Some DNS lookups causing 5xx errors due to leap second bug

Some DNS lookups causing 5xx errors due to leap second bug
cloudflarestatus.com

[1] https://developers.google.com/time/smear

It's absurd that we continue to keep subjecting ourselves to these disruptions and the considerable amount of work that goes into handling leap seconds for the systems that aren't disrupted by them.

Leap seconds serve no useful purpose. Applications that care about solar time care usually care about the local solar time, while UT1 is a 'mean solar time' that doesn't really have much physical meaning (it's not a quantity that can be observed anywhere, but a model parameter).

It would take on the order of 4000 years for time to slip even one hour. If we found that we cared about this thousands of years from now: we could simply adopt timezones one hour over after 2000 years, existing systems already handle devices in a mix of timezones.

[And a fun aside: it appears likely that in less than 4000 years we would need more than two leapseconds per year, sooner if warming melts the icecaps. So even the things that correctly handle leapseconds now will eventually fail. Having to deal with the changing rotation speed of the earth eventually can't be avoided but we can avoid suffering over and over again now.]

There are so many hard problems that can't just easily be solved that we should be spending our efforts on. Leapseconds are a folly purely made by man which we can choose to stop at any time. Discontinuing leapseconds is completely backwards compatible with virtually every existing system. The very few specialized systems (astronomy) that actually want mean solar time should already be using UT1 directly to avoid the 0.9 second error between UTC and UT1. For all else that is required is that we choose to stop issuing them (a decision of the ITU), or that we stop listening to them (a decision of various technology industries to move from using UTC to TAI+offset).

The recent leap smear moves are an example of the latter course but a half-hearted one that adds a lot of complexity and additional failure modes.

(In fact for the astronomy applications that leap seconds theoretically help they _still_ add additional complication because it is harder to apply corrections from UTC to an astronomical time base due to UTC having discontinuities in it.)