If your one of the hundreds, maybe thousands,  of companies that use AIT for web and email hosting then your probably not very happy today. Appears they are down and I mean really down and have been for hours. I was able to pull the following notice off of Google Cache which was at least some information on the issue since you cannot even load AIT’s own servers meaning they don’t have their own product setup in a redundant manner:

By redundant it’s my take that any company of any major size or that runs a critical 24x7 business should always have their servers setup in multiple locations across the country so that any single facility failure does not result in a system wide failure. In this case without knowing exactly what has happened I can say that AIT should have been able to at the very least change where their records point so a server in California could come up, explain the problem and show they are alive and kicking.

If your not sure if your an AIT customer as they work through resellers you can go to Network Solutions and enter your domain and if your hosted on AIT you will see some reference to that in the Name Server or other records. As of this writing I know this has taken down at least six businesses in the Winston-Salem area many of which rely on email for business.

Recently Steve Gibson did his regular “Security Now” podcast with Leo Laporte on hacking voting machines which although was interesting I found it to be somewhat dubious to refer to this as “Voting Machine Hacking”. Just to keep a copy for myself if nothing else here is my response to Steve on this podcast: Security Now 211, Voting Machine Hacking

Steve I somewhat take issue with your podcast on if these machines were hacked or not. The first rule of security is to secure the access as no matter how secure the OS or device if there is no physical security then there is no security at all. In this case these researches didn't "hack" anything, they reverse engineered the device and code finding areas they could manipulate however how could they ever do that in real life to a voting machine if those machines are kept in a secure environment?

It is my hope at least that just as ballots should be kept safe (as in not in some car trunk as in the last election) that voting machines are stored in a secure location when not in use, are validated as having not been reconfigured or changed prior to a vote, have the cases security sealed and are delivered by security and kept in a secure location before, during and after the vote. If none of the above is true then sure let's take any of these boxes apart and manipulate the code, what news is there in that being something difficult? It is no different than stuffing ballot boxes that are not secured.

Security starts with securing the access.

For those that use Gmail if your trying to access the web interface today your probably running into a bit of trouble. Appears Gmail's web interface went down around 4:15PM EST although IMAP and Gmail services themselves are up and processing email. The event seems to be worldwide so here’s a big, fat, WOW!