331–340 of 427 posts
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So, pay for access, or go to your local library, or browse the internet, or get free access in a similar way that Aaron Swartz did? Knowledge often requires funding to be created in the first place.
Why does every research team and lab use SciHub and/or Library Genesis?
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It is a common complaint that fixed penalties are just the fee the rich get to pay to break the law. Doubly so for big corporations especially when the penalties are less than the gain they got doing the harm. It sounds like you're implying that it is impossible to create a system that makes penalties scale instead of just being a fee because the system will always be gamed. Do you believe that or did I misunderstand…
It's a common complaint but the complaint is ridiculous because the penalties already scale with the scope of the activity. It's typical when you sue a corporation for the penalty for willful violations to be treble damages, i.e. three times the actual damages. If you rip customers off by $10,000 then you pay $30,000. If you're huge and rip customers off by $10 billion then you pay $30 billion. Whereas the proposal i…
Being able to game a naive implementation of such scaling is not an argument for not scaling penalties but for designing the concrete implementation to be hard to game and/or applying even higher penalties when someone has been found to try to game the system - which is something that should be done more in general.
We can absolutely make it so that people hiring private chauffeurs share in the liability for breaking traffic laws just like we can absolutely hold CEOs liable for illegal activities done by employees under their purview.
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Again, this is a wealth tax. Rich get driven around and don't loose their jobs for loosing their license. Try being poor though and having this happen. Edit: should have said 'poor tax'
Being poor is no excuse for breaking the law. If you can't afford having your license revoked then don't do things that can get your license revoked.
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I can't believe his lawyer didn't explain all of that to him? An important role for an attorney in this situation is as a counselor, to explain the actual reality and the possibilities.
I have had the misfortune of hiring many attorneys for a variety of different legal issues. They’re almost always fucking useless.
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The real shame is that the next "best" countries are.. China? and the European countries pushing for age verification and sweeping surveillance and apparently bent on destroying the freedoms that made them better than China & Russia.. God can we have an alien invasion already please
China? Not sure if Chinese propaganda got you or what. They did 100,000,000 forced abortions, killed tens of thousands of their own people and covered it up. The United States kills 4 of their own people and the news outlets go wild.
lmao have you realized how absurd such numbers are (even though I'd assume the 100,000,000 can only be a hyperbole, or are you actually serious with it? Having a single child policy for a long while is not the same as "forced abortion" if that's what you're referring to. The thing called "contraceptives" exists) if you use your common sense for just a second?
Seems that it's you who got fed a lot of propaganda unfortunately.
And yes there have been a lot of disasters throughout the history, even not so long ago (e.g. Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution etc.), but if you're suggesting that's what the current regime is doing in 2026, you have no clue.
The part that still bothers me so much about the US vs Swartz case is that JSTOR didn't pursue civil litigation against Aaron. It was the US government that pursued him. There was little for the government to lose in the case. In a case vs Meta, at the scale it has reached, it could have wide ranging economic implications limiting the investment in AI, which the US is absolutely not willing to pursue at this point in…
In many cases it's "all about the money" (and the lawyers). Take the case of Billionaire hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors who was famously pursued by federal prosecutors as their ultimate "white whale" in a massive insider trading probe. Though his firm pleaded guilty and paid a record $1.8 billion fine, Cohen himself was never criminally charged or convicted. Yet two lower underlings were c…
Owner of the New York Mets now, by the way, which maybe non-sports following readers will be happy to hear remain a boondoggle. He tried very hard to spend his way to glory, leading the league in payroll at the beginning of the 2025 season, only to crash and burn and end up in last place this season.
How the world has always worked, sadly, ha.
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You are a coward; which is why you cannot use your name or identity and only feel comfortable insulting people online because it makes you feel like a big bad keyboard warrior. I feel bad for you because not only is your argument irrational and baseless its not even entertaining. I am not one of the "thugs" that harassed him. I never met him; but I was a huge fan. I am also not employed by anyone that would participa…
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You're missing the symmetry. The two party system is a false dichotomy. The enemy is not the other party, it's the system that causes there to be only two alternatives that are both captured by mostly the same interests. Each party convinces half the population that the other is trying to destroy them so that their votes cancel out. And then Marx calls this a criticism of "capitalism" even though it's fundamentally a…
The two party system is absolutely part of the problem, but there's also definitely the culture war being waged to distract people from the class war that's being waged against them. But the two-party system definitely enables that, making it easier to win by discrediting the other, because there only is one other.
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The general public was authorized to enter the facilities 24/7. The exterior doors were unlocked and it was considered an "open campus". The access controls you see today have only existed since COVID. Whether he was a student at the time also means "precisely nothing".
Really? The expectation was that they could go into facilities closets and plug into the core networking equipment?
The expectation is that such individual and laptop doing "unauthorized" scraping doesn't trigger a criminal investigation when the host university, and the target business, didn't implement any meaningful access controls or even rate limiting for any other person on campus.
The expectation is that after an investigation of scraping at 11 req/s (450,000 over 11 hours according to the report), a further 8,000 requests (before JSTOR blocked MIT's /8) two weeks later would not have the effect that "Half the servers in one data center failed, and JSTOR engineers feared that the entire service might go down worldwide." The expectation based on that claim by JSTOR is that JSTOR was incompetent or lying.
The expectation is that when MIT was able and willing to implement access control for JSTOR, and JSTOR declined because they want to develop a notice to MIT visitors who might be negatively affected by ending uncredentialed access, JSTOR would not then create a tempest in a teapot over the violator returning and continuing to download papers at a reduced speed that wasn't even detected for about a month. On Dec 26, when JSTOR again noticed the "abuse", they went to significant effort to route the violator's requests to a special server and serve them garbage instead of the real PDFs, all on short notice... yet they couldn't add the general notice to MIT visitors about the credentials requirement, on a much less urgent timescale; they had told MIT in October that they needed until after Dec 18th to add such a message. The expectation is that JSTOR's claims are self-serving lies.
The expectation is that such a request pattern would not trigger a report, by the MIT libraries director, to the MIT academic council, that a "cyberattack" had been launched from MIT's network.
The expectation is that you don't get arrested for felony B&E for entering a data closet that's effectively unlocked, connecting to a switch, and scraping a paper hosting site that offers free downloads from the entire institutional network.
The expectation is that you don't get charged with larceny for downloading, in any quantity, papers that are freely available to anyone on the MIT campus or probably most other campuses in the U.S.
The expectation is that sending web requests with a url parameter indicating T&C has been agreed to, and without saving cookies, might be a basis for a civil action, but is not "accessing a computer without authorization" under the CFAA.
The entire situation, at most, should've been a minor local crime and a lawsuit by JSTOR against Swartz. Yet the state charges were dropped (feds didn't want to share required discovery material), and JSTOR settled with Swartz before the feds even indicted.
MIT was caught in an awkward position of having the ability to block unauthenticated scraping to protect their contract with and access to JSTOR, but not doing so. So they proceeded to treat someone connecting to a switch in a data closet and doing what any MIT visitor could do, as a criminal offense.
I don't believe anyone at MIT was genuinely concerned that there was some broader criminal conspiracy when the issue was downloading of papers from JSTOR. Certainly not based on some random Chinese IP pinging or scanning Swartz's laptop. When the data closet laptop was discovered in January, MIT could have left a note telling the owner that JSTOR is very upset and it would be better for everyone if the scraping stopped. Why didn't they? They could even, reasonably, have taken the laptop and external drive and noted that the data closet was insecure and please contact network staff to claim it.