Gmail fans have been building unofficial extensions to spice up their inboxes for a while, but up til now themes haven't been an integral part of Gmail. We wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes we're launching today, there's a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company. There's even an old school ascii theme (Terminal) which was the result of a bet between two engineers -- it's not exactly practical, but it's great for testing out your geek cred. We've also done a minor facelift to Gmail's default look to make it crisper and cleaner -- you might notice a few colors and pixels shifted around here and there.

There's a good news/bad news update on the rogue ISP McColo and last week's coordinated effort to drive the malware faucet offline. The good news is, the ISP has (mostly) stayed offline, and spam levels a week later are still running significantly lower than they had been. The impact of taking McColo offline seems to have reverberated longer than what we saw from the Atrivo takedown back in September. When Atrivo shut off, spam levels fell, but rapidly climbed back to near-original levels. Post-McColo spam counts have remained lower for the last eight days, but may unfortunately be on the verge of climbing again.

That's where the bad news comes in. McColo, it turns out, had previously negotiated the rights to a backup internet connection with Swedish ISP TeliaSonera. Once its own connection to the Internet was severed, McColo bided its time until Saturday, at which point it flipped a switch, reconnected via TeliaSonera, and began frantically updating its C&C servers, aiming them at new targets within our old friend, the Russian Business Network (RBN).

A woman in Cornwall, England, has filed papers to divorce her husband on the grounds of "unreasonable behavior" after she discovered that his character in the online role-playing game Second Life had been having an affair.

Amy Taylor, 28, whose online alter ego is named Laura Skye, said that her husband's virtual infidelity exacted a pain that cut as deep as any extramarital liaison. "It may have started online, but it existed entirely in the real world and it hurts just as much," she said. "His was the ultimate betrayal. He had been lying to me." (See the 50 best websites of 2008.)

Taylor is now in a new relationship with a man she met in the online roleplaying game World of Warcraft.

According to a post in the Red Alert 3 forum by 'eeapoc' (Apparently, C&C Community Manager Aaron Kaufman) EA is implementing a new policy that will tie your forum login to your Master EA Account. If you get hit with the ban hammer for misbehaving in a forum, you could find that you are locked out of your purchased games as well.

"EA is continuing to make progress against our business plan, but we have the constant imperative to keep our costs in line as we grow our revenues and improve our margins," Electronic Arts spokesperson Mariam Sughayer told me. "Decisions that impact people's jobs are always extremely tough but all of the people affected will be treated fairly and respectfully."

YouTube is getting its Hulu on. The Google-owned video site has partnered with CBS to air full-length TV shows, starting today (Oct. 10).

For now a select group of old and new shows will appear, including "MacGyver," "Star Trek" and the original "Beverly Hills 90210," the season premieres of Showtime's "Dexter" and "Californication," and current episodes of "The Young and the Restless."

But there is often an untold aspect involved in setting an embargo date: Some embargoes are in place for no other reason than to give another site an exclusive on that review. Let's call bullshit on this process right now. Did that site do any extra work to get the exclusive coverage -- and I mean, real legwork or investigative work, not just putting together the best "deal" for the publisher? No. The only work involved may have been making the review sound effusive enough to justify the high score that allows the site to keep the exclusive, thanks to certain restrictions occasionally requested by a publisher's marketing department. Embargoes designed to protect the publisher from a bad score, or a competitor's deal with a publisher, fly in the face of why embargoes were originally created, to protect the public interest -- not the publisher interest.

Yes, in the past, pre-Crispy, I was in the business of negotiating for exclusive reviews. First review always means the best traffic, right? The numbers bear that out. I came to realize exclusives were not worth the risk for games with extensive multiplayer components, because they couldn't properly be tested pre-release. How do you review a multiplayer game when you can't test it in real-world conditions against people who aren't developers and on servers not belonging to the developers or publishers?

1. We've got games your 10-year-old won't be better at. GOG.com offers you critically acclaimed games from major publishers in every genre. Don't let your kids mock the graphics; remind them that the classics never go out of style, unlike their totally wicked haircut.

