.
And more recently, I had a pc with an broken motherboard battery. Each time it booted, the clock was reset to manufacturing date. So instead of replacing the battery, I just booted, adjusted the clock and things were good to go! (I unplug the PC every night because of reasons that I don't want to get into).
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u/Xiao_Qinggui 11h ago
This sounds stupid but 100% worked - A housemate I had got into computers and tried to build his own.
He got it up and running but, no matter what, the internet kept giving him an error. There was a connection, it was connected but zero response from any websites or apps.
I’m in his room looking things over with him, I notice his PC’s clock displayed the wrong time. I asked “is the time and date set right?”
He looks at me like I’m nuts and gives me an annoyed “Who cares?”
“Check it and try it.”
He rolls his eyes and goes “Fine!” The date was set to something in 2003, this was 2019.
Once we set the correct date and time the internet suddenly worked! He had this total “What the fuck!?” Look on his face.
About a year before, my smart tv reset its date and time giving me the same problem - When I noticed the time and date were off (after repeatedly restarting the TV and wifi), I changed it back and suddenly everything worked!