61–70 of 324 posts
"Aaron Swartz ... was a fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Ethics"
"Do Ethicists Steal More Books?" is particularly tasty.
"Aaron Swartz ... was a fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Ethics"
It is not impossible to imagine a code of morality which views his alleged actions as ethical.
Why the hell is MIT stashing information in closed systems in first place? I thought the idea (OCW etc.) was to enable more people to learn, participate and benefit from work of academics and researchers. Hell I even donate a few hundred bucks every now and then to OCW. It is mind boggling how the supposedly smart people are not getting their heads out of their asses so late in a world frighteningly short on distribu…
How did Aaron get access to the for-pay articles (page 9)? Also: nice going, Aaron! Drag research access into the 21st century, kicking and screaming! Does anyone think it's odd that an Acer laptop could write these files to disk faster than JSTOR could serve them?
"Does anyone think it's odd that an Acer laptop could write these files to disk faster than JSTOR could serve them?" Nope. I bet the JSTOR servers are serving many concurrent requests. If he had the servers to himself then yes, that would be surprising.
It sounds like he was using the majority of their resources. But maybe those servers serve lots of places, and they only mentioned MIT as an example.
The title is inaccurate. It is alleged that he signed up for guest accounts on their network with different laptops, changed his MAC address and re-registered if the IP he was using was blocked (by JSTOR) or cut off of the network (by MIT), and finally connected a laptop in a basement networking closet. I guess you could say that is 'hacking' in the unauthorized access sense, but not in any meaningful sense. It isn't…
33. Swartz intended to distribute a significant portion of JSTOR’s archive of digitized journal articles through one or more file-sharing sites. How do they know this? Has he said something to that effect? --edited for formatting.
Why the hell is MIT stashing information in closed systems in first place? I thought the idea (OCW etc.) was to enable more people to learn, participate and benefit from work of academics and researchers. Hell I even donate a few hundred bucks every now and then to OCW. It is mind boggling how the supposedly smart people are not getting their heads out of their asses so late in a world frighteningly short on distribu…
The papers are from JSTOR, not MIT. MIT pays for a subscription to JSTOR like many other universities do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of them. I think you'd be doing Aaron a favor to kill it, though.
Yeah, let him become desaparecido in obscurity. Nacht und Nebel. What a "favor." Do you really think that he will be invited to post incriminating comments here from his jail cell?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are talking about theft of services, not copyright infringement. In any event these charges are going to be very difficult to beat since they're federal, even though there are some obvious holes in the indictment. It will be almost impossible to get any of the evidence thrown out even if there was an illegal search and seizure. His best bet is probably to get the Harvard legal team to go to bat for him, although…
I wasn't really commenting on the legal sufficiency of the indictment, just the rhetorical dishonesty of accusing someone of "steal[ing] well over 4,000,000 articles from JSTOR" (quote from the indictment) when JSTOR didn't own those articles. They could've just alleged violation of JSTOR's TOS and thereby theft of network services. I suspect JSTOR or people sympathetic to them had a hand in writing the indictment, t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, let him become desaparecido in obscurity. Nacht und Nebel. What a "favor." Do you really think that he will be invited to post incriminating comments here from his jail cell?
Is he in jail? For this? I'd be shocked. I think even Mark Abene made bail, and he reprogrammed telco switches.
I will be surprised if he is allowed into an airport.