According to a report from The Register, the US delegates at the ITU conference have reportedly threatened to walk out on the talks. Such a move would probably doom the entire conference as the US has considerable sway in the matters at hand. US ambassador Terry Kramer refutes the report and says it’s nothing but a rumor. Here’s the full email statement courtesy of Tech Dirt:

In the past few days, a small number of media reports have characterized the United States as “threatening” to withdraw from the WCIT negotiations. These speculative reports are inaccurate and unhelpful to the Conference. The United States has made no such threat, and it remains fully committed to achieving a successful conclusion to the WCIT.

The US may not have threatened to leave the talks, but something must have happend to make China and other nations drop its proposal. What that something was will remain unknown until a leak occurs or member states finally decide to be a bit more transparent about the ITU process. My bet is on the former.

The ITU conference is set to last until December 14. The US could very well walk out before that, but it seems like Ambassador Kramer is prepared to stick it out for the rest of the week. It will be interesting to see what other developments come out of what has already proven to be one of the most fascinating, and unnerving, global conventions of the year.

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TechWeekEurope is reporting that nations including China, Russia and others have taken their controversial proposal off the table for now. It would appear that the reason for the withdrawal was due to the negative response the proposal received from citizens all around the world.

Google is leading one of the largest campaigns against the ITU with its #freeandopen campaign. As of now, over 3 million people have signed in support of Google’s efforts to keep the Internet out of the hands of those who would abuse it. It’s unknown if Google’s other concern – a proposal to tax Internet companies – has been killed yet.

As for governmental bodies, the US and European Union have been aligned against any proposed changes to how the Internet is governed. Last week, the US House of Representatives unanimously passed a Senate resolution that affirmed the US’ stance on any proposed takeover of the Internet. Late last month, the European Parliament issued a similar resolution that rejected any change to how the Internet is currently handled.

All that being said, the ITU conference isn’t over until December 13. There’s still a lot to be concerned about, including the recent passage of a deep packet inspection standard. For now, however, you can take a minute to catch your breath.

Defense expert Arthur Ding of Taiwan’s Institute for International Relations said “China wants radar data so they can develop countermeasures, If you have this data, you can jam the system or redirect its missiles.” This would obviously be a blow to any future conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan. The United States has publicly declared that an attack on Taiwan by China would be considered an act of war against the U.S..

Two former U.S. government officials familiar with American defense sales to Taiwan said that “despite some Taiwanese media reports, China’s recent espionage activity on the island does not threaten the integrity of U.S. defense technology. They said Washington withholds sensitive information and equips highly classified electronic components with anti-tamper devices.”

“How Po Sheng is used, the network layouts, what systems are integrated into the network and what are not, all this would be very useful for the Chinese to know,” he said.

The tension between the United States and China has been ramping up in the past few months. China is angry with the U.S. for getting involved in disputes in what it claims is it’s territories, and the U.S. is constantly admonishing China over it’s human rights violations. With China’s recent air craft carrier launch and leak of a new stealth fighter, they are looking to be a bigger player on the world wide scale. And the one place that the U.S. is leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the world is military proprietary software. The defense systems in planes and ships is what the enemies want, not necessarily the hardware.

On Tuesday, U.S. government officials and a private historical group, International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, will announce that with a half a million dollar grant they will start to look in the deep waters near the island of Nikumaroro.

In 1937, when Earhart and Noonan disappeared, several Coast Guard, Navy, and Pan Am stations throughout the Pacific reported hearing radio transmissions that seemed to have been from Earhart. When the transmissions are triangulated from the various places they all converge at one place. The Phoenix Islands which is where Nikumaroro is located.

There have been several theories as to what happened to her plane. Everything from she was shot down by the Japanese, or taken prisoner and executed on Saipan. To she turned back and crash landed on New Britain. And the problem becomes the fact that there are semi-credible sources for every theory.

For now, this mystery is unsolved, but hopefully with more attention being put on the subject, we can finally figure out what happened.

China has had a significant drop in the amount of spam originating from that country, falling out of the top twelve and coming in at 15th place for relaying just 1.9 percent of the world’s spam.

The top twelve spam relaying countries for January to March 2010

"All eyes aren’t so much on which countries are on the list, but the one which isn’t. China has earned itself a bad reputation in many countries’ eyes for being the launch pad of targeted attacks against foreign companies and government networks, but at least in the last 12 months they have demonstrated that the proportion of spam relayed by their computers has steadily declined," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

"South Korea, Brazil, India and the United States account for more than 30% of all the spam relayed by hacked computers around the globe."

Spam accounts for a 97% of all email received by business email servers, putting both a strain on resources and accounting for a huge amount of time to lost productivity.

People in the US have been unable to use the service so far. There has been talk that this may soon change upon the launch of Google’s Nexus One phone, but this may not happen. There was rumored to be a US Spotify app for Google’s Android ready just in time for the launch of the phone. Michael Arrington reports:

The two companies sketched out a plan where Spotify’s excellent Android application would be build [sic] into the 2.1 version of Android and would launch in the U.S. with the Google Nexus One phone on January 5. The application – which is available in Europe and allows for offline syncing of songs – would give Google a much-needed competitive answer to Apple’s iTunes. The Android could realistically be seen as a media consumption device, like the iPhone, with things like Spotify built into it.

