A cloud. Photo Karen Ka Ying Wong / Flickr

Apple has confirmed maybe the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley: it’s been working on a cloud service, and will announce it at the June 6 Worldwide Developers Conference.

So now we know annual developer’s conference will unveil “iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering,” but we don’t know yet what it is, or what exactly will reside at the domain name it may have bought for $4.5 million in April.

iCloud could be the mythical iTunes streaming service, a possibility that is looking increasingly likely now that Apple has most of the major record labels signed up for it, in a space pioneered by Amazon and Google, which has no such deals. Or it could be Apple’s version of DropBox, the amazing sync and storage service that currently glues together the whole iOS ecosystem along with its desktop service.

Or it could be yet another abortion of an Internet service, like Mobile Me, iDisk and Ping before it.

Whatever it is, it’ll have to be good. DropBox is already the default file system for iOS, and can be used by any developer, on almost any other OS. If iCloud is to succeed, it needs to be just as available to developers. ITunes streaming, too, needs to be something special. A “cloud locker” service like Amazon and Google’s is almost pointless, and we already have amazing streaming services like Spotify and Rdio.

Still, this won’t stop endless speculation during the next week, as pundits work up theories like a shaving brush works up a lather from a tiny, almost non-existent nubbin of soap. And then on Monday, boom, we’ll know for sure.

Apple also said the keynote will be delivered by Steve Jobs, who is currently on medical leave, and that the WWDC will also focus on the new version of OS X 10.7 Lion, and the upcoming iOS 5.

Apple to Unveil Next Generation Software at Keynote Address on Monday, June 6 [Apple PR]

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While vacationing in France, you find a DVD of Ishtar. Score! (It’s never been released on DVD in the US). But when you get home, you discover that you’ve purchased a Region 2 disc, which, in your Region 1 player, is as useful as a coaster. This raises two questions: Why do you want to watch Ishtar? And why do we still have region codes?

The answers: taste and money, respectively. Though there’s no accounting for the former, those codes may soon be gone.

Regional restrictions began in 1997, as DVD technology was rolling out. They have nothing to do with the NTSC and PAL formats that made some foreign videos incompatible with American TVs. Those barriers resulted from different technical standards and are largely irrelevant when it comes to HD media formats.

Region codes are digital fences that divide the world into six pieces, erected by the US-based DVD Copy Control Association to protect publishers and distributors. If a film comes out on DVD in Canada in March but won’t hit French theaters until July, the French distributor can be reasonably sure that his box-office take and DVD profits won’t be eroded by a flood of Canadian discs.

“The codes were developed at a time when people were largely on dialup,” says film and TV producer David Kittredge. “Nobody really thought to download a full movie in 1997. And there were still a lot of rolling release dates.”

But movies premieres are far less staggered now, and regionless DVD players, which used to be prohibitively expensive, can be had for $75. Studios went with a simpler three-region approach for Blu-ray, but even that may be largely symbolic. By some estimates, nearly 70 percent of Blu-ray discs carry no code at all.

Then why bother? We asked Universal, Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., and Sony and got a collective “no comment.” Screen Digest analyst Tom Adams says there’s a reason for that defensive posturing, however toothless. “Whether or not the codes are there,” he says, “the idea that they are is probably a good thing from the studios’ point of view.”

As downloads replace discs, a consortium of studios, manufacturers, and retailers is backing UltraViolet, a digital-rights system that would let people play a purchased file on up to 12 devices. Region codes may be dying, but they won’t vanish completely until there’s something to take their place.