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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 01 - 06 JULY, 2024
Hello and Welcome,
Meetings This Week
2024/07/02 — 18:00-20:00 — July, Tue — Main Meeting
2024/07/06 — 13:00-14:00 — July, Sat — Penrith Group
Meeting Next Week
2024/07/09 — 18:00-20:00 — July, Tue — Programming
Schedule of Current & Upcoming Meetings
First Tuesday 18:00-20:00 — Main Meeting
First Saturday 13:00-14:00 — Penrith Group
Second Tuesday 18:00-20:00 — Programming
Third Tuesday 10:00-12:00 — Tuesday Group
Third Saturday 14:00-16:00 — Web Design
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Go to the official Sydney PC Calendar for this month's meeting details.
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Penrith meetings are held every 2nd month on the 1st Saturday from 1-2 pm.
The next scheduled meetings are in September and November 2024.
ASCCA News:Tech News:
WikiLeaks' Julian Assange to be freed after pleading guilty to US espionage charge
See the Reuters article by Sarah N. Lynch and Alasdair Pal | June 25, 2024, at 4:06 pm GMT+10.
Summary
Assange is not expected to face new prison time; already served five years.
Assange to return to Australia after court proceedings — Wikileaks.
Charges against Assange sparked outrage among global supporters and press freedom advocates.
WASHINGTON/SYDNEY, June 24 (Reuters) — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is due to plead guilty on Wednesday to violating U.S. espionage law in a deal that will end his imprisonment in Britain and allow him to return home to Australia, ending a 14-year legal odyssey.
Julian Assange's Return Journey to Australia
According to filings in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, Assange, 52, has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified U.S. national defence documents.
He will be sentenced to 62 months already served at a hearing in Saipan at 9 a.m. local time on Wednesday (2300 GMT Tuesday). Prosecutors said, the island in the Pacific was chosen because of Assange's opposition to travelling to the mainland U.S. and for its proximity to Australia.
Assange left Belmarsh prison in the UK on Monday before being bailed by the UK High Court and boarding a flight that afternoon, Wikileaks said in a statement posted on social media platform X.
"This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations," the statement said.
A video posted on X by Wikileaks showed Assange dressed in a blue shirt and jeans, signing a document before boarding a private jet with the markings of charter firm VistaJet.
He will return to Australia after the hearing, the Wikileaks statement added, referring to the hearing in Saipan.
"Julian is free!!!!" his wife, Stella Assange, said in a post on X.
"Words cannot express our immense gratitude to YOU — yes, YOU, who have all mobilised for years and years to make this come true."
FlightRadar24 data shows that the only VistaJet plane that departed Stansted on Monday afternoon was headed to Bangkok. A spokesperson for Assange in Australia declined to comment on his flight plans. VistaJet did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Australian government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has been pressing for Assange's release but declined to comment on the legal proceedings as they were ongoing.
"Prime Minister Albanese has been clear — Mr Assange's case has dragged on for too long, and there is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration," a government spokesperson said.
A lawyer for Assange did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
HISTORIC CHARGES
WikiLeaks in 2010 released hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military documents on Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — the most significant security breaches of their kind in U.S. military history — along with swaths of diplomatic cables.
Assange was indicted during former President Donald Trump's administration over WikiLeaks' mass release of secret U.S. documents, which were leaked by Chelsea Manning, a retired U.S. military intelligence analyst who was also prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
The trove of more than 700,000 documents included diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts, such as a 2007 video of a U.S. Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people, including two Reuters news staff. That video was released in 2010.
The charges against Assange sparked outrage among his many global supporters, who have long argued that Assange, as the publisher of Wikileaks, should not face charges typically used against federal government employees who steal or leak information.
Many press freedom advocates have argued that criminally charging Assange represents a threat to free speech.
"A plea deal would avert the worst-case scenario for press freedom, but this deal contemplates that Assange will have served five years in prison for activities that journalists engage in every day," said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of free speech organisation Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
"It will cast a long shadow over the most important kinds of journalism, not just in this country but around the world."
LONG ODYSSEY
Approaching Bangkok airport for a layover. Moving closer to freedom
Assange was first arrested in Britain in 2010 on a European arrest warrant after Swedish authorities said they wanted to question him over sex crime allegations that were later dropped. He fled to Ecuador's embassy, where he remained for seven years, to avoid extradition to Sweden.
He was dragged out of the embassy in 2019 and jailed for skipping bail. Ever since, he has been in London's Belmarsh top security jail, where he has been fighting extradition to the United States for almost five years.
Those five years of confinement are similar to the sentence imposed on Reality Winner, an Air Force veteran and former intelligence contractor, who was sentenced to 63 months after she removed classified materials and mailed them to a news outlet.
While in Belmarsh, Assange married his partner Stella, with whom he had two children while he was holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy.
Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch, Andrew Goudsward and Kanishka Singh in Washington, Michael Holden and Kate Holton in London, Lisa Barrington in Seoul and Alasdair Pal, Kirsty Needham and Renju Jose in Sydney; Editing by Scott Malone, Matthew Lewis and Sonali Paul.
More on the Windows 10 Recovery Partition
See the 13m34s YouTube video from IT Army on Dec 8, 2022.
"In this video, I will walk you through the steps to create a Windows recovery partition on a Windows 10 machine installed in UEFI mode with a GPT partition-style disk.
set id=de94bba4-06d1-4d40-a16a-bfd50179d6ac."
Ed:
This video provides new information: When disabling the Recovery Partition before deleting and remaking it, is the fact that the Recovery software is moved to the "System32\Recovery" directory on the C: drive.
During the procedure, the video shows both views (the System32\Recovery directory and the Recovery Partition). This program is "Wimre.wim with size 416,714 KB". See the image below.
Recovery program, Wimre.wim 416,714 KB
Afterwards, this software is back on the Recovery Partition.
Win-11 Pro has a much bigger Recovery Partition
Next Tuesday-Group meeting (July 16th), we'll discuss recreating the Recovery Partition, exactly as outlined in this YouTube video.
Google Maps Timeline Data May Disappear
See the InfoPackets article by John Lister on June 19, 2024, at 12:06 pm EDT.
Google Maps
Google Maps is changing the way it stores Location History. This arguably boosts privacy but may surprise some users who appreciate the feature.
The change is to the timeline feature, which is included in both the desktop and mobile app versions of Google Maps. It lets users see a complete record of all places they've visited while using a mobile device with location tracking switched on.
The feature will also add detail and context, including any pictures from a visit saved in Google Photos or figuring out when a user went on a trip or vacation. It can help solve niggling, if unimportant, questions, such as quickly figuring out when a particular visit happened.
History Now Device-Based
At the moment, Google ties Timeline data to a user's account so that users can access their entire history even if they have switched mobile devices over the years. However, it's now ditching that approach as part of a broader response to privacy criticisms.
Timeline data will no longer be backed up to the account and will instead be tied to the specific mobile device. That also means the feature will be removed completely from the website version of Google Maps. (Source: thehackernews.com)
What happens next depends on user settings. If the user takes no action the first time they use Google Maps on a mobile device after December 1, Google will load up the Timeline data from the previous 90 days and delete everything before that.
How To Avoid Data Deletion
The way to get around this is to open Google Maps on a mobile device, tap the profile picture, and then select the "Your Timeline" option. From here, users can choose to keep their location history available. The possibilities include keeping all data until the user manually deletes it or having the data automatically deleted after three, 18 or 36 months. (Source: theverge.com)
The user can also switch on cloud backups through an option in the Timeline feature itself. This means they can transfer their history to a new device later, though it still won't be available on the Google Maps website.
What's Your Opinion?
Do you use the Timeline feature? Would you be disappointed to lose the history? Are you concerned about location tracking?
Fun Facts:
Amazon Is Changing How It Packages Your Deliveries
See the How-To Geek article by Andrew Heinzman | Published June 21, 2024.
Amazon Packages
This year's Amazon Prime Day will mark a subtle yet substantial change in packaging. Instead of using plastic air pillows as packing filler, the company opts for 100% recycled paper.
Amazon began testing recycled paper filler at an Ohio fulfilment centre last year. The paper filler was found to offer the same protection as plastic air pillows. According to an employee quoted in Amazon's press release, using paper filler also cleared up space in the Ohio fulfillment centre and proved "easier to work with."
There's a significant environmental benefit to the shift to paper filler. Amazon anticipates a 95% reduction in the use of air pillows, effectively eliminating 15 billion plastic air pillows from the supply chain. The new paper filler, made from 100% recycled material, is a step towards a more sustainable future, even if it isn't recycled by the customer. This change is not only beneficial for the environment but also for the customers who will no longer have to deal with a pile of air pillows with every delivery.
I should note that Amazon's "discoveries" aren't all that groundbreaking. Distributors know that paper fillers can offer the same protection as plastic air pillows. They also know that paper is more convenient for employees. Instead of teaching a rotating cast of labourers how to use an air cushion machine, you can tell them to stick some paper in a box (although employees still need to be taught how to use an appropriate amount of paper).
Air pillows are commonly used in packaging because they are the most economical "void fill" solution for large-scale distribution operations. Amazon has yet to comment on the economic side of things, so we don't know whether this transition is economically or environmentally motivated.
From a business perspective, I am optimistic that Amazon has found a way to make paper filler the more profitable packaging option. This could potentially set a new standard in the industry, encouraging other distributors to follow suit.
This year's Prime Day, scheduled for July 2024, will be a significant milestone in Amazon's packaging transition. While an exact date for the shopping event has yet to be announced, you can look forward to noticing the switch to paper filler. Keep in mind that the use of paper filling may vary between distribution centres, adding an element of anticipation to the event.
Source: Amazon
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Bob Backstrom
~ Newsletter Editor ~
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