Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz

rememberaaronsw.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 149 posts

Re: Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz

#51

Post by rdl »

paulgb wrote: post #43
mhartl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reminded of the time MIT threw Star Simpson under a bus when she wore a breadboard on a sweatshirt to Logan Airport and the local authorities freaked: http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N40/simpson.html At least some faculty got it: http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N17/facultyopn.html

For what it's worth, they seem to have handled MBTA v Anderson well in 2008 ( http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N31/subway.html )

I think "EFF and the students involved handled it well, and MIT didn't do anything egregiously wrong." MIT didn't provide any legal assistance; that was all EFF.

Re: Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz

#52

Post by mindslight »

ghshephard wrote: post #45
rdl wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to know who specifically at MIT was involved in this. It seems antithetical to the MIT IT people I know (Jeff Schiller, etc.). There's no hope, really, of replacing the US Attorney Ortiz. MIT, however, actually has some indirect accountability to the tech community.

What would cause an MIT IT executive (and this would have to be an executive decision) to bring in the Secret Service for someone running curl against academic journal website. I have done precisely that type of thing dozens of times in the last 10 years, and it would have never occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong. And yes, I always had to login first through a browser, figure out how the hell the cookie w…

Gosh, who hasn't hid a machine on MIT's network to get access to academic journals? (mine was a Sparc IPX in a drop ceiling for IEEE articles.)

Re: Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz

#53

Post by tobiasu »

rdl wrote: post #38
genwin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone wants to solicit support to fight their battles. I can see why Aaron chose suicide. I wish he had fled to one of the few places in the world where American depravity couldn't effectively kill him, but I can see why he didn't.

Realistically, he could have just gone ~anywhere outside the US and probably wouldn't have been pursued too aggressively.

Are we talking about the same US that tried to extradite Richard O'Dwyer over some copyright bs or nutcase Gary McKinnon? Both of them are not even US citizens, it only gets worse when you "belong" to the country that wants to put you on trial.

There are few countries that are not in bed with the US. Usually they don't feel like getting into even more diplomatic difficulties unless there is some gain for them.

Assange, for example, could've made a deal with the Kremlin - in exchange for keeping silent about Russia and friends... But he's a different category.

Re: Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz

#54

Post by rdl »

wololo wrote: post #22
jhuni wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If not even hacker-friendly institutions like MIT will side with people like Aaron, it's a sad state of affairs. MIT hasn't been a hacker-friendly institution since the early 1980s which is why Richard Stallman left MIT to found the free software movement.

What changed?

There was a big shift in the 70s and 80s to a bigger administration and to administrators who were "professional university administrators" (BU/random liberal arts alumni with a mssters in admin), vs. students/alumni/faculty.

This was a product of a greater "in loco parentis" and services available for students, as well as bigger government grants (requiring more admins on that side)

It correlated with the downfall of MIT as an amazing place, outside bio/biotech. It would not be my first choice of CS school today (Stanford by a mile, then CMU, then maybe a few others including Waterloo), or science (Caltech). For computer security, I'd probably say Cambridge (UK), maybe Stanford, maybe Technion, and a few others.

Re: Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz

#55

Post by colechristensen »

sonabinu wrote: post #28
Gorbzel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without any disrepect to Aaron's memory (very sad news), no. Interested to hear what reminded you, but Turing committed suicide based on an unjust persecution of a minority by society as a whole. While Aaron's situation also involved injustice, I hadn't (and probably wouldn't) link the two.

Did you not feel like his death was the result of authority pushing a him into a corner? Wasn't Turing persecuted by authority as well? Two brilliant tech minds lost before their time.

Aaron was accomplished, but Turing far overshadowed. Turing was forced or compelled to take synthetic estrogen because he was gay as well as being convicted and stripped of his security clearance. The hormone replacement could be seen as rather more directly responsible for his suicide than the still relevant stresses of overzealous prosecution.

