[LEAPSECS] is leap smear legal in Germany?

[Warner Losh]

On Mon, Feb 4, 2019 at 11:14 AM Kevin Birth <Kevin.Birth at qc.cuny.edu> wrote:

> Since law significantly lags behind technology, the leap smear is probably
> not illegal in any private network in any country.  After all, UTC is still
> not the "legal" time in many countries.
>
> NTP was developed after rubber seconds.  If NTP had developed before
> rubber seconds, and if the increments lengthening the rubber seconds were
> small enough, there might never have been a leap second policy.
>

Maybe, maybe not. For some things, rubber leap seconds are fine. For
others, the error in the frequency exceeds the tolerances for control
systems that care about errors as small as 1E-6 that will be wrong on leap
second spear day. Having seconds of different lengths is a problem for this
class of people, and will be a problem whether or not there's a leap second
step.

NTP was developed after leap seconds started, it is true. But it took
20-odd years after it was developed for people to start smearing leap
seconds. The prime mover for leap seconds was never computer time, which in
1970 sucked by today's standards: to be within minutes of the "correct"
time was good enough so nuanced differences in what was "correct" were
never given much of a though (UTC, UT1, UT2, TAI, meh, the delta between
these is 1000x smaller than what my system time can track, so who cares).
It was all about navigation and making sure that there was uniformity.

Warner

Cheers,
>
> Kevin
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: LEAPSECS <leapsecs-bounces at leapsecond.com> on behalf of Martin
> Burnicki <martin.burnicki at meinberg.de>
> Sent: Monday, February 4, 2019 10:48 AM
> To: leapsecs at leapsecond.com
> Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] is leap smear legal in Germany?
>
> EXTERNAL EMAIL: please report suspicious content to the ITS Help Desk.
>
>
> Steve,
>
> Steve Allen wrote:
> > The story about the German time broadcasts of DCF77 is in Bulletin
> > Horaire.
> [...]
> > But now I am trolling and asking:
> > Given that rubber seconds are illegal in Germany, is it legal to
> > use Google/Amazon NTP servers that provide smeared leap seconds?
>
> Thanks for the historic facts on DCF77, that's very interesting.
>
> I don't know if it's legal or not, but I know some of our customers here
> in Germany have explicitly configured their Meinberg LANTIME NTP servers
> to do leap second smearing.
>
> It's not because they like smearing seconds so much, it's just because
> it's a reliable way to avoid problems caused by OS kernels which simply
> step the system time back to insert a leap second.
>
> Martin
> --
> Martin Burnicki
>
> Senior Software Engineer
>
> MEINBERG Funkuhren GmbH & Co. KG
> Email: martin.burnicki at meinberg.de
> Phone: +49 5281 9309-414
> Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinburnicki/
>
> Lange Wand 9, 31812 Bad Pyrmont, Germany
> Amtsgericht Hannover 17HRA 100322
> Geschäftsführer/Managing Directors: Günter Meinberg, Werner Meinberg,
> Andre Hartmann, Heiko Gerstung
> Websites: https://www.meinberg.de  https://www.meinbergglobal.com
> Training: https://www.meinberg.academy
>
> _______________________________________________
> LEAPSECS mailing list
> LEAPSECS at leapsecond.com
> https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
> _______________________________________________
> LEAPSECS mailing list
> LEAPSECS at leapsecond.com
> https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist6.pair.net/pipermail/leapsecs/attachments/20190204/770fb1ea/attachment-0001.html>