2. So you're cheap. It's okay--we are, too. For less than the cost of a lunch at some lousy diner you can own some of the greatest games of all time. No matter how big the file is and how successful the game was, you'll leave the table satisfied that you got a great deal for your money. As an added bonus, our house specialities won't make you sick.

3. You buy it, you keep it. Don't let your DRMs turn into nightmares (clever, no?). You won't find any intrusive copy protection in our games; we hate draconian DRM schemes just as much as you do, so at GOG.com you don't just buy the game, you actually own it. Once you download a game, you can install it on any PC and re-download it whenever you want, as many times as you need, and you can play it without an internet connection.

4. All games are Vista and XP compatible.

Just in time for the run-up to Bethesda's Fallout 3, GameTap has added both of Black Isle's original Fallout RPGs to its lineup. To celebrate, the company is offering the first Fallout in its free subscription rotation.

Hailed as one of the better PC games of all time, Fallout is a post-apocalyptic romp through a ruined American West, featuring a cast of memorable characters and an uncompromising tactical combat system.

Electronic Arts has announced that they're now giving away the original Command & Conquer: Red Alert as a free download in celebration of the 13th anniversary of the series (and a reminder that Red Alert 3 is totally coming out soon).

While the game is free, the actual process of playing it isn't without a little complication. You can head over to EA's official page to download both the Allies and Soviets discs (each disc contained the single-player campaign for its respective faction), but the files are actual ISO images of the CDs themselves. That means that in order to play them, you'll either need to burn the ISO images onto a blank disc, or use a Virtual CD program to load them. The game will run on Windows XP/98/Me/95, but it's not "officially" compatible with Windows Vista (although there are certainly ways around that, so don't let that stop you, Vista users.).

Nestle Prepared Foods Company is recalling about 215,660 pounds of frozen stuffed pepperoni pizza sandwich products, known as Hot Pockets Pepperoni Pizza, because the product might contain small pieces of hard red plastic and other foreign material, which pose a risk of serious injury to consumers.

The Mt. Sterling, Ky., company has received four consumer complaints and no reports of injuries. Spokeswoman Roz O’Hearn said the reported foreign substance — hard red plastic as well as clear flexible rubber-like material — might have splintered off from a testing device and some of it could be buried inside with sharp edges.

G4 has figured out the best way to harness the energy of Will Wright. Besides getting him to make a game, of course, which Electronic Arts has already figured out. Instead, G4 has set up a camera in front of him and told him to talk about whatever he wants. They've then taken an interesting minute at a time and made short clips called "The Will Wright Minute". The great thing about these is that Will Wright's off-the-cuff observations are more than interesting enough to make up for the silly animation and the Spore and G4 promos that technically make these "The Will Wright Minute and a Half".

They're like Zero Punctuation, but with punctuation. And Will Wright. And American. And without cynicism, sneering, or sarcasm. And not about games.

I am a huge fan of comic strips. The comics section is the first place I go when reading the daily newspaper. (Newspapers, how quaint!) My kids love the comics, too. They wait in (almost) silent anticipation for me to move along to the Sports Section, so that they can get their sticky little hands on the page.

We here at GeekDad are dedicated to providing examples of geeky things that geeky parents can do and share with their kids. This is not one of those times. Well, at least not with the little ones!

Webcomics began springing up like kudzu almost as soon as Al Gore finished inventing the interwebs. Some were good, some were bad, many were indecipherable. However good, bad or fugly they were though, they all had one thing in common: a complete lack of censorship. In the spirit of Bad Dad Month, I have compiled a list of 10 of my favorite geeky webcomics, most of which I will not be sharing with my children until they are well into their teenage years. Let's face it, much of geek-related humor out there tends to have more of an adult/bizarre/sophomoric streak than your typical Sunday Comics page. It can also be hi-friggin'-larious. Tired of Garfield? Tired of Garfield Minus Garfield? Check out the comics on this list and feel free to recommend your own choices in the comments section.

WARNING: All of the comics on this list include adult themes, adult language, adult situations and/or violence. Whee!

