Chinese cellular providers China Mobile and China Unicom together have over 500 million active cell phone accounts, and recently more than 200 million of these users received a stream of unwanted and unwelcome advertisements as text messages – cell phone spam. Both cell phone providers and the spammers received a stern talking to from the Deputy Head of China’s State Council Office for Rectifying Malpractice (yes, really).

We in the anti-spam field have known it all along, but the events of this week confirm it: spammers are worse than prostitutes, pimps, and those involved in plying the human traffic trade. Clearly that is the only way to interpret the actions of former N.Y. Attorney General and soon-to-be-former Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer this week was linked to – and has admitted to – ties to a prostitution ring spanning several countries, and boasting some of the highest-paid call girls in world – some commanding more than $5,000 per hour. But that was chump change for some of the extremely wealthy clients of the ring, which operated through a group and website known as the Emperors Club VIP

Revealing a statistic sure to make J.C. Penney, Sears, and every major mallwalk children’s photographer shudder, a British survey has found that one out of every five families with children use their cell phone to take and send pictures of their just-born babies to family and friends within ten minutes of the child’s birth. And that’s not all! An equal number have created a social networking profile, such as on Facebook or MySpace, for their children!

We’re really proud to be involved in this effort! The Boulder Dushanbe Relief effort, which is working with the United Nation’s World Food Programme, is a joint relief effort coordinated by us, and supported by the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse, the Boulder Dushanbe Sister City organization, to help save the 260,000 people in Dushanbe and Tajikistan who are starving and freezing to death due to the extreme winter right now.

Hundreds of thousands of would-be video watchers found that YouTube was down for them Tuesday night – in fact it’s still down for some people – because of an oopsie by the Pakistan government, trying to block its own people from accessing YouTube. Instead, Pakistan accidentally ended up blocking as much as 2/3rs of YouTube users around the world from accessing YouTube.

A few days ago we reported that a third and fourth undersea telecom Internet cable had been cut, following the initial disruptions caused by damage to two underwater cables that had been blamed on anchors dropping on the cables, plunging millions of people in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Middle East, into Internet darkness. Now the plot thickens as a fifth undersea Internet cable outage is reported, and Iran is taken offline. Total users affected so far by the outages exceeds 80million.

As a third and then fourth submarine Internet cable are cut, further disrupting power to India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Qatar, and other Middle East countries, officials admit that the cuts to the undersea cables have not been caused by poorly dropped anchors, but deny that the cable cuts are the result of malicious activity.

If you are having trouble getting email to or from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka or the Middle East, it’s probably because a badly dropped ship anchor has damaged an undersea Internet provisioning telecom cable in the Mediterranean, disrupting Internet service throughout India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and the Middle East. The cable, belonging to Flag Telecom, was badly cut when a ship anchored off the cost of Alexandria was told to anchor in a place that was not their usual anchor location – resulting in the anchor dropping on the cable.

This Valentine’s Day, give a true gift of the heart by giving the gift of life – help fund heart surgery for a child. Even $5.00 will help, and you can even donate through Paypal – it doesn’t get much easier than that.

Yesterday we told you how to boost your vocabularly with the FreeRice.com game, today we’re bringing you another free and educational online game, Traveller IQ Challenge. Test your knowledge of world geography, learn something, and have fun!

For those of you who wonder why people make child pornography videos, it’s because it pays. Fortunately, child pornography and the law don’t mix. While people may try to find countries that sell child pornography videos, child pornography is illegal virtually everywhere. Last week police cracked an Internet child pornography ring with 2500 customers in 19 countries, leading to 92 arrests.

The lawsuit against Yahoo over the jailing of two Chinese journalist whom they helped the government of China to identify has been settled, after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang met with the families of the two journalists. In a rush of pollyanic* optimism, their lawyer says “It’s no longer possible for a corporation to say ‘We were just following orders’.”

It’s like all those foreign movies with bad translations that you like to laugh at, only this time it’s real – journalists in Israel used the Babelfish free online translator to translate an email request to the Dutch foreign ministry – and in the process insulted a Dutch dignitary’s mother and created an international incident. Who in their right mind would let Babelfish translate a message – let alone send a Babelfish translation – to members of a foreign government whom they wished to interview??

“Is water boarding torture?” is a question that many are asking these days. Now a live water board video has hit the Internet, purposely put on the worldwide web in order to allow people to witness someone being water boarded, and to decide for themselves. See the video of Kaj Larson getting waterboarded here.

In a new twist, web spammers are using images of a stripper named Melissa to dupe naive Windows users into helping them break CAPTCHAs – those “enter this text” images that websites rely on to keep spammers from posting spam on their site. Dubbed the CAPTCHA.a or Captchar.a virus, an infected Windows computer will display a picture of Melissa, who promises to remove an article of clothing for each “puzzle” that the user solves.