New submitter Landy DeField was the first of many of write in about Network Solutions’ website and DNS outage: “If your website does not load this morning you need to ask yourself do we use Network Solutions? Because all of their servers are all currently down. You can confirm this by visiting http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/networksolutions.com.html.” The only solid information from Network Solutions is a post on their Facebook page: “Network Solutions is experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack that is impacting our customers as well as the Network Solutions site. Our technology team is working to mitigate the situation. Please check back for updates.” There have been several reports that the outage is causing hosted DNS to fail, leading to a number of unresolvable websites. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original post:
Network Solutions Hit With DDoS
kodiaktau writes “The ACLU has issued a FOIA request to determine whether the IRS gets warrants before reading taxpayers’ email. The request is based on the antiquated Electronic Communication Protection Act — federal agencies can and do request and read email that is over 180 days old. The IRS response can be found at the ACLU’s website. The IRS asserts that it can and will continue to make warrantless requests to ISPs to track down tax evasion. Quoting: ‘The documents the ACLU obtained make clear that, before Warshak, it was the policy of the IRS to read people’s email without getting a warrant. Not only that, but the IRS believed that the Fourth Amendment did not apply to email at all. A 2009 “Search Warrant Handbook” from the IRS Criminal Tax Division’s Office of Chief Counsel baldly asserts that “the Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.” Again in 2010, a presentation by the IRS Office of Chief Counsel asserts that the “4th Amendment Does Not Protect Emails Stored on Server” and there is “No Privacy Expectation” in those emails.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
wiredmikey writes “Google on Tuesday announced that it now fully supports DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) validation on its Google Public DNS resolvers. Previously, the search giant accepted and forwarded DNSSEC-formatted messages but didn’t actually perform validation. ‘With this new security feature, we can better protect people from DNS-based attacks and make DNS more secure overall by identifying and rejecting invalid responses from DNSSEC-protected domains,’ Yunhong Gu, Team Lead, Google Public DNS, wrote in a blog post. According to Gu, about 1/3 of top-level domains have been signed, but most second-level domains remain unsigned. According to NIST, there has been no progress in enabling DNSSEC on 98 percent of all 1,070 industry domains tested as of March 18, 2013. ‘Overall, DNSSEC is still at an early stage and we hope that our support will help expedite its deployment,’ Gu said.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.