The embers were not out.
In April 2025 we shipped 1.2.4 - the waf build system brought up to 2.1.4, the daemon taught to run on FIPS-mode systems, clock fuzzing removed at last, Linux armhf supported, and a genuinely useful new trick: the ability to listen on a second port so that NTS could slip past the ISPs that filter port 123. And the development list, against the trend of years, woke up: over four hundred messages in 2025, more than triple the year before. Most of it was the hard, necessary conversation of a project deciding how to keep living - whether anyone still ran the old waf, whether Python 2 could finally be buried, whether the daemon should at last be rewritten in Go or Rust, and the small indignity of the mailing-list certificate expiring yet again. Even the IETF work crept forward: NTS for the public pool, long thought impossible, started to come together in a new key-exchange draft, and in early 2026 NTS-with-pool finally worked.
Through all of this the project manager who had stepped up in late September 2015 had grown steadily quieter, pulled away by the rest of a working life - encryption, the Linux distribution world, the slow gravity of other things. The project ran on the steady hands of the people who had always kept it running: Hal, Gary, Ian, Matt, Richard, the regulars.
Then, on June 7th, 2026, a message went out to the development list with the subject "Back to active participation." After some years away, Mark wrote, he was back, and meant to actively take part in NTPsec again - useful, these days, around TLS, crypto, and the distributions. Barely an hour later Gary Miller replied from Bend, Oregon, signed as always with his GPG key: "Yo Mark! Welcome back!" And then, because Gary has never once let a welcome stand without work attached to it, he pointed at the open problems waiting in the NTP working group - NTS in the pool, and the unresolved question of NTPv5.
That is where this telling stops, because that is where the present is. The big idea has shipped and been standardized. The founder of the protocol has been laid to rest. The project is older, smaller, and quieter than it was at its noisy peak, and it is still here - packaged in every serious distribution, keeping accurate, secure time for whoever wants it, with most of its original crew still answering the list.
The rest of the story has, once again, yet to be written.
