Thread: Time managed what the RIAA couldn't

Source: Time managed what the RIAA couldn't



While the RIAA has been trying for years to get Pirate Bay offline, it seems that the weekend's leap second fiasco managed it.
Over the weekend a number of key sites went tits up because they were not programmed to cope with the leap second.
In Pirate Bay's case it was due to a bug in the NTP daemon, which caused crashes of Debian based Linux machines all over the world.
TPB posted a note that it would be back as soon as it could find a sober admin to fix the problem and it assured users that it was not a DDOS attack or a raid of any kind after all.
The reason this is done is because the atomic clock standard we use has a slightly different rate than the rotation-of-the-Earth based Coordinated Universal Time system. Since these two years are so out of whack, humanity has to compensate by throwing in the odd leap second.
Last time there was a leap second there were a few problems for systems admins. This time people like Red Hat released a few patches to make sure that nothing went tits up. However there are reports of other companies having similar problems.