A Month Later
A month ago the Assange family began raising money to cover the cost of Julian's flight to freedom (in his home country, where he is still recovering under the sun). It said: "Julian Assange has embarked on flight VJT199 to Saipan. If all goes well it will bring him to freedom in Australia. But the flight comes at enormous cost: Julian will owe USD 520,000 which he is obligated to pay back to the Australian government for the charter flight to Saipan and onward to Australia."
We've since then learned that the goal is to collectively punish the family and that the initial cost figure was an underestimate. A report from 4 days ago said: "It has been revealed his trip back to Australia cost more than $781,480. A foundation has agreed to pay most of the costs, but Australian taxpayers will still face a bill of about $100,000."
The crowdfunding page says "£512,749 raised so far" from "10724 supporters".
Notice they interchangeably say dollars and pounds, sometimes conflating US dollars with Australian dollars. It's not clear what exactly goes on there. Some reports say that "crypto" bros will cover the bill or that Roger Waters will pay it.
Anyway, paying off the debt seems to be a prerequisite/obstacle to Assange resuming work on Wikileaks.
Speaking of supporters, there are only 37 new members left for FSF to woo in order meet the goal it set for itself about 4 weeks ago (nearly a month now) and we're gratified to see that Let's Encrypt has fallen to 100 (capsules) earlier today in Geminispace. We thought it would take the whole of summer or the entire year to get there. Geminispace is increasingly self-signed, maybe 95% of it by year's end.
We're optimistic on many fronts. Sure, not everything goes freedom's way, but we still find lots of good news (and Microsoft is still in a panic due to last week). █