141–150 of 213 posts
I know it involves breaking into a room, writing a bot to scrape a website, and MIT. I'm not sure on the details though.
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And why would that come to mind when none of it is true? Firstly, Aaron is responsible for his own death, it was suicide. Secondly, it's the zealous prosecutor you should be mad at, MIT is not to blame here; Aaron broke many laws and they were well within their rights to have him arrested. Good intentions aside, what Aaron did was illegal and he deserved to be arrested for it; what he didn't deserve was more than pro…
Well oftentimes colleges can and will exercise discretion when it comes to having a student arrested and they will perform their own internal inquiry to determine whether an offense warrants arrest and prosecution. That's just the way it goes. Colleges should do the right thing for their students and protect them when appropriate because all kids do stupid things. MIT would have known pretty well what type of prosecu…
He was also caught by the MIT Police which has full state-vested arrest power, so I'm not sure if there's any turning back from the legal system at that point.
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> For downloading academic papers, he was facing [...] You left out the part where he snuck into a server closet and tampered with the network equipment. Among other things, that's burglary.
I've heard stories from my days at MIT of people doing much worse things in server closets. The MIT community's view on these things is vastly different from the federal government's, and there's a large and shocking disconnect when those laws are applied to what's normally fairly accepted (if not explicitly, then implicitly condoned) behavior in the community.
Similar from my days at Caltech. However, there were two important considerations for this kind of thing at Caltech.
1. The "look the other way" attitude of the administration applied to members of the Caltech community, and also depended on how you were connected to Caltech. A student could get away with more than an employee or a friend/relative of a student.
2. The Caltech honor system applied. If you were hacking something without permission and the people in charge of that thing told you to stop, not stopping would have likely been an honor system violation. I'm pretty sure that repeatedly purposefully evading someone's attempt to get you to stop messing with their thing would count as ignoring a request to stop.
Does MIT have similar considerations?
MIT Failed him - spectacularly so. If they had declared that they had no wish to see him in prison and used their (considerable) influence he would be alive. Instead, this political, vindictive creature http://wgbhnews.org/post/carmen-ortiz-spotlight-under-fire and her nasty acolytes in search of a high profile "Scalp" pushed him over the edge. A terrible waste and a horrible use (misuse) of prosecutorial discretion.
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While you certainly have a point, MITs actions in this case, and in the case of Star Simpson show what looks to me (as an outsider who really wants to go to an elite college) like MIT doesn't stand behind their students the way that I would expect an elite college to stand behind their students. I mean, maybe that's just the way it is; maybe being a student at an elite institution just doesn't come with the level of…
aaronsw was not a student at MIT.
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I've heard stories from my days at MIT of people doing much worse things in server closets. The MIT community's view on these things is vastly different from the federal government's, and there's a large and shocking disconnect when those laws are applied to what's normally fairly accepted (if not explicitly, then implicitly condoned) behavior in the community.
> I've heard stories from my days at MIT of people doing much worse things in server closets Similar from my days at Caltech. However, there were two important considerations for this kind of thing at Caltech. 1. The "look the other way" attitude of the administration applied to members of the Caltech community, and also depended on how you were connected to Caltech. A student could get away with more than an employe…
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I remember reading on arstechnica about Aaron. US justice system has so much inconsistencies. Punishment for copyright cases being harsher than the ones for Actual crimes being one of them. Lets not forget that he is being called criminal because he broke a law, a silly thing signed into law probably because someone lobbyed so hard for it. He is no actual criminal. He didn't feel the articles he downloaded from serve…
> He is no actual criminal. He didn't feel the articles he downloaded from servers should be kept private. That is a horrible argument. should I just be able to take your tv because I think it shouldn't be locked up in your house? I'm not saying I agree with the papers being locked up. Not believing in a law does not make you innocent. Many people think they don't have to pay their taxes and they all go to jail.
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>Almost no one does. That's not even remotely true. Our justice system may be severely fucked in many ways, but it's not completely nonfunctional. But we hear about the problems whenever something goes wrong. The other 99.9 percent of the time when things go smoothly we don't even notice...
There is a huge difference between things going smoothly and things being just . Something like 95% of cases in the US don't even go to trial. They're ended in a plea bargain, which allows the prosecutor to serve as both judge and jury. I do not think that is a sign of a healthy justice system, nor a sign of a justice system that actually pursues justice .
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Are you basing this on statements from MIT, from the government, from the indictment...? I ask because, though I've never been near MIT, everything I read about it suggests that every one of these steps is seen as part of the game expected to be played by a few curious students now and then.
Some quotes from the official MIT report: http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pd... Typically, when an excessive use case is reported that is determined to originate from within MIT’s network, the Libraries report this to either the MIT Information Services and Technology (IS&T) network security team or MIT’s “Stopit” group, which deals with inappropriate behavior that occurs electronically. The…
I guess jstor staff doesn't have access to good technical texts on how to run a network.
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I remember reading on arstechnica about Aaron. US justice system has so much inconsistencies. Punishment for copyright cases being harsher than the ones for Actual crimes being one of them. Lets not forget that he is being called criminal because he broke a law, a silly thing signed into law probably because someone lobbyed so hard for it. He is no actual criminal. He didn't feel the articles he downloaded from serve…
> He is no actual criminal. He didn't feel the articles he downloaded from servers should be kept private. That is a horrible argument. should I just be able to take your tv because I think it shouldn't be locked up in your house? I'm not saying I agree with the papers being locked up. Not believing in a law does not make you innocent. Many people think they don't have to pay their taxes and they all go to jail.