在重量与度量大会（GCPM）*上，时间领主们决定停止引入闰秒，理由是闰秒可能导致物联网设备出现问题——从而需要类似千年虫问题规模的修复工作——因此需要做出这一改变。正如《The》上周报道的，GCPM致力于协调世界时（UT1）——科学家们通过地球自转速度的变化来计算——以及人类用来设定时间的协调世界时（UTC）标准。
The Time Lords at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (GCPM)* have decided to stop introducing leap seconds, citing the likelihood they could cause problems with internet of things devices – and therefore a Y2K scale remediation effort – as a reason for the change. As The reported last week, the GCPM works to harmonize Universal Time – UT1, which boffins calculate using the changing speed of Earth’s rotation – and the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard that humans use to set time.
我们这些脑容量较大的智人可以制定标准，但对地球自转速度的可变性无能为力。当地球自转变慢时，GCPM会加入闰秒，使UT1和UTC保持同步。近年来，他们甚至曾考虑过负闰秒，因为地球自转略有加速。就像所有优秀的标准组织一样，GCPM会就其工作进行多年讨论。闰秒议题近年来一直是议程上的重点，因为如今人类依赖数十亿能够共享相同时间数据的设备，但这些设备可能无法轻易处理闰秒的实施。
We big-brained hominids can set standards but can’t do much about the fact that the speed of Earth’s rotation is variable. When our planet’s spin slows, the GCPM adds leap seconds so that UT1 and UTC are in synch. In recent years, they have even pondered a negative leap second because Earth’s rotation has sped up a little. Like all good standards orgs, the GCPM conducts years-long debates about its work. The topic of leap seconds has very much been on the agenda in recent years, as they’re increasingly hard to implement now that humanity relies on billions of devices that can usefully share the same timing data but may not easily account for leap seconds.
这一问题在上周GCPM第28次会议上达到高潮，当时时间领主们投票决定终止使用闰秒。负闰秒的可能性似乎是一个主要因素。时间领主们在投票后发布的决议中写道：“负闰秒此前从未被应用过，且被认为可能对大多数未做好准备的关键基础设施造成异常和中断，风险较高。”
The matter came to a head at last week’s 28th meeting of the GCPM, at which Time Lords voted to end use of leap seconds. The possibility of a negative leap second seems to have been a major factor. “A negative leap second has not previously been applied, and it is considered to pose a high risk of causing anomalies and disruption to critical infrastructures that are largely unprepared,” the Time Lords wrote in a resolution posted after their vote.
“准备工作将为依赖时间同步的行业带来需要进行财务投资的需求，其金额估计与它们为千年虫问题所做的准备相近。”读者可能记得，在1990年代末，全球花费了数十亿美元来修复软件，这些软件由于早期商业计算中为节省内存而采取的当时看来合理的措施，无法妥善处理1999年12月31日之后的日期。历史学家现在将Y2K修复的全球成本估计为3000亿至6000亿美元。
“The preparation would create, for the industries that rely on time synchronization, a need for financial investment, whose amount is estimated to be similar to their preparations for the millennium bug.”Readers may recall that in the late 1990s, the world spent billions of dollars remediating software that, due to sensible-at-the-time memory-saving measures from the early years of business computing, couldn’t comfortably handle dates after December 31, 1999. Historians now cite the global cost of Y2K remediation at $300-$600 billion.
普遍认为这笔钱花得不值。GCPM还担心联网设备。物联网（IoT）技术的日益普及、分布式多传感器系统、智能电网以及面向当代社会的虚拟服务，增加了系统和服务在插入任何闰秒时发生故障的风险，尤其是负闰秒的情况，”他们写道。该决议还提出了另一个担忧：“全球服务提供商在其服务器系统中采用不同的缓解方法来引入闰秒，以避免时间跳变，这导致不同系统之间的时间不一致，以及所传播的时间和频率不一致，且不符合SI单位（标准秒）。”
It's widely thought that money was not well-spent. The GCPM also worries about connected devices. The growing influence of IoT (Internet of Things) technologies, dispersed multi-sensor systems, smart grids, and virtual services for contemporary society, creates an increasing risk of malfunction in operation of systems and services with the insertion of any leap second, especially with a negative one,” they wrote. Another concern raised in the resolution is: “The use of different mitigation methods for leap second introductions by global service providers in their server systems, in order to avoid time steps, leads to inconsistency in timing between different systems and in the disseminated time and frequency, which do not conform to the SI unit [the standard second].”
世界上有众多物联网设备制造商，但关于它们应如何行为的标准却较少。因此，一些制造商生产了做工粗劣且不安全的设备，这些设备出厂时携带易受攻击的软件，可能被恶意软件利用，或者缺乏便于更新的功能。因此，数十亿台设备可能无法正确实施闰秒。这将成为一个问题，因为数字证书包含一个notbefore值——即证书在此时间之前不会被接受。许多遇到表现异常证书的系统会予以拒绝。
The world is home to myriad manufacturers of IoT devices, but fewer standards on how they should behave. Some manufacturers therefore build shabbily insecure devices that ship with vulnerable software that allow them to be subverted with malware, or without facilities that allow easy updates. Billions of devices could therefore fail to implement a leap second. That would become a problem because digital certificates include a notbefore value – a time before which the cert won’t be accepted. Many systems that see a misbehaving cert would reject it.
因此可以设想，如果一家主要互联网服务提供商的调制解调器无法容纳闰秒，那么这一额外时间片的引入可能会导致该运营商的网络认为其客户不够可信，从而拒绝连接。此类情景更表明，时间主宰者对软件开发者可能不可避免的失误持有相当长远的看法。GCPM 对闰秒的替代方案是允许 UT1 和 UTC 在称为“连续 UTC”（Continuous UTC）的方案下偏离多达 3,600 秒，该方案将于明年生效。
It’s therefore conceivable that if a major ISP’s modems could not accommodate a leap second, the extra sliver of time’s introduction could see the carrier’s network decide its own customers are not trustworthy enough to connect. Scenarios like that rather suggest Time Lords have taken a sensibly long view regarding the perhaps-inevitable fallibility of software developers. The GCPM's replacement for leap seconds is to allow UT1 and UTC to diverge by up to 3,600 seconds under a scheme called "Continuous UTC" that comes into force next year.
由于夏令时的实践，人类在增减小时方面积累了丰富经验，而一些人希望废除夏令时。® * 该组织的正式名称是 Conférence générale des poids et mesures，由此得出缩写 GCPM。
Humanity has lots of practice adding and removing hours thanks to Daylight Saving time, which some want to sunset. ® * The organisation’s formal name is the Conférence générale des poids et mesures, which yields the acronym GCPM