Have you ever wondered how computers stay in sync with the time? That is theresponsibility of the Network Time Protocol (NTP). Around since 1985, NTP is oneof the oldest protocols still in use on the internet and its referenceimplementation, ntpd, written in C, is still widely used today.That's a problem. C is a language that is not memory safe, and ntpd has had itsshare of security vulnerabilities. Here is a list of CVEs.As part of Project Pendulum, Folkert de Vries and his colleagues from TweedeGolf have been working on a Rust implementation of NTP. I sit down with Folkertto talk about the project, the challenges they faced, and the benefits of usingRust for this kind of project.Along the way, we learn about funding open source projects, the challenges ofestablishing a new implementation of a protocol, and all sorts of otherinteresting things that might or might not be related to NTP.