Tekzilla daily gives us this useful tip for searching any sites that you go to frequently. Make sure to set up keyword for UNEASYsilence!

Microsoft has been fined by the European Union for breaching sanctions placed upon them for anti-competitive behavior. The amount? $1.4bn or £680.9m

EU regulators said the firm was the first to break an EU anti-trust ruling.

The fines come on top of earlier fines of 280m euros imposed in July 2006, and of 497m euros in March 2004.

“Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the Commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an antitrust decision,” Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement.

The issue is Microsoft being found guilty of not providing key code to rival software makers, according to the BBC. The fine itself is just a drop in the bucket for Microsoft, but I’m not sure about the ruling itself. I’m not lawyer of any sort (I just play one on the internet) but why is it that Microsoft has to give up its own documentation? If I started an ice-cream company and made my own flavors I wouldn’t want to give out my recipe, nor would I want to be fined for not doing so. Any commenters have some more light to shine on the issue?

Read More

Can’t wait until the next World Cup to get your football fix? (Yes I say football.) Busy in work but really wish you were outside bending it like Beckham? Well, the next best thing is to drag it like with Drag Soccer. Drag the “players” where you want them to go and they go, though you cannot control the shooting. After playing for a while I’m starting to really have fun with it. Now leave me alone, it’s tied 8-8!

Play It

I’m an avid Facebook user and I try to keep my Application use at a minimum. One major annoyance is the applications that require you to invite friends before you can do anything. Applications like Jetman do it in a less annoying way – you invite friends to get points to unlock new characters. But what if you don’t have the 20 friends required to be invited to use the application? Or what if you just want to cheat the system? Drag the “skip forced invites” bookmarklet to your Bookmarks toolbar and click on it when you’re on a page in Facebook for an application requiring you to invite friends. Now choose how many invites you want it to spoof the application into thinking you sent and you will be the envy of all your friends having unlocked the mermaid, Kirby and Magic Schoolbus on the same day in Jetman. Giggity, giggity.

Try It

It’s about time you’ve seen some of the faces behind the blog at UNEASYsilence, so I’ve taken a photo of myself with the fantastic ASCii Cam. Alright, so you can’t exactly see me that well, but I guess that’s the point. While it has no practical use, if you wanted to know how you looked in ASCii you are covered. And you don’t have to stick with plain old white text – Matrix green is available for your use as well.

Try It

Just because Dan’s away doesn’t mean the Apple news stops! Oh no, my friends. Apple updated their notebooks today, here are the details.

General

• All Macs Ship with Leopard OS, iLife ’08

• Macbooks/Macbook Pros ship with built in iSight camera, MagSafe Power adapter, 802.11N, Bluetooth, USB 2.0, FireWire and built-in SuperDrive

Macbook Pros

• Macbook Pros now come with multi-touch gesture support, allowing you to pinch, rotate, swipe and interact differently with photos in iPhoto or Aperture, as well as browsing pages in Safari.

• Illuminated Keyboard with ambient light sensor that auto-adjusts brightness

• New Macbook Pro has the latest Intel Core 2 Duo technology going up to a 2.6GHz processor, 6MB of shared L2 cache.

• Up to 4GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM

• Up to 300GB HD

• NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics with up to 512MB video memory

Macbooks

• Faster Processors available – 2.1GHz and 2.4GHz

• 120GB or 160GB 5400rpm HDs

• Black 2.4GHz model ships with 250GB 5400 rpm HD – this was previously available as an option.

• Black Macbook ships with 2GB standard.

• Up to 4GB memory on all Macbooks

So, just updates under the hood, no new laptops – but did we really expect anything right after the Macbook Air

Google Talk is a bare-bones messenger that I keep running even though my friends don’t really use it. Now, I don’t need my friends to chat thanks to a new feature called Google Talk Chatback which is a way for me to chat with anybody, after I embed some HTML code. You don’t need to be a Google Talk user, just click on the bubble and we’ll be chatting in no time! So, why not try it out? I’ve embedded it above, feel free to say hi, submit a link you think might be of interest or tell me the meaning of life.

This feature, of course, is nothing very new as Meebo has it’s Meebo Me widget that embeds directly on the page. Google Talk Chatback works as a pop-up. My new IM client of choice, Digsby, also has a widget feature. Which do you prefer?

Read More

I think it’s great that places like Starbucks offer Wi-Fi for customers, and since the customer is always right they can access that Wi-Fi on any device they choose, even if it’s a desktop setup running Windows 95, right? Well Improv Everywhere aimed to find out in one of those “I wish I had thought of that” moments. (if you’re into this kind of stuff) I’m thinking the only way to top this is to get a bunch of friends to do this while running a game of Unreal Tournament over LAN.

Read More [via]

Adobe is now playing around with DRM in Flash. What are the possible implications? Well, sites like YouTube will not have as much content because people possibly may not be able to download Flash Video (FLV) files.

It’s entirely possible to read too much into this to claim Adobe is trying to be like Microsoft. It’s not like they’ve done anything suspicious in the past that couldn’t be explained.

Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software. Instead of an ordinary web download, these programs can use a proprietary, secret Adobe protocol to talk to each other, encrypting the communication and locking out non-Adobe software players and video tools. We imagine that Adobe has no illusions that this will stop copyright infringement — any more than dozens of other DRM systems have done so — but the introduction of encryption does give Adobe and its customers a powerful new legal weapon against competitors and ordinary users through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

It’s a competitive move to go up against Microsoft Silverlight and it’s entirely possible that this DRM, like others, will be circumvented in some way. All I care about is that pretty soon it could mean when the next Chocolate Rain hits the tubes we’ll be stuck with that and NO remixes like this. And if I can’t have a YouTube with Chocolate Rain/Souljaboy Remixes, well, I don’t want any YouTube at all.

Read More

The first 20 people to leave a comment asking for an invite will get it. We couldn’t think of any sort of competition, so ask and you shall receive. For any of you out there who might have invites to spare with fellow UNEASY readers, post in the comments if you’ll be willing to do so. Remember to include your email.

Edit: I probably should have directed the folks who don’t know what we’re talking about to this post.

Edit 2: Wow, major response – I managed to give out all my invites, more than the 20 I mentioned initially. Sorry to those who didn’t get any invite and if there’s anyone else who has invites and wants to share in the comments, please do so.

Edit 3: Yes, we have the best readers ever – more invites are being offered in the comments, so check it out, all is not lost.