Hello, welcome to the Tuesday, January 3rd, 2017 edition of the Sands and its Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich, and today I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

Well, we got a couple of New Year items to start out with. The first one is a leap second that was added at New Year in order to adjust timekeeping for some of the irregularities

in Earth's rotation.

This is something that has caused issues in the past.

A few years ago, I remember some Linux systems crashed because of this leap second.

This time, no real widespread outage, but Cloudflare had some issues with its

DNS servers. They crashed because some of their round-trip time calculations ended up with

negative time. I also myself received one message from one of my servers, basically just complaining

about the large time that was skipped. So in this case, the full second that was all of a sudden

skipped did cause that alert to trigger. But other than that, no big widespread issues

that I have heard about. And AT&T started turning off its 2G network on

New Year's day. In order to free up more spectrum for data services and the like, AT&T decided to no

longer support 2G, which includes edge devices.

So at this point, if you don't have a 3G capable phone, then you will no longer be able

to use the AT&T network.

You should have received a notice from AT&T if you're affected by this.

One place where I see this possibly becoming an issue is where you do have, for example,

data loggers and such like GPS systems that do use 2G signals in order to report status back.

These systems that are often deployed sort of out in the field, main alonger function

once in that particular area, the 2G feature is turned off. This is a gradual rollout, but it is

starting as of January 1st. T-Mobile, by the way, is trying to target AT&T customers that are affected by the shutdown,

and it is promising that it will operate its 2G network until 2020. And a malicious calendar file

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