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Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago

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Re: Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago

#301
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

"Aaron should man up, take responsibility for his actions, and pay his own bills." ~Ed Sounds like Ed was a bit harsh on someone who was going through allot of trouble. The comment was excessively cruel. Not to mention it was the top comment, which must of added large dosage of salt on an already wounded soul. So he(Ed) rightfully deserves any criticism thrown at him. It's such a tool bag comment, Ed should apologize…

Not to mention it was the top comment

You say this as if it was the fault of the poster. Why did HN in general not upvote another, more positive comment? WTF kind of witch hunt is this even? I don't like the comment either, but cut it out, all of you.

Re: Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago

#302
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you happen to have a link?

Edit: found it, http://www.forbes.com/sites/harveysilverglate/2013/01/03/bla...

Great stuff, ta for the link. This bit is amazing:

"It happens that the appointed lawyer was someone of considerable reputation and experience, but the feds neutralized the appointed lawyer’s skill by pouring more than 360,000 pages of disorganized documents onto him"

Re: Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago

#303
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may or may not have something to say about this, but not here, and not now. Can we please just let the family grieve? We are the family.

Dude, stop acting and shut the fuck up. What you said amounts to cyber bullying and it's idiots like you who are setting the spiteful tone in HN comments. So much hate. No matter what other comments here say, you are in a way responsible for his death.

irony much?

Re: Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago

#304
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you sound like a drama queen. The severity was not conveyed. According to HN users in this thread, it couldn't be for whatever reasons. We didn't know the extent of the trouble. Sure, he was rude, and I don't like it when people are rude, but some people in this thread are making it sound like he pulled the fucking trigger. Give it a rest.

Why don't you "man up" and acknowledge, the comment was not only very distasteful, but extremely vitriolic and damaging for someone who was asking for help. He was asking for help, is this the type of rude comment you make when someone ask for it. Severity wasn't conveyed, what does everything have to be explicitly spelled out for you in order to understand.

You're too emotional to ration with. I hope you stop displacing anger in every which way.

Re: Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely certain that Aaron knew he was doing something wrong, or, for that matter, whether he was in fact doing something wrong. It seems he made little effort to cover his tracks and pretty much acted out in the open. And from what I've heard from friends who've met him in person - Aaron was brilliant, idealistic, a nice guy, and hopelessly naive about how the world actually works.

If he didn't think he was doing anything wrong, why didn't he just ask permission?

It's possible to believe you're doing something right and still be acting against the rules.

Let's just imagine -- completely hypothetically, of course -- that I recently wrote a crawler specifically designed to rescue client websites from a terrible DIY website service (which might or might not be Jimdo). Let's imagine it was tuned to load Jimdo-related assets (or the assets of a similar service), fix broken code, etc.; I'm pretty sure this would have been against Jimdo's rules (or the rules of a related service, if I had done such a thing, which, surely, I did not), but let's say I did it anyway because I think it's reprehensible that they don't provide a way for their customers to export their websites.

It's possible that I could have found myself on the pointy end of an expensive lawsuit over something like this. It's possible that I would have broken some laws that I am unaware of, had I done that -- and, had I done that, it would only weaken my case further to claim foreknowledge of the laws being broken. It's likely that there are laws which could be loosely enough interpreted to make me guilty of some form of "hacking". (And it would be most certainly utterly stupid to even consider leaving a comment like this under my regular username -- if, of course, I had done such a thing. Fortunately, as HN occasionally reminds me, I'm not competent enough to have done something like this.)

But there's no way I'd ever say that I did something "wrong", and there's no way I would have asked for Jimdo's permission to do something like that. I simply knew what the rules were, and I believed it was the rules, not I, that were wrong.

Re: Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agreed. And as someone who strongly supported what Aaron did at the time (and thus disagreed with you, Ed, et al), this techcrunch "article" is still disgusting. This public singling out of one of us for ad impressions should be taken personally by every commenter here. I know it's the 3072nd time someone has said this, but techcrunch.com should just really be added to the spam blacklist. Unfortunately, fl…

I too disagree with a posted link, and therefore earnestly believe that it should be censored so nobody can see it. Sincerely, the church of scientology

Are you trying to build 1984 society here?

Re: Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago

#307
post #68
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the contrast? edw519's past remarks remain consistent with the one you've linked to in your comment. Expressing the idea that Aaron should be expected take responsibility for his actions does not imply any ill will on edw519's part. Why does this issue have to be made into something so polarizing? With many here, it's either you believe Aaron should've been able to walk away scot-free, or you support an oppr…

Does anyone here who has paid any attention to Ed whatsoever believe he would have written that comment had he known that Aaron had already been financially ruined by an overzealous prosecution that had confronted him with a dilemma of pleading guilty to 13 felonies and spending 6 months in prison or taking a crap-shot at 6-7 years in prison? NOBODY KNEW THESE DETAILS AT THE TIME. Aaron was apparently prevented from…

No, but it's reasonable to assume those details, while secret, were plausible in a system that has time and again proved itself irrational and unfair.

You are asking people to not jump to conclusions about people who jumped to conclusions.

Re: Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago

#309
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the problem wasn't in asking for funds, the problem was in explaining why the funds were necessary. I read a recent story, probably linked here on HN, about how standard procedure for the Justice dept. is to freeze all your funds so you can't afford adequate representation, then dump so much paperwork on you that you have no chance to defend yourself. All of this would have been facts related to the case w…

How can a judge gag the defendant from speaking out? I don't really understand this.

My best guess is that it may be to avoid polluting a future jury.

Re: Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago

#310
Michael Arrington has written his share of trollish articles, but this is just mean spirited. I have a hard time remembering anything so hypocritical and hindsight-biased written after someone's death.

I will do my best to avoid reading anything written by Arrington from now on.

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