The Register reports that “Belgium declared last week that it intends to join the ranks of European nations operating a hidden list of blocked websites.  The move is controversial, as it would build on existing powers to block websites – but essentially hand jurisdiction over what gets blocked on a day to day basis to the police.  In all likelihood, that means federal police special division Federal Computer Crime Unit (FCCU). They would get the authority to compose the blacklists of to be blocked websites, without any legal safeguards or external oversight mechanisms. The fact that the FCCU has already suggested that this practice should also be applicable in other cases has raised concerns amongst those concerned with uncontrolled and over-zealous censorship of the internet.”

Internetnews.com reveals that “

[t]he House Energy and Commerce Committee backed including about $3 billion in grants to expand Internet service as part of a larger economic stimulus bill, including a provision requiring ‘open access’ in wireless service and on the Internet.  The Democratically-controlled committee on Thursday cleared the provisions aimed at expanding high-speed Internet and wireless service in rural and hard-to-serve areas over objections from several Republican members.”

In a different article, Internetnews.com writes that “[t]he next time you run a search on Google, pay attention to which results you click on from the paid results area. Security experts say spammers are gaming Google's Adwords program again in order to get malicious sites placed at the top of paid search results.  Some search results, listed to the right of organic search results in Google, contain links purporting to take searchers to the subject they are looking for, but redirect them to sites that infect their PCs instead.”

CNetNews.com points out that “[t]he blogosphere's love affair with Facebook-MySpace traffic wars just won't stop.  On Thursday, TechCrunch posted new statistics from ComScore that show Facebook now pulling in nearly twice as many unique visitors worldwide as its News Corp.-owned competitor.  About 222 million people visited Facebook worldwide in December (keep in mind that the social network pegs its active user count somewhere just north of 150 million these days) versus 125 million people for MySpace.  This comes less than two weeks after other ComScore statistics indicated that not only was MySpace still bigger in the U.S., it was way ahead in page-view count and time spent on the site.”

The Mercury News has an interesting article on the next 25 years of the Mac.