Longer daylight saving could mean tech trouble

Some watches from Timex Inc. can adjust times based on radio signals from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology and other government sources.

The digital clocks on cell phones are generally synched with the service provider’s network clock. Operating systems from Microsoft, Apple Computer Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. can be configured to check periodically with Internet-based “time servers,” though such servers tend to use Greenwich Mean Time and leave daylight adjustments to local machines.

Joe Tasker, senior vice president for government affairs at the Information Technology Association of America, points out that daylight time already varies around the world, and some parts of the United States don’t observe it at all.

“We already are used to having a system in place that specifies all the information that we need” for a particular region, Tasker said. “It’s just a question of changing the effective date.”

Some European countries changed dates in response to a European Union directive to standardize daylight time beginning in 1996. That led to problems with Finnish dates in at least one version of Windows.

A few countries even change dates every year.

Israel, for instance, bases daylight time on the lunar Jewish calendar, and Palestinians change their clocks at different times as an assertion of independence. Windows doesn’t even provide an auto-adjust option for the time zone covering Jerusalem.

Moti Tzur, a sales manager at Sakal Electronics Ltd. in Jerusalem, says the constant changes do little to confound manufacturers, sales representatives or consumers.

“We get up and change the time on the VCR ourselves,” Tzur said. “These things come with directions.”

But while other countries have coped, Americans have largely become complacent and expect many clocks to change automatically because dates have been set for two decades, said Lauren Weinstein, a veteran technologist.

“Missiles won’t be launching but it’s still going to cause a lot of hassle,” he said. Risks grow when “things advance to the point where you expect things to happen automatically and you expect it to be correct.”

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