Cabbies protest GPS

A group that represents about 10 000 cabdrivers is calling for a strike today, its second in less than two months, to protest a city plan requiring the more than 13 000 medallion taxicabs to install global positioning systems and credit card machines, reports NY Times.

The group, New York Taxi Workers Alliance, staged a two-day work stoppage last month, but it had limited participation and failed to achieve its goals. The group plans a 24-hour strike this time.

"We are not going to back down," Bhairavi Desai, the alliance`s executive director, said in an interview.

It`s rare that anyone at Microsoft talks publicly about Windows 7, the next version of Windows. It`s even rarer that anyone provides actual information about what might be inside the operating system, which is still in the planning stages, says News.com.

However, Microsoft has posted a video of a recent university lecture given by engineer Eric Traut, in which he talks about, among other things, a new, slimmed down kernel known as MinWin that was created as part of the Windows 7 development process.

The kernel, which lacks Vista`s bells and whistles, or even a graphics system at all, takes up just 25MB on disk as compared with 4GB that the full Windows Vista takes up. And while people would need far more than MinWin to run even a basic Web server, Traut said it shows Windows, at its heart, does not have to be a monster resource hog.

The United Nations telecommunications agency in Geneva has given the upstart technology called WiMax a vote of approval, a sizable victory for Intel and something of a defeat for competing technologies from Qualcomm and Ericsson, reports IHT.com.

The International Telecommunication Union`s (ITU`s) radio assembly agreed last week to include WiMax, a wireless technology that allows Internet and other data connections across much broader areas than WiFi, as part of what is called the third-generation family of mobile standards.

That endorsement opens the way for many ITU member countries to devote a part of the public radio spectrum to WiMax, and receivers for it could be built into laptop computers, phones, music players and other portable devices.

Independent testing performed by the AP has revealed Comcast actively interferes with peer-to-peer traffic going to and from its high-speed Internet subscribers, by impersonating users` machines and sending fake disconnect signals, says Daily Tech.

While traffic shaping, the act of throttling a given piece of Internet traffic based on its type, like BitTorrent or VOIP, is becoming increasingly common among ISPs interested in preserving quality of service, it seems Comcast is one of the first companies that actively impersonates individual connections.

Most providers will simply slow down some traffic in favour of others, or block a protocol`s port number to prevent it from functioning.