EA and BioWare have officially announced a new Star War: Knights of the Old Republic game at E3 2008. A third KOTOR game has long been rumoured but this is the first confirmation that EA has given on the subject.

The mega-publisher didn't just stop there though, going so far as to confirm that the next KOTOR game will also be a massively multiplayer online RPG - making it the first Star Wars MMO since the ill-fated Galaxies.

Lets just say Square-Enix recognizes how much meat there is on the carcass that is Final Fantasy VII. This title has received more direct sequels, prequels, side stories and general fansterbation than any other title in the series. I won't go into the quality of these titles, but they are out there. Now there is a rumor that says the Squeenix may be bringing the title to XBL and the PSN.

This all likely started as the result of the statement hinting at a "big FFVII-related announcement" that will come at next month's DKΣ3713 event. 'Inside sources' (I love how important that makes someone sound) stated that not only will the original be available through the Playstation store as a PS1 original download there will "definitely" be a remake or spin-off announced. I don't know where the XBLA release fits into this but that's the rumor anyway.

Curious as to just how the Netflix functionality is going to work on the Xbox 360 when it's added this fall? Major Nelson just posted a video of him going through it, showing off just how it's going to work. Essentially, it looks exactly like the interface on the Roku Netflix box.

You can't search through the entire Netflix database, instead needing to add movies you want to watch to your instant queue. It's a bit annoying, but as you can add as many movies you want to the queue, not that big a deal. If you own an Xbox 360 and bought a Roku box, however, get that thing to eBay ASAP, as you won't be using it anymore come this fall.

Despite having said it was done negotiating a number of times already, Microsoft appears to find Yahoo's search business too tempting to stay away for long. Yesterday, Yahoo released a statement that rejected yet another offer from Redmond, this one made jointly with Carl Icahn, who is engaged in a proxy battle for control of the company. The deal would have handed Yahoo's search division to Microsoft, leaving the remainder of the company in Icahn's hands.

President Bush's signature had barely dried on the FISA Amendments Act, which the Senate approved Wednesday, when the American Civil Liberties Union announced that it would mount a constitutional challenge to the new law, claiming that it violates the First and Fourth Amendments....

Lawyers have also filed a motion with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, explained the ACLU's Melissa Goodman, making four requests for transparency. In the event of proceedings that might yield significant interpretations of the FAA, or rulings on its constitutionality, the motion ask that the FISC notify the public, that it allow ACLU to file briefs and participate in the arguments, that it require the government to file a public version of its own legal briefs, and that the Court issue a public version of any ruling. "Otherwise," said Goodman, "we will literally never now how the FISA court interprets the new law.

The idea that we could have a secret body of Constitutional Law is more Kafka than America."

After scoring three successive independent hits (Uplink, Darwinia, and Defcon), Introversion is taking an uncharacteristic step back: revisiting its greatest critical and commercial success. Darwinia was an odd duck in many respects, but only one failed to count in its favor: it was an exclusively single player real-time strategy. Darwinia overcame what would have been a crippling weakness for any other game in the genre with the sheer force of its charm. In fact, we hardly missed the nonexistent multiplayer. Which leaves us wondering now "did it ever really need it in the first place?"

After some hands on time with two of Multiwinia's multiplayer modes, it's apparent that a great game could have been even better.

Ah, Netflix. Killer of brick-and-mortar video stores; red-jacketed savior of people having a crappy day who come home to find that at least there's a decent flick waiting for them. These days, the rent-by-mail company offers around 100,000 tiles, sends out some 1.9 million discs per day (another 10,000 movies are available for instant download) — and passed the billion-discs-shipped mark last February.

And the outfit is quite efficient: According to the company, some 96% of customers clicking around the site receive their movies the next day. This basically means, barring some major mail-ending catastrophe in your ZIP code (in which case, hoarding nonperishable food and bottled water may be a more pressing concern than seeing Will Smith's most recent magnum opus), any disc ordered on a Monday morning will most likely appear in your mailbox by Tuesday — unless all copies are at far-away distribution hubs, which occasionally adds a day or two to the delivery date.