The Third Commandment is to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. For two millennium the wandering people of Judea have been trying to deal with local problems of following the Mosaic Laws. Keeping the Sabbath has been a high priority and a serious legal problem. When elevators came along, the act of pushing the button for a floor was considered work and violation of the Sabbath. Where Jews own elevators or use them regularly the elevators are set to stop at every floor on the Sabbath or with two elevators one goes to all even numbered floors the other to all odd numbered floors.
Today there is an interesting new problem that is not local.
For two thousand years this people have mutually agreed to write letters to the scholars among them for advice. That advice is written down and called the Talmud. At one point the center of Mosaic scholarship was Baghdad, today it is Jerusalem. Jerusalem is where this solution came from.
A problem arose roughly ten years ago when it became possible to do autonomous business on a global scale with the Internet. The Sabbath is defined as starting at sunset on Friday and lasting until sunset on Saturday. But on a global scale sunset on Friday first begins at sunset in New Zealand and continues until sunset in Hawaii.
The rabbinical solution: If no person is working, the Sabbath is not an issue. Shut off your own computer screen or cover it and if your business is run autonomously (sales are going on in the server with credit cards) it is not violating the Sabbath. Keeping the Sabbath is about maintaining a holy presence in your own person without interruption. Think meditation for 24 hours.
I think that is a splendid solution.
A different question arises if you are doing business on Friday or Sunday and you know you are doing business with a Jew who is using a server in a Sabbath time zone. Answer: don’t.
Lastly, there remains the question of what to do about using a server that is located above the Arctic circle or below the Antarctic circle. That question hasn’t been answered yet because the actual problem doesn’t appear to have arisen, although it is theoretically a problem now when using a computer or doing any work while flying over those areas.