Is the DOJ trying to 'make an example' here? JSTOR and MIT aren't pursuing this, the Feds are.
Aaronsw indicted for hacking MIT network to download millions of JSTOR docs
141–150 of 324 posts
Re: Aaronsw indicted for hacking MIT network to download millions of JSTOR docs
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does anyone think it's odd that an Acer laptop could write these files to disk faster than JSTOR could serve them? Why would that be odd? SATA = 3 Gbps throughput with minimal overhead, Ethernet = 1 Gbps with lots of overhead (IP headers, Ethernet headers, HTTP headers)
SATA = 3 Gbps throughput with minimal overhead USB HD's top out about 200Mbit/s. JSTOR's RAID arrays should be able to drown his laptop without breaking a sweat.
JSTOR isn't at MIT; it's an online service. He just needed an MIT IP address to be able to access it without paying.
Re: Aaronsw indicted for hacking MIT network to download millions of JSTOR docs
#143Ballsy, considering his previous brush with the FBI over similar things: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fbifile
Re: Aaronsw indicted for hacking MIT network to download millions of JSTOR docs
#144One hopes he is smart enough to have a solid legal argument for what he has done. If he loses the legal battle then it's going to set a bad precedent for all these academic document stores to continue keeping hold of this information. On the other hand, if he were to win then it may make it harder for groups like JSTOR to continue restricting access to their data.
Re: Aaronsw indicted for hacking MIT network to download millions of JSTOR docs
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does anyone think it's odd that an Acer laptop could write these files to disk faster than JSTOR could serve them? Why would that be odd? SATA = 3 Gbps throughput with minimal overhead, Ethernet = 1 Gbps with lots of overhead (IP headers, Ethernet headers, HTTP headers)
SATA = 3 Gbps throughput with minimal overhead USB HD's top out about 200Mbit/s. JSTOR's RAID arrays should be able to drown his laptop without breaking a sweat.
Did it specify that he was writing to local disk? If I did a stunt like this, I'd probably try to write to some cloud storage like Amazon S3. I'd bet that Amazon's servers can drown JSTOR's, particularly if there's a big pipe like MIT's in-between.
Re: Aaronsw indicted for hacking MIT network to download millions of JSTOR docs
#146I don't understand why he was so desperate to access it via MIT. There are dozens of libraries in the Boston area with access to JSTOR with guest access to their network. If he wasn't in such a rush, he could have easily bounced around campuses and likely have avoided detection.
Perhaps to have enough legitimate traffic surrounding you to mask the fact that you're trying to download every single article.
Re: Aaronsw indicted for hacking MIT network to download millions of JSTOR docs
#147I admire Aaron's persistence. Sadly it was quite rude of him to repeatedly crash JSTOR's servers. If only he'd throttled his script back a bit.
Liberating those documents from JSTOR would have been quite a gift to society.
Re: Aaronsw indicted for hacking MIT network to download millions of JSTOR docs
#148Fantastic news! He deserves to rot in jail for wasting so much precious bandwidth.
Compared to the millions of people who viewed "Friday"?
Re: Aaronsw indicted for hacking MIT network to download millions of JSTOR docs
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> somehow "owns" its archive It does own its archive. They just may not own the exclusive copyright to the contents of the archive... there is a subtle distinction.
There is no non-exclusive copyright. J-STOR is not the copyright owner, period. They do own the right to the composition of their collection, so someone who got the whole collection would be liable to infringing their right on the composition of the collection; in contrast, a random sample of articles would infringe on the publishers' IP rights rather than J-STOR's. The subtle point is that J-STOR is absolutely not i…
Notice on the first page of every JSTOR pdf:
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Re: Aaronsw indicted for hacking MIT network to download millions of JSTOR docs
#150Why would he do this? What is the purpose of having all those documents?
33. Swartz intended to distribute a significant portion of JSTOR’s archive of digitized journal articles through one or more file-sharing sites.
Conjecture? Since his previous projects seem to involve downloading and analyzing huge sets of data.
This does not necessarily mean shovelling the articles out to file-sharing sites.