References

Every fact on this site traces to a primary specification or authoritative source. URLs were verified to resolve to real content during research; where a primary source could not be reached or does not exist, that is stated plainly.

Time scales, leap seconds, calendars

• POSIX.1-2017 / IEEE Std 1003.1, Base Definitions §4.16 "Seconds Since the Epoch" — pubs.opengroup.org
• IERS leap-second data file (TAI−UTC table) — hpiers.obspm.fr; IERS Bulletin C — iers.org
• BIPM — Resolution 4 of the 27^th CGPM (2022) (leap-second phase-out by 2035) — bipm.org
• US Naval Observatory — Julian Date / calendar notes — aa.usno.navy.mil
• Leap smearing (vendor primary): Google Public NTP — developers.google.com/time/smear; AWS — aws.amazon.com; Meta — engineering.fb.com

Microsoft / Windows

• [MS-DTYP] §2.3.3 FILETIME — learn.microsoft.com
• Win32 File Times (NTFS UTC, FAT local) — learn.microsoft.com
• OLE Automation DATE — VariantTimeToSystemTime — learn.microsoft.com
• Excel 1900 leap-year bug — learn.microsoft.com
• .NET System.DateTime / .Ticks — learn.microsoft.com (ECMA-335 BCL)
• SYSTEMTIME — learn.microsoft.com
• Active Directory: pwdLastSet MS-ADA3 §2.175; lastLogonTimestamp MS-ADA1 §2.352
• FAT: DosDateTimeToFileTime — learn.microsoft.com; Microsoft FAT32 specification (fatgen103) — download.microsoft.com
• exFAT specification §7.4 — learn.microsoft.com
• .ZIP APPNOTE v6.3.10 — pkware.cachefly.net
• C runtime time, _time32, _time64 (Year 2038) — learn.microsoft.com
• Windows clock granularity: High-Resolution Timers, GetSystemTimePreciseAsFileTime

Non-primary by necessity

The on-disk NTFS $STANDARD_INFORMATION / $FILE_NAME MFT attribute byte layout has no Microsoft open specification; only the FILETIME unit/epoch and UTC-on-disk storage are from Microsoft primaries. The SI-vs-FN timestomping distinction is from established forensic literature (The Sleuth Kit; Carrier, File System Forensic Analysis).

Apple

• TN1150 "HFS Plus Volume Format" — developer.apple.com/library/archive
• CFAbsoluteTime / NSDate — developer.apple.com; constants in Apple CoreFoundation source CFDate.h
• Apple File System Reference (APFS) PDF — developer.apple.com

Verification caveat

Modern developer.apple.com/documentation/… pages are single-page apps that serve no machine-readable text to a plain fetch; the CFAbsoluteTime constants here are anchored to Apple's published CoreFoundation source. Core Data's and Safari History.db's on-disk column encodings are established forensic conventions, not Apple-documented guarantees — confirm empirically.

Unix, web & databases

• WebKit/Chrome base::Time — chromium.googlesource.com
• PostgreSQL timestamp.h — github.com/postgres
• SQLite date-and-time functions — sqlite.org
• MySQL DATE/DATETIME/TIMESTAMP — dev.mysql.com
• ECMA-262 (JavaScript Date) §21.4.1.1 — tc39.es
• Go time package — pkg.go.dev/time
• Linux man pages: clock_gettime(2), gettimeofday(2), hwclock(8)
• Mozilla NSPR prtime.h — searchfox.org

Identifiers

• RFC 9562 (UUID, obsoletes RFC 4122) — rfc-editor.org
• Twitter Snowflake — github.com/twitter-archive/snowflake
• Discord — Snowflakes — discord.com/developers
• ULID spec — github.com/ulid/spec
• MongoDB ObjectId — mongodb.com
• KSUID — github.com/segmentio/ksuid
• Sonyflake — github.com/sony/sonyflake

Time scales: GPS, TAI64, NTP

• IS-GPS-200 (NAVSTAR GPS Interface Specification) — navcen.uscg.gov
• RFC 5905 (NTPv4) — rfc-editor.org
• TAI64 (D. J. Bernstein, libtai) — cr.yp.to/libtai/tai64.html
• RFC 868 (Time Protocol) — rfc-editor.org

Hardware / older clocks

• OSDev wiki (community reference; live host blocks bots, archive snapshots cited): CMOS, RTC, PIT, Time And Date

Validation oracle

• time-decode (Corey Forman / digitalsleuth, MIT) — the independent third-party differential oracle used in Validation — github.com/digitalsleuth/time_decode

Libraries timeglyph builds on

• jiff (civil time, IANA tz) — docs.rs/jiff
• hifitime (leap-aware TAI/GPS) — docs.rs/hifitime