> I first spent weeks arguing on a bugzilla that the security policy of requiring the root password for changing the timezone
The time zone is a completely presentational setting, something that users can be expected to want to change every so often. And it has no relation to timestamps.
What on earth are you doing using time zones in a server application? Time zone is purely presentation, you should be storing and calculating everything in UTC and only converting to time zone for presentation to a user based on that user's time zone (either via a user defined setting for your application or based on the current time zone setting of a user's system). You should never, ever, ever use the server's time zone to determine presentation to a user (or for anything really).
> I first spent weeks arguing on a bugzilla that the security policy of requiring the root password for changing the timezone
The time zone is a completely presentational setting, something that users can be expected to want to change every so often. And it has no relation to timestamps.