The Truth About Aaron Swartz's "Crime"

Post by rgbrenner » Sun, Jan 13, 2013, 10:02 PM UTC

zapdrive wrote: post #27

MichaelSalib wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starbucks torrenters generally don't cause a community of 20,000 scholars to lose access to a major journal archive for days at a time. And they generally don't require university staff to burn hours trying to hunt down hidden machines that are disrupting their network.

Apparently, the MIT and/or JSTOR staff took down the service themselves when they detected the mass downloads. It was not Aaron's "attack" that brought down the access.

Post by rgbrenner » Sun, Jan 13, 2013, 11:40 PM UTC

ghshephard wrote: post #92

rgbrenner wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not correct. He launched what amounted to a DoS against JSTOR: " the strain it put on JSTOR’s servers was enough to have impaired other research institutions attempting to access the materials." "Together, Grace and Gary Host downloaded JSTOR articles at such an astounding pace that several of JSTOR’s servers crashed." http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N30/swartz.html

Every journal database I have done bulk downloads from (sometimes constantly) over a week requires a cookie and sends you a polite message (via http no less) asking you to put in a few seconds pause between each request. It would not have occurred to me that they haven't configured their servers to handle the load. Once again - Aaron did nothing that I, and tens of thousands of people like me, haven't done many times…

Post by darkarmani » Mon, Jan 14, 2013, 3:58 PM UTC

rprasad wrote: post #61

darkarmani wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The prosecutor was just doing her job. If that is the case, then she is BAD at her job. You can't have it both ways. Either way, let everyone know that she is either bad at her job or overzealous.

As a former criminal defense attorney, I will say that based on what has been published about her on HN and other websites she's actually very good at her job as a prosecutor , precisely because she is overzealous. In fact, if her fellow prosecutors are to be believed, she's one of the best federal prosecutors still working for the government--after all, she runs the Boston federal prosecutor's office, easily one of…