According to himself Gary McKinnon hacked into the US computer systems only to find answers related to UFO’s and the like. Now he’s facing 70 years behind bars IF he gets extradited to the US.

The final appeal is held today, and yo can follow this intense political drama on his blog (and the news) freegary.org.uk.

This blog website is intended to support British citizen Gary McKinnon, who is facing “fast track” extradition to the USA (after over five years since his initial arrest !). Gary was indicted by a US court in November 2002, accused of “hacking” into over 90 US Military computer systems from here in the UK. The unjust treatment of British citizens (and others) when facing the might of the US Military “justice” system, which practices detention without trial in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, and stands accused of making use of torture by allied regimes (”extraordinary rendition”) is an ongoing scandal. It cannot be excused even by a “war on terror”. It seems only just that Gary should face any charges in a British court, and to serve any sentence, if he is found guilty, in a British prison.

What do you all think, should he be extradicted? Or should he be tried at home (England)? And did he really do any damage at all? After all he’s already served 5 years behind bars.

A demo of an experimental UI for Mobile Firefox by Aza Raskin, Head of UX for Mozilla Labs.

See azarask.in/blog/post/firefox-mobile-concept-video for more information.

Shrink O’Matic is an AIR application to easily (batch) resize (shrink) images. It handles JPGs, GIFs and PNGs.

Simply drag and drop images and they’ll be resized as you wish! Options allow you to choose the output sizes, names and formats. Note! The resized images will be stored in the same directory as the originals (in case you wonder where they went…).

A very handy tool for all bloggers and on-line publishers.

To install visit their website. If you want to play around with the code the developers have also made some classes used in this project available.

As you probably know Opera beat Firefox to the finish line this time (see yesterdays post). However, the long wait is finally over. Mozilla announced Wednesday that Firefox 3 will be available as of 17th June - that’s on Tuesday next week

Great news and really big expectations. 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, this should be the greatest release ever from Mozilla and maybe also the best browser…

In the meanwhile you can play around with the 3rd release candidate, or sign up for the Guinness WR download attempt and hope for an even earlier release date…

Opera Software today released to the world the final public release of its flagship Web browser, Opera 9.5. Opera’s cross-device expertise, support for open Web standards and commitment to speed and performance culminate to create the most powerful Opera browser yet. Making its desktop debut in Opera 9.5, Opera Link blurs the boundaries between computers and mobile phones by enabling a seamless Web experience from device to device. Opera 9.5 for Windows, Mac and Linux systems is available free from www.opera.com.

What’s new in Opera 9.5 according to themselves:

Opera Link: Your bookmarks, Speed Dial and even notes taken in the Opera browser can follow you anywhere. Opera Link keeps you synchronized between any Opera 9.5 desktop browser and Opera Mini, Opera’s free browser for your mobile phone.

Find anything: If you can remember a word from a page you’ve read earlier, you can find that page easily with Quick Find. Just enter a word in the address bar to find matching text from any page you have visited.

Looking sharp: Opera makes a move to modernize its look and feel to a sharp new skin with clean lines and clear icons. The ‘New Tab’ button and other elements have been modified to make the switch to a better Web experience more intuitive. Also supports platform-specific skins.

Strengthened defence against malware and phishing: Powered by Haute Secure, Netcraft, and PhishTank, Opera’s Fraud Protection technology automatically blocks offending Web pages to keep you out of harm’s way.

Speed: Opera continues to lead in performance. Opera 9.5 makes dramatic speed improvements to the e-mail client, RSS feeds and the browser itself, so you can spend more time getting things done online.

“Opera 9.5 represents the culmination of two years spent listening to our community and transforming our browser to add features and capabilities they have requested,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. “Opera 9.5 offers new possibilities and capabilities. It’s faster, lighter and pushes us further out in front of other browsers, by blending the mobile and desktop worlds together in new and powerful ways. We invite everyone to join us as we continue to shape the way the Web will evolve.”

My first impressions according to myself:

The bookmark thing is probably a good thing but I tend to get reminded of important things by my wife, through twitter, news feeds etc. Also the Quick find thing doesn’t seem as fantastic as I’m not comfortable having the browser keeping track of all the pages I’ve visited…

However, my biggest disappointments are design and speed. The browser still uses WAY TOO MUCH space to display the most useful toolbars. Almost twice the space compared to Firefox. Also it appears that rendering fast also means rendering inaccurate. If image size is not set you will have to reload the page several times before it looks “normal”.

Browser security is definitely a good thing, but if you have a decent anti-virus program and firewall it might just be slowing things down. Most threats are directed against IE anyway, so until Opera’s market share grows this doesn’t seem too important.

The most positive news is that it scores 83/100 on the new Acid3 test - congratulations Opera!

Feel free to comment, disagree, argue and share

More info here, here and here.