Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

[Nefertiti2]

There should be.

Co-inventor of RSS (at 14). Co foudner of Reddit. Tireless fighter for internet freedom who was facing the possibility of 30 years in jail.

Killed himself at 26.

THis is a great tribute by Rick perlstein.

Or this by Lawrence Lessig

This too is good

If coders are the unacknowledged legislators of our new digital age, then Aaron was our Thomas Paine--an alpha geek who didn't use his skills just to get more people to click on ads, but tried to figure out how to change the system at the deepest levels available to him.

Very, very sad.

aron is dead.

Wanderers in this crazy world,
we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.

Hackers for right, we are one down,
we have lost one of our own.

Nurtures, careers, listeners, feeders,
parents all,
we have lost a child.

Let us all weep.

--Sir Tim Berners Lee, January 11, 2013

[G-Man]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

Has the Anonymous hacker collective fucked with the JSTOR site yet? Just a matter of time, surely.

[Nefertiti2]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

JSTOR behaved fairly well and dropped all charges- unlike MIT or the prosecutor.

Academics (supported by Anonymous and many others) have been uploading documents for open access using the twitter hashtag pdftribute.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

Tragic and horrible. Great guy, huge loss.

What kind of insane criminal justice code has a maximum 35 year prison sentence for that kind of offence? Just another odd way in which the US is a bit screwed up I suppose.

[Nefertiti2]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

Think it's just choosing the most punitive interpretation of the law for maximum efffect- rather like the way conspiracy used to be used here.

According to this (retweeted by lessig) The prosecution was taken over by the Secret Service.

The authorities had just turned down a plea bargain

[G-Man]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

Nefertiti2 wrote: JSTOR behaved fairly well and dropped all charges- unlike MIT or the prosecutor.

Academics (supported by Anonymous and many others) have been uploading documents for open access using the twitter hashtag pdftribute.

Ah, I missed the dropping of charges bit. But by laying them, JSTOR put the tragedy in motion. I can imagine that some people might hold a bit of a grudge.

[Incandenza]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

The New Yorker has a story about Swartz this week. Well worth reading. It uses long quotes from his family and friends, as well as blog posts he wrote. What I found interesting is that for many people, they seemed to have some idea that he could commit suicide, and that the idea that came out after his suicide that the prosecution hounded him to death seems simplistic.

He also seems to fit the troubled genius mold--the article shows him as a difficult person with some flaws (and it seems that he didn't hear "no" all that often growing up or in his young adult life, so the charges against him no doubt seemed even more Draconian). It might be trying a bit too hard to complicate the martyr image of him, but I think it's still a good read.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

I haven't really followed this story. What's the rap on MIT in all this, exactly? Don;t understand their role in it all.

[Incandenza]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

This is from the New Yorker article:

At M.I.T., hacking, broadly understood, was a tradition. It was taken to be part of the culture that led to technological innovation and was rarely punished, even if it resulted in considerable annoyance and expense to the hackee. When, for instance, students stole a three-ton cannon from Caltech in 2006, showing false work orders to campus security officers, and transported it across the country to M.I.T., this was widely celebrated.
For all these reasons, when he decided to download the jstor articles through the network at M.I.T., it was not entirely unreasonable of him to suppose that, if he was caught, this would be regarded as a prank. He did not try very hard not to get caught—he bought the laptop he used with Quinn Norton’s credit card. “We fought about this during the investigation, because I am much more careful,” Norton says. “I work with hackers and I’ve watched their lives be destroyed.” Norton is a journalist who covers Internet culture. She is thirteen years older than Swartz and dated him on and off for four years. “I said, ‘If you’d told me what you were doing, I would have found you real hackers, and there would have been one smoking jstor server and you would have what you wanted and they would not know what happened.’ He really hated when I said that. Because he was doing an M.I.T. hack, and this whole idea that if you’re going to do something criminal, I’ll find you real criminals to help you . . .”
He did not hack into the M.I.T. system—he didn’t have to. M.I.T.’s network is open to anyone on campus, whether or not they are part of the university, so anyone on campus has access to jstor, too. He wrote a script that instructed his computer to download articles continuously, something that was forbidden by jstor’s terms of service. When this violation was detected, and requests coming from his computer were denied, he spoofed the computer’s address, fooling the jstor servers into thinking that subsequent requests were coming from somewhere else. This happened several times. M.I.T. traced the requests to his laptop, which he had hidden in an unlocked closet, and installed a hidden camera there that recorded him entering the closet, covering his face with a bike helmet. He was arrested after leaving the closet. The police took away his shoes and put him in a cell. Soon after his arrest, he returned the data he had taken, and jstor considered the matter settled. M.I.T., however, coöperated with the prosecution, despite many efforts, internal and external, to dissuade it.

