Chrome: "Your Clock is ahead"

[Ray Tackett]

But the date and time are perfect -- Nist-synced at boot and every four hours thereafter. All the searchable answers tell you how to fix your computer's date/time. Mine do not need fixing. On my wife's machine, Chrome gets it wrong, Firefox is OK. On all other machines, except a "live backup" of my wife's machine, it's OK.

All national and date/time format settings are identical between good and failing machines.

I suspect it's a site (walmart.com) certificate issue, but I don't know how to deal with it.

[Russell Holton]

I suspect it's a site (walmart.com) certificate issue, but I don't know how to deal with it.

If you go into the advanced settings of Chrome, you should be able to selectively delete cookies. I'd delete all the cookies that deal with that site.

That's my best guess. It least it would explain why one browser on one machine. But I'm not sure how that would cause that error message - cookies by nature are always in the "past" (system clock ahead).

[Ray Tackett]

Thanks, but every browser in the house deletes all cookies, flash cookies, history, etc. "from the beginning of time" on closing. On the machine my wife uses, I manually wiped the system temporary directory in the hope of clearing up another issue.

[Russell Holton]

Certificates could be cached as well. But that still begs the question of how it could detect that the clock is ahead.

[Robert Dubner]

Certificates could be cached as well. But that still begs the question of how it could detect that the clock is ahead.

I don't know what started this conversation; as I see it, it seems to start in the middle. However...

Browsers time-stamp their requests, so a server can compare what time your computer thinks it is to what time the server thinks it is.

You probably know that there are a number of attacks on security that can be accomplished by spoofing time, which is why the requests and responses are time-stamped.

[Russell Holton]

Which suggests it might be the server's clock that's off. And thanks to load-sharing, there's no guarantee that another computer (or even another browser) will end up talking to the same server, even if they go to the same URL.