[Joel_Mckay]

The epoch "zero time" on most hardware RTC is decades in the past.

Thus, it is generally a safe assumption to check if the system release date is in the future. One often doesn't want to trip this fix every boot as it can have collateral consequences in poorly written software.

We have a no time-travelers policy in most situations, and recommend others try to also constrain transactional-validity temporal-windows. Some hardware fakes an RTC by writing the current time to a cache file on disk on power cycles, but it would take a hour to explain why this is unwise (even if using GPS stratum time). =)