an idealist to the core who has left a mark on world or anyone who got to know about him directly or indirectly. May be governments and people like us have failed him. Its like few or majority hold too much of power to make a decision rather than what is right.
Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
191–200 of 213 posts
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#192Seems like an apt time to reupload the markdown dump of his blog that was made by a HN'er 3 years ago. (we were concerned that his blog would cease to be a going concern) http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=673004338877052... (not really sure where the best file hosting venue is these days)
Looks like they established a GitHub repo, with additional formats available: https://github.com/joshleitzel/rawthought
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That's also a horrible argument. When you take someone's TV, they no longer have it. When Aaron copied documents, JSTOR still had them...
Though you could argue the more copies that are available the lower their value becomes (inflation).
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have a friend in a Federal investigation. No evidence besides people who did something wrong willing to turn State's Evidence. Heck he was under surveillance for 2 years and NOTHING. He is threatened with 25 years to life.
Your friend should probably look for an attorney then.
Has cost them over $200,000 in lawyer fees and to go to trial is over $1,500,000 at least. Doesn't sound very justice. Government has spent over a millions already with an empty war chest for trial.
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#195Can anyone give a clear and concise summary of what he did to bring on the wrath of the criminal justice system? Every article I have read jumps back and fourth through his timeline and inter-splices useless information. 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.
He downloaded a large amount of articles from JSTOR. This involved setting up a laptop in a storage room in MIT, where he was not a student. MIT had to investigate it because the laptop was making a large amount of requests to JSTOR's servers and JSTOR had to block access to MIT. The rest of the story involves an overzealous federal prosecutor wanting to charge him under the CFAA to make an example of him because of Aaron's "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto". JSTOR also claimed that Aaron cost them an overinflated sum of damages, but was not interested in prosecution after Aaron agreed to delete the acquired documents. MIT adopted a policy of neutrality in the matter, contrary to its spirit of hacking, and did not speak up for Aaron's case. Hope that helps. If you want a more objective look at the case, see Wikipedia [0][1] and MIT's Report to the President [2] (which is long, but very comprehensive).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#JSTOR [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz [2]: http://swartz-report.mit.edu
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#196The response to his death is creepy to me, like "His name is Robert Paulson". There's so much misinformation, and misuse of his death for ideological and social purposes unrelated to the actual person. The fact that someone made something called "Internet's Own Boy" only compounds this. If it were me, I'd want to come back to life just to tell you all that I'm not your puppet, and you have no clue why I died; you did…
Did you actually watch the documentary? (It's available for free) They talk with people who were very close with him, including his father, his ex-girlfriend, and Lawrence Lessig. It also includes excerpted footage of him speaking at various events. (Not to mention his blog is still present) If these people (like the author) and excerpts don't actually know Aaron Swartz, then I don't know who could. (I'm also of the personal opinion that documentaries are not meant to tell the truth, but rather solidify a living memory of the person)
One can't deny that Aaron was opposed to institutional corruption (such as his work with PACER) and wanted to see the freedom of information (see his "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto" for a precursor to that). Of course as in Fight Club, the original intent of a movement or a person's identity can get twisted and morphed, but it would help if you actually bought up these inaccuracies. The most insulting thing we could do is forget what Aaron fought for and let all that he stood for go for nought out of some misguided respect for his memory.
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whenever I visit MIT to work with some researchers there I always manage to sneak in an Aaron reference and love watching their faces. People can justify what happened by citing that he broke the Law™, but this is still a sore thing for many on the campus, that I think those who want to, shouldn't miss the beat to rub salt in MIT's wounds, especially because of the history around hacking at MIT. People won't think tw…
How professional of you.
Yeah, I just want to live my life as whatever the fuck random people who really don't give a damn about me (and vice versa) equate to being as "professional"… lol
Surprisingly, it doesn't stop people who want to work with me. I guess it helps when you can do useful stuff a couple standard deviations away from the vapid/banal bullshit most seem satisfied working on and aggrandizing such efforts :P
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Nobody was harmed, no property damaged. Sounds like a "hack" to me. Certainly cheaper than getting a car off of a building.
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
>or otherwise placed new locks around them that hadn't existed beforehand How is creating network and identity based locks around the papers not placing new locks?
The "them" in the sentence you quoted refers to "the original public records". The locks you refer to were around the new , value-added work: the digitized, processed, cataloged version of the papers they had made by adding value to the original public-domain documents. The locks were not applied to the original documents. It's like the difference between storing a touched-up version you made of an Apollo 11 photo in…
Maybe you are talking about a different lock box?
JSTOR doesn't claim that its documents are public-domain:
Our licenses from publishers are non-exclusive, meaning that the publishers are free to license their content to others to digitize or make it available in any way they might wish. [0]
We do this with funds provided by thousands of libraries and institutions, all of whom are our partners in disseminating access around the globe. [0]
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Swartz wasn't a MIT student and thus 'dealing with it internally' was not an available option. What would they do, put him in detention?
Ask Harvard to take away his JSTOR access? It doesn't seem like it would have been difficult to have found some punitive measures that didn't involve the police.
You misunderstand what happened, Harvard wasn't involved, he went onto the MIT campus where he was not a student, to take advantage of their on campus anonymous access to JSTOR, he was abusing MIT's open anonymous policy to get the data and he kept moving around to different terminals whenever they'd kill his access to the one he was at; he finally ended up sneaking into a network closet and plugging directly into the network to get access because the public terminals he'd be using had all been shut down to lock him out. He didn't have access, he was't logged in, he was taking advantage of MIT's anonymous policy.