Google wanted Spotify badly enough that they were willing to cover the label costs for every user of $3 – $4 per month. Spotify would add advertising on top of it, as they do with the free version in Europe, to make additional revenue. Without Google paying those label fees there was no way Spotify could handle the costs of the user flow that 2.1 would provide. Currently, European users must pay for Spotify Premium to use the mobile versions of the service.

Those in the US waiting to get their hands on Spotify may have to wait though. Arrington says his sources indicate that the deal has likely "gone cold," but he says there is a chance Spotify could still be part of Google’s Nexus One announcement, slated for Tuesday, January 5.

Such a deal could mean big things for sales of Android devices and really give the iPhone a run for its money. It’s going to be quite interesting to see how the smartphone competition plays out over the course of 2010. This is only the beginning. Even if a deal is not made, Google is clearly interested in the musical side of mobile, and will likely pursue other options.
 

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According to MessageLabs, Idaho is the spam capital of the US with 93.8% spam, far exceeding the global spam rate for September of 86.4%. MessageLabs says Idaho has jumped 43 spots since 2008, when it was ranked the 44th most spammed state. According to the security firm, the jump can be attributed to "the resilient and aggressive" botnet market, as well as a higher volume of global spam since he beginning of the credit crisis in late 2008.

Here’s a look at the top ten:

1. Idaho
2. Kentucky
3. New Jersey
4. Alabama
5. Illinois
6. Indiana
7. Massachusetts
8. Pennsylvania
9. Arizona
10. Maryland.

I have to say that based on the incredible amount of spam I receive in my inbox on a daily basis, I am not entirely surprised that our state of Kentucky is high on the list.

"Some of the high spam levels seen across the US can be attributed to the economic challenges experienced globally since the end of 2008 as well as Internet advancement including the high adoption of social networking," said Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst, Symantec. "Spammers have taken full advantage of both the economic uncertainty of some and the trustworthiness of others for their own rewards. Automated tools, resilient botnets and targeted spam campaigns are all part of the spammers’ toolkit and they are constantly evolving these techniques to outsmart any effort to stop them. No state is immune to the affects of spam."

MessageLabs says there currently between 4 and 6 million computers across the globe that have been compromised to form botnets, which send the majority of spam. These are used by cybercriminals to send out over 87% of all spam, which equates to about 151 billion emails every day.

So who’s not getting very much spam?

States mentioned as having the least amount of spam include Montana, Alaska, Kansas, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Florida. Puerto Rico gets below the average global spam level.

"BBC News ranked as the 21st most visited News and Media website in US during August, while the Daily Mail was 47th and the BBC Homepage 65th," says Hitwise’s Robin Goad. Other British sites in the US News and Media top 200 last month included: the Telegraph (71st), the FT (115th), The Sun (117th), Times Online (131st) and the Guardian (134th)."

Goad names sites like Digg and the Drudge Report as being key for driving US audiences to UK news sites. Google is the biggest driver of US traffic to British News sites, accounting for 13.5% of visits in August, and Drudge follows this, accounting for 10.6%. In third place is Google News, accounting for 5.3%.

According to Goad, email also plays a major role in driving US traffic to UK news sites – Yahoo! Mail (2.5%), Gmail (1.6%) and Hotmail (1.4%) all appeared in the top 10.

On a state-by-state basis, Californians are driving the most traffic to British news sites, followed by New Yorkers. "Slightly more surprising is the list of states that over index most as visitors to UK-based news sites, with Arizona and New Mexico ranking second and third after California," says Goad. "Residents of Wyoming are the least likely to visit."

I’d be curious to know what kind of traffic social networks like Twitter and Facebook have driven to these sites.

In his post announcing the milestones, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that they’d hoped to reach cash positive sometime next year—but, happily, they made enough to cover their operating expenses starting last quarter.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard financial news from Facebook—and the last reports weren’t so good. Almost a year ago, many were speculating whether Facebook was headed for financial ruin, and their ad rates had fallen. And less than six months ago, there were some reports that Facebook was snubbing a $4B valuation despite needing the cash the sale would have given them. (A far cry from $15B, eh?)

Up to this point, it seemed that Facebook was struggling to monetize itself enough to cover its costs. But according to Zuckerberg, their finances are better than fine. One recent effort that may have helped (but, let’s be honest, is so new that it probably hasn’t made a whole lot of money yet) was opening the gift shop to developers. Inside Facebook notes a few other potentially contributing efforts:

What’s driving Facebook’s revenue growth? A combination of revenue streams: Facebook’s self-service ad business has been very strong lately, it continues to invest heavily in brand advertising efforts, and it also continues to release many experimental expansions to its virtual goods and virtual currency business, Facebook Credits. The company is also still deriving revenue from its advertising deal with Microsoft, signed when Microsoft invested in Facebook in 2007.

If Facebook is a microcosm of the Internet, and they make money off serving ads that lead to other parts of their site (driving up time onsite and possible ad rates), perhaps this is a good sign for the Internet at large.

What do you think? Is Facebook’s cash positive status a sign of a turn around? Or are clever new monetization strategies keeping Facebook ahead of the curve?

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