Re^2: Leap second coming up. Check your date handling code

[1nickt]

I read about that⁽¹⁾, and I hate it!

As linked to by pme, the official statement from the INTERNATIONAL EARTH ROTATION AND REFERENCE SYSTEMS SERVICE (IERS) reads:

A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2016.
 The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be:        
        
                          2016 December 31, 23h 59m 59s
                          2016 December 31, 23h 59m 60s
                          2017 January   1,  0h  0m  0s

In spite of "American exceptionalism" (cough, cough), neither Google, nor Akamai, nor Microsoft, nor Bloomberg, owns science. The international scientific community decided in 1972 that the correct thing to do was to add a second periodically, as is done with the leap day quadrennially. Google's and other companies' decision to employ "smearing" because it's more convenient for them undercuts scientific authority (last thing we need these days!), privatizes reality, and not least, makes their clocks unreliable for 20 hours or more.

Support science! Say "no" to Google's Not Time Protocol! Stick to pool.ntp.org -- it's open source, community-based, used by many millions of servers, accurate, and written in Perl :-)

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¹ (Although not in "Business Insider," which must be owed something by Google, since its articles dominate the Google News selections, even though behind a pay wall if one uses an ad blocker ...)

[talexb]

Google's post on this topic is here, but they're not pressuring anyone to use their smeared time -- they are just making the public aware of how they're handling the leap second by 'smearing' the additional second over a 20 hour window centered on midnight.

They've also posted about how other organizations are doing their smear: UTC-SLS is using a one thousand second smear before the leap, Bloomberg is using a two thousand second smear after the leap, and Akamai, Microsoft and Akamai are doing a 24-hour smear.

I believe for most consumers of ntp data this smearing is mostly of academic interest. Use whichever time feed is appropriate to you.