Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different” • Hacker News Board

Re: Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different”

#61

Post by gluejar » Mon, Jan 21, 2013, 2:47 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #15

danso wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a reasonable post and the distinctions are important. However, perhaps Tufte would argue that he (Tufte) knew what he was doing was illegal, especially if done in order to self-profit...and IIRC, other blue-boxers who had some profit-motive were not given such a light treatment when caught. In contrast, from Aaron's point-of-view, what Aaron was doing was not explicitly illegal. From his admittedly sk…

> Of course, as we know now, his miscalculation was that JSTOR's archives were not (not all of them, anyway) in the same public status as the PACER documents. Is there any evidence that was a miscalculation?

A significant part of the JSTOR corpus is out of copyright. I expect that Aaron meant to do with that subset what he had done with PACER.

Re: Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different”

#62

Post by gluejar » Mon, Jan 21, 2013, 2:51 AM UTC

danso wrote: post #23

lizzard wrote: post #7

I had no idea Tufte had been a blue box hacker. Amazing story.

I was hoping someone here could shed some light on this. This would apparently be the first time (according to Google) Tufte has ever talked about experimenting with blue-boxes. I have no doubt he (and whoever his Stanford roommate was) had the technical chops to do it. I just wonder how he knows his was the "first"...since blue-box experimentation seems to have spontaneously come about after hackers put 2 and 2 toge…

This was the first time Tufte had talked about this. I asked him after the talk. It was december 1962. http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2013/01/edward-tufte-was-p...

Re: Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different”

#63

Post by kragen » Mon, Jan 21, 2013, 6:02 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #26

Anechoic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally I urge you to please watch Taren's video at the end of the linked article. I watched it. It was certainly touching. What specifically are you referring to in the video? Or just the whole thing?

The whole thing. I think it was more than just touching, and I also think that it puts the lie to anybody that still wants to harp on the case not being the prime factor in Aarons life over the last two years as well as the reason why he choose to conclude it. There are a number of very good questions in her address, questions that have no easy answer. Especially the ones about technology being used to improve the wo…

Is there a transcript, or a way to watch the video without installing Flash?

Re: Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different”

#64

Post by kragen » Mon, Jan 21, 2013, 6:15 AM UTC

cristoperb wrote: post #57

danso wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope someone takes the time to transcribe it...at the end of an already emotionally draining service, Taren still managed to bring out a collective, audible weeping in the packed auditorium. She was very aggressive on her calls to make sure the prosecuting attorneys face reproach. But interestingly, Carmen Ortiz was mostly mentioned in passing. Stephen Heymann by far was the target of Taren's anger.

Here's a transcription of Taren's eulogy (consider it a rough draft -- I don't have time to check it carefully now): http://mretc.net/~cris/swartz-transcripts/taren-transcript.t... If anybody does read it along with the video, please feel free to send me any corrections (or change the txt file and send me a diff). Thanks!

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm crying too now.

Re: Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different”

#65

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Jan 21, 2013, 7:34 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #63

jacquesm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing. I think it was more than just touching, and I also think that it puts the lie to anybody that still wants to harp on the case not being the prime factor in Aarons life over the last two years as well as the reason why he choose to conclude it. There are a number of very good questions in her address, questions that have no easy answer. Especially the ones about technology being used to improve the wo…

Is there a transcript, or a way to watch the video without installing Flash?

I see you've already found it. If anybody else wants to read rather than view the video http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5088757

Re: Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different”

#66

Post by keithpeter » Tue, Jan 22, 2013, 9:48 PM UTC

hkmurakami wrote: post #53

keithpeter wrote: post #22

" ...in this part, Tufte related how he told Aaron, half-seriously, that Aaron’s main fault was downloading millions of articles when only a few thousand were worth downloading. " So true; the trick is in recognising and curating those few thousand.

The commonly accepted metric for "worthwhile" articles would be the number of citations they have received from other articles. One could conceivably figure out, through some clever parsing, which articles have been cited the most.

There are indeed citation indexes which are used to 'score' papers when they are cited, one such being the Science Citation Index, a subscription service available to many members of universities.

http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/free/ess...

There are issues with citation indexes, bias towards early publication &c. My comment was directed more at the 'paper mill' and the 'minimum publishable result' tendency in some areas of science!