Rogue second that brought down the Internet

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Published time: July 02, 2012 19:46
Edited time: July 03, 2012 00:02

Reddit's increasingly peeved Twitter feed.

Comments (2)

jaturaphat 03.07.2012 00:52

Beware of the amazing power of the " leap second." ...... awesome.

American Patriot (unregistered) 02.07.2012 20:39

I find it suspicious that such a phenomenon could take out servers at these large technology and computing firms. Reddit, Gawker, Linkedin, Foursquare, and others, when my computers, television, cellphone, TV cable box, DVD player, and Facebook all worked. I didn't notice anything.

The UTC is like a service. The service it provides is accurate time via the Internet computer network. Each computer has to connect to the UTC service, indirectly or directly, via the NTP protocol. So that means that these computing firms Reddit, Foursquare and others, updated their computers times just in the right time to do an update of their computers time. A stray second here would not take down their OSes, as the kernel is agnostic to external time and has it's own built-in timing mechanism. So that leaves these organizations applications to blame.

And if their applications failed due to one extra second, this leap second, then their company is to blame and not this routine anomally. Leap seconds are added to UTC based on a protocol, or a set rules by the engineers over there in England at the UTC faciility. Leap seconds are added a for a variety of reasons, techinically speaking, leap seconds are a routine occurence. An earthquake can throw the Earth out of alignment with the sun, and so a leap year will need to be added to re-sycn the Sun and Earth once again. In 2012, we had many tsunami's (caused by earthquakes) and many natural disasters, and these could have altered Earth tilt and thus the ensuing time change. Those could have been causes enough to throw the Earth out of sync with UTC at that point, and so a leap second or two will need to be added.

In other words, this article is bunkus, and these companies are in some conspiracy.

The next thing you know is that they will mandate the citizens install "leap second security software" on each personaly computers to prevent a cyberwarfare attack using leap seconds. Sounds far fetched, but you won't be smiling when you read that in the news.

Question more huh RT.... I just did. I want a more thorough and capable article next time.

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