Why your computer clock is wrong

Your computer clock is lying to you. Right now, it's probably off by at least two seconds.

You think your laptop is perfectly synced because it's connected to the internet. But it's not. Operating systems use Network Time Protocol to ping a server and get the current time. But hardware clocks drift. They drift fast. Motherboard batteries get weak, temperature changes affect the quartz crystal, and suddenly your local time is just guessing.

Let me back up. Two seconds doesn't sound like much. Who cares about two seconds?

You care when you're trying to snipe a train ticket on IRCTC. Those tickets vanish in literally four seconds. If your clock is two seconds slow, you click book and the server just laughs at you. The tickets are gone.

Or if you're day trading. A one-second drift means you're buying a stock at a price that doesn't exist anymore.

That's why you don't trust the little clock in the corner of your screen. You go to a dedicated time server. You go to a site that pulls pure local time directly from the atomic clock feeds.

Actually, scratch that. Just refresh your browser window before you do anything expensive.