Tampered taxi meters? There could be a solution!

Taxi owners tampering taxi meters and overcharging their customers is a perennial problem all around the world. This problem is more prevalent in third-world countries. I believe there could be a solution to this menace. Taxi meters should be made using GSM or CDMA technology and should have only the passenger in/out button. On our cell-phones, if the “cell info display” is enabled, the user can see the name of the place being displayed on the screen. As one moves from one place to the other the display also changes thus displaying the name of the place accurately. This technology can be used in taxi meters.

At the start of journey the taxi-driver can press the passenger in button, which would log the start time/place on the server. As the taxi moves from one place to another the route and the time taken gets updated in real-time in the server. When the passenger reaches the destination the passenger-out button which would request the server to process the journey details and display the total journey charges on the LCD available on the taxi-meter. Thus the taxi-owner can never dream of tampering the meter since the charges are sent from the server of the service provider.

In case of traffic snarls, wherein more time would be required to cover the same distance, the taxi driver should be automatically compensated for the lost time and the final charge should include the time-lost charges as in case of normal meters. The new meters should also have a provision to alert the passenger in case the taxi-driver is taking a round-about route to increase his profits thus fleecing the passenger. I hope these new taxi-meters will go a long way in improving the life of taxi-passengers.

Kodak's new Wi-Fi camera

Kodak has released a new 4 Mega-pixel, 3x optical zoom camera which is capable of connecting to the internet via 802.11. This can be done at Wi-Fi enabled hot-spots. This is a boon to consumers who are increasingly going wireless and the need for such devices are on the rise. I bet this device will become as popular as cell-phones which can shoot and send pictures instantly through GPRS or Bluetooth.

Cell phones had many restrictions as to quality of photos and space, but this camera which has a 256MB storage capacity will fill the void. Photography, which more than a century old, has evolved in leaps and bounds over the past decade and today you, can see almost every second person in the world having access to the gadget in one form or the other.

Long live this industry!!

Thunderbird holes plugged

Several security holes in Mozilla Thunderbird have been plugged by Mozilla in their latest version of the e-mail client. Thunderbird 1.0.7, which is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS, is a security and stability update. One of the security flaws which were fixed is a Linux command line URL parsing security flaw which could allow an attacker to run malicious code on the infected system. As hackers grow in number, intelligence and innovativeness it has become extremely difficult for information security officers to fix flaws.

It is very important for users to patch their systems as soon as the patches are released so that they are not vulnerable to attacks and thus make life easier for security officers.

New Malware on the prowl

There is a new malware on the net which redirects Google, MSN and Yahoo traffic to other spooky websites and collect traffic dependent advertising income. The malware named PremiumSearch installs a malicious Browser Helper Object on the infected computer’s HDD and also installs a Google toolbar. It also returns fake results and the user is taken to a spurious website on clicking the result.

I would advise everyone to use a good firewall and a real-time anti-spyware in order to thwart such attacks.