Reguardless if today's Chinese theme on the flash portal Newgrounds.com is an April Fool's prank or not, Tom Fulp has pulled out all the stops when it comes to making the Chinese happy. Fulp reports that they are now accessible in China, but they had to make certain concessions.

Notibly, if you type in "Tibet" it is replaced with "great province of the People's Republic of China" and "America" is replaced with "Capitalist Pig".

The forums have also become moderated, as you are greeted with the following message:

Please Observe This Message from the Ministry of Communication.

Your personal information, associates, and past activities are currently under review by the State Council Information Office.

You will be able to post in Communication Forums once you have been cleared. Until that time, please submit all comments to user pages.

Also, please note what others are saying about approved activities and non-inciting discussion.

As if Charter's problems weren't bad enough, Tim Barker of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Charter is taking the low road that Comcast is following and implementing tiered bandwidth caps.

"Charter tells me that on Monday it will change its Acceptable Use Policy to establish limits on monthly residential bandwidth consumption. Customers with service speeds up to 15 mbps will have a 100 (GB) per month limit. Those with speeds between 15 and 25 mpbs will have a 250 (GB) cap. There is no limit for those people who buy the company's luxury Ultra60 service."

A local gaming blogger has critized this adjustment.

Charter has a monopoly on cable service in much of the St. Louis area.

Acoording to the New York Times (via CNet News) Arthur W. Burks passed away May 18 at a nursing home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. Though he has a PhD in philosophy, Burks was a member of the team that designed the Eniac computer, a frequent collaborator of John von Neumann and a pioneer in computing education. Professor Burks served as Chair of the Department of Computer and Communication Science at the University of Michigan until 1986 when he retired. He was 92.

Carly Fiorina, who lead HP into a time of bad marketting and mediocre products until her resignation and who previously was the president Lucent Technologies and AT&T, is vying to be John McCain's vice president. The problem is that Fiorina gave 7,000 employees at HP the axe during her tenure while buying private jets and stealing the American Dream from alot of people in Silicon Valley by taking a $21M severance package.

Is America willing to bet the house with Old Man McCain and the Wicked Witch of Silicon Valley?

While the concept of Turn-Off-TV week is pretty straight forward, the culturejamming group Adbusters has extended it to other forms of electronic media calling it Mental Detox Week. While I personally am cool with not being part of the iPod clique or sending text messages to the point that my phone bill comes in a box delivered by FedEx, The Media Foundation has begun to shift gears given the change in technology and the fact that most parents look at the Xbox as an electronic babysitter. There really is nothing that requires being connected or teathered to the internet for.

Go outside and play, kids! You're fat bodies and blank stares are giving the new technology a bad name! You too, Mom and Dad! Take the kids fishing. Road trip...even if gas is $3.75 per gallon. Find a nearby river or lake that is in walking or bus distance and get outside for a while. CELLPHONES OFF! Leave them in the car. Do some IRL stuff!

According to ABC News, a Icelandic 16 year old teenager called the White House main switchboard (202-456-1414) posing as Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, The President of Iceland. After answering some questions about President Grímsson, the switchboard operator connected him to a high security private phone number that he wasn't suppost to connect to but Bush's secretary said that they would call him back later. Instead, the police showed up, took him down to the police station, and questioned him for several hours. The police say they were ordered by the American government to "find the leak" or be he would banned from ever coming to America. (To the Icelandic people: If this is how our government treats you, then you are not missing anything. Go visit Canada instead.)

Strangely enough, the boy had the phone number for a few years now. (He should post it online.)

I bet if he would have used Lech Kaczyski as his alias, they would have treated him differently.

There is no denying that 2007 will be written down as the Year of the Recall. Tainted pet food. Lead in toys. And now Make Magazine has learned from one of it's subscribers that some electronics may be housing counterfeit capacitors. These fake parts could be in anything from motherboards to TV remotes.

A shipwreck is no laughing matter, unless an ironic twist of fate is involved. The shipwreck on November 23rd in the Southern Ocean had the good fortune that everyone aboard the MS Explorer was safely evacuated and in good spirits.

As if the writer's strike isn't the least of Hollywood's troubles, Larry Carroll reports that bootleg DVD copies of American Gangster were released before the movie but how it was bootlegged has changed the rules of Internet Piracy.

Unlike such piracy favorites as the 2004 thriller "Mindhunters," the copies of "Gangster" are crystal-clear, with none of the "property of" burn-ins that typically indicate its origin. Aside from a few minor audio pops here and there, it seems no different than the eventual DVD that Universal would release itself.

Such events may be a sign that pirates are working at the studios.

On Tuesday, October 16, WHDH-TV in Boston reported that their city was under siege by another bomb threat, this time posted on the 4chan website.

4chan was closed this weekend. At the time this article is being written, it recently reopened. So far, no word as to why they were shut down.

As if all the things that have occured this year with Boston and 4chan were not enough, the combination of both Bomb Scares and Internet Hate Machines is ironic.