[TUHS] Leap Second

[stephen.strowes@gmail.com (sds)]

On 29/12/2016 01:21, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On 2016-Dec-29 10:59:32 +1100, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>> (Yes, a repeat, but this momentous event only happens every few years.)
> Actually, they've been more frequent of late.
Important question: did anybody have an "exciting" new year because of a 
leap second bug?

>> The International Earth Rotation Service has announced that there will be
>> a Leap Second inserted at 23:59:59 UTC on the 31st December, due to the
>> earth slowly slowing down.  It's fun to listen to see how the time beeps
>> handle it; will your GPS clock display 23:59:60, or will it go nuts
>> (because the programmer was an idiot)?
> Google chose an alternative approach to avoiding the 23:59:60 issue and will
> smear the upcoming leap second across the period 2016-12-31 14:00:00 UTC
> through 2017-01-01 10:00:00 UTC (see https://developers.google.com/time/smear).
> Of course, this means that mixing time.google.com with normal NTP servers
> will have "interesting" effects.
FWIW, Akamai and AWS are similar (but different) implementations of leap 
second smear:
* 
https://blogs.akamai.com/2016/11/planning-for-the-end-of-2016-a-leap-second-and-the-end-of-support-for-sha-1-tls-certificates.html
* 
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/look-before-you-leap-the-coming-leap-second-and-aws/

S.