Re: Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz

#56

Post by shawn-butler »

seiji wrote: post #15
shawn-butler wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that it is any of your business but because I have no children and the education of future generations is about the most important thing there is to me. What is important to you? Thanks for trolling me. I will try and make your contribution positive by reminding readers that if they lack a will with benefactors or executors with real world power, the state generally takes everything often ignoring legal documents…

No intent to troll here. I was just curious, seeing as I hold my academic institution in such high contempt. Now that you mention it, I'm not sure where I would leave any form of wealth I had. My first intuition would be needy organizations of some sort (cancer/hiv/troubled youth--and there's always hackerdojo). Intelligence finds a way. I'm not too worried about the world on that front.

I'm glad you took a few minutes to think about it. Even if you are not wealthy it helps focus on what is valuable.

Regarding your bad experience it sounds like you weren't able to make the best out of your time and maybe your school failed in some respect. I find universities valuable because they are basically reincarnated every 4 or 5 years. They exist and function as an expression of the values of the students and to a lesser extent the faculty hired in that time. I simply cannot fathom how the Institute in any incarnation that I have been involved with would set out to destroy a productive community member for something so inane. Perhaps handle it internally but to ask for a formal prosecution? Something is really broken and I hope it is brought to light before the institution fails its students further.

Re: Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz

#57

Post by ghshephard »

rdl wrote: post #49
ghshephard wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would cause an MIT IT executive (and this would have to be an executive decision) to bring in the Secret Service for someone running curl against academic journal website. I have done precisely that type of thing dozens of times in the last 10 years, and it would have never occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong. And yes, I always had to login first through a browser, figure out how the hell the cookie w…

He wasn't a member of the MIT Community, and was in a wiring closet. If they'd charged him with trespassing, I would have contributed to his legal defense fund and bought him a drink when he finished his ~30 days of community service or whatever. Minimal harm, minimal foul. I did way worse stuff from my machines at MIT when I was an undergrad. I actually was called to testify in a federal case over it, but told them…

Secret Service was involved prior to MIT knowing who was web-scraping JSTOR. Does MIT normally call the Secret Service when they find Laptops w/Hard Drives in wiring closets, particularly unlocked wiring closets that Homeless people were known to store their stuff in? This is all very strange.

From: http://chronicle.com/article/Rogue-Downloaders-Arrest/128439...

"On January 4, MIT police officers were notified that a member of the university's technical-security staff had discovered a laptop in the wiring closet. That morning, a team including a Secret Service agent and police officers from Cambridge and Boston visited the site and installed a Webcam....JSTOR never contacted any law-enforcement authorities about the matter. The decision to pursue criminal charges, she says, was not JSTOR's."

Re: Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz

#58

Post by colechristensen »

stesch wrote: post #23
worldsayshi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? You mean by vote?

No. Every post with a tumblr.com link gets automatically banned. A week ago I posted something to a subreddit I've founded and it got banned. This spam filter isn't even allowing moderators to post these links. But I was allowed to unban it. So, I wrote to the moderators of /r/technology a few minutes ago and instead of unbanning it they said that tumblr.com is banned reddit wide. No, he hasn't unbanned the link. :-(

Despite the occasional high value link, the reddit ban on tumblr makes reddit better.

Re: Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz

#59

Post by jmcgough »

rdl wrote: post #49
ghshephard wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would cause an MIT IT executive (and this would have to be an executive decision) to bring in the Secret Service for someone running curl against academic journal website. I have done precisely that type of thing dozens of times in the last 10 years, and it would have never occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong. And yes, I always had to login first through a browser, figure out how the hell the cookie w…

He wasn't a member of the MIT Community, and was in a wiring closet. If they'd charged him with trespassing, I would have contributed to his legal defense fund and bought him a drink when he finished his ~30 days of community service or whatever. Minimal harm, minimal foul. I did way worse stuff from my machines at MIT when I was an undergrad. I actually was called to testify in a federal case over it, but told them…

"MIT sold out Drink or Die, too"

What did they do?

Post reply on HN