A CNET article:

MIT called the local police on Swartz in January 2011, according to a Cambridge police report (PDF) that described his arrest. The case was then taken over by the U.S. government, with the alleged harm suffered by MIT as a centerpiece: Ortiz' criminal complaint (PDF) against Swartz alleged that "he sought to defraud MIT," "accessed protected computers belonging to MIT...without authorization," and "recklessly caused damage to MIT."
At any point in the prosecution of Swartz, MIT could have disagreed with those allegations -- which likely would have prompted Ortiz to drop charges or not insist on prison time -- but it chose not to. JSTOR, by contrast, has been saying publicly for two years that "we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter." Harvard professor Larry Lessig, a friend of Swartz's, wrote: "Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured 'appropriate' out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear."
Robert Swartz, Aaron's father, told The Huffington Post that he asked MIT officials on three occasions to intervene on his son's behalf by asking prosecutors to seek a lighter punishment, but they refused. "The reason I was given was there were many differing opinions in the MIT community on this topic and therefore they had to remain neutral," he said. "They put institutional concerns ahead of compassion."
Former Sen. John Sununu, an MIT and Harvard alum, wrote in The Boston Globe this week that "MIT is conducting the inevitable soul-searching internal investigation. New administrative policies and campus rules will be written in the soft tones of academic boilerplate. But a new policy handbook will not suffice. This is a crisis of values and judgment, and it requires a change in attitude, starting at the top."
An October 2012 court filing (PDF) from Swartz's lawyers argued that "MIT personnel were acting as agents of law enforcement." It also says that "MIT's problem with JSTOR could have been ended by disconnecting that computer from the MIT network. Instead, it elected to intercept communications, not to protect the MIT system, but to gather information for law enforcement purposes."

[ursus arctos]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

We'll need to wait for the full scale report that MIT has commissioned before we have a real sense of that, but the family's view is that a) it wasn't clear that he violated the terms of access to the MIT network in the first place, and b) that even if he had, MIT's apparent unwillingness to enter into a settlement similar to one reached with JSTOR allowed the prosecution to go forward. There are also some hints that MIT may have encouraged the prosecutors (even if they didn't, they certainly didn't discourage them (whereas JSTOR urged them to drop the criminal case once they settled).

All of which is complicated further by the fact that Swartz' father works at MIT.

[EDIT: or read what Inca posted while I was typing.]

[Reed John]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

The severity of the charges don't fit the offense and it is terribly sad that he killed himself (i read that whole New Yorker piece), but his reasoning for doing what he did is bullshit.

As somebody who makes a living writing stuff that people pay to read on the internet, I have no sympathy for this "information wants to be free" horseshit. Information doesn't grow on trees. It takes a lot of work by several people for it to become a publishable whatever. If there's no revenue, there's now way for writers, graphic designers etc to get paid, there won't be anything to print.

It's a bummer that not everyone has access to scientific research but there are other ways to resolve that. One is to require that government research grants also cover the cost of publication in an open access journal. Another is to make the rich customers like Harvard or whomever pay enough that it can be offered for cheap or free to students and institutions that are skint.

But just violating access agreements isn't ethical. It's not super criminal, but it's not OK and this guy doesn't deserve admiration for that. (Maybe he does for other stuff).

[Anton Gramscescu]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

If one were speculating, what would MIT's motive for behaving this way have been? That as an ISP provider they were worried about their own liability for this kind of thing and wanted to send a message to their own students?

[MsD]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

There's a really good documentary available on the iPlayer. Look for Storyville: The Internet's Own Boy.

[Antepli Ejderha]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

MsD wrote: There's a really good documentary available on the iPlayer. Look for Storyville: The Internet's Own Boy.

It doesn't have long left to watch it either, starting watching last night, really good so thanks MsD.

[linus]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

It's on youtube too; looking forward to watching it.

[Incandenza]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

I remember hearing about it when it came out in the US last summer, it didn't get much attention though.

[peel_acres]

Nothing about Aaron Swartz (that I can see)

I saw the story at the time but shamefully didn't pay much attention. I saw the documentary on iPlayer and it was excellent. Real eye opener, and scary too. Storyville is an excellent documentary strand.