vsack - Slashdot User

+ - Protect a bridge from quakes - don't tie it down

Submitted by holy_calamity on Friday May 11, 2007 @08:03AM

holy_calamity (872269) writes "Bridges can be made more resistant to earthquakes by not tying them down properly, say engineers at Buffalo University. In trials on 'shake tables' 9 metre, 9 tonne, steel towers were allowed to totter to the point their legs left the ground by up to 10cm — dampers prevent them from falling over completely. Letting the towers rock out would isolate the structure from the rapid movements of the quake. Two videos show the tests."

+ - how to test your firewall

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 11, 2007 @07:44AM

An anonymous reader writes "Security-Hacks.com, a security tips and tricks blog, has published a compilation of firewall testing utilities: "There are many leak-testing programs available. Each one designed to test a particular flaw and each using a particular technique to bypass a firewall's standard protection mechanisms. We've compiled a list of tools we believe will be of value to both home users and advance users.""

+ - IPv6 flaw could greatly amplify DDoS attacks

Submitted by tygerstripes on Friday May 11, 2007 @06:47AM

tygerstripes (832644) writes "The Register has a story about the discovery of a flaw in part of the IPv6 specification which has experts scrambling to have the feature removed, or at least disabled by default. From the article:

The specification, known as the Type 0 Routing Header (RH0), allows computers to tell IPv6 routers to send data by a specific route. Originally envisioned as a way to let mobile users to retain a single IP for their devices... RH0 support allows attackers to amplify denial-of-service attacks on IPv6 infrastructure by a factor of at least 80.
Paul Vixie, president of the Internet Systems Consortium, described the fault bluntly. "It can be exploited by any greedy Estonian teenager with a $300 Linux machine.""

+ - Emailbasura blocking Google / Gmail!

Submitted by

wolverine1999

on Friday May 11, 2007 @05:31AM

wolverine1999 writes "Apparently Emailbasura, the spanish dns blacklist, is currently blocking emails from Google (eg gmail, google groups, etc)..
It's been days and nobody has resolved this, what gives?

This is the text of a bounce I received..
"This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 8): 554 Connection from 209.85.132.247 rejected for policy reasons. Host found in DNS blacklist at bl.emailbasura.org""