MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

Archival-quality document storage requires two things: 1, hashing papers; 2, guaranteeing that the preimages of those hashes (ie the papers) remain available despite accidental and deliberate forces toward their destruction.

Non-archival-quality document storage already requires thing 2, we just want to add more nines of reliablity to those guarantees, which is a fundamentally technical endeavor that the likes of Springer/Elsevier don't particularly help with.

1) Ok, from that perspective Aaron Swartz was part of the MIT community, but I don't agree that his case "was an attack by the administration on a member of the community". MIT did not speak against (or in support of) Swartz, did not press charges, told the prosecution it should not think MIT wanted a jail sentence for Swartz, and really was not involved in the trial. As I said before, you can definitely criticize MIT for not actively supporting Swartz, but I get the sense that people think MIT was out there encouraging the prosecution and pushing for some severe punishment, which it was not.

2) MIT did not press charges, MIT called the police. I just took a look at the Abelson report and it in fact states multiple times that MIT did not press charges, although it also points out that MIT was not opposed to charges. I would call that being neutral. I believe the report is fairly objective in its fact-reporting, but of course we have to acknowledge that it comes from MIT itself, so please let me know if you think Abelson/the administration is outright lying when they say they did not press charges.

3) I agree that people at MIT are/were actively encouraged to push boundaries, and that MIT resources were for everyone in the community to use, although your description of using random lab equipment does strike me as a bit odd. Granted, I was not part of the makers community, but while I had friends who actively used the hobby shop for personal projects, I never heard of anyone just going into random labs while people weren't there to play around with equipment and build something. Not saying it's wrong, just wondering how common this actually is at MIT.

4) Maybe he just left a laptop in a closet, but I would argue Swartz had at least some idea he was doing something questionable - I'm not saying something illegal or even wrong - but somewhat inappropriate. When he was caught near Central Square, the MIT PD officer identified himself and said he wanted to speak with him, after which Swartz dropped his bike and started running away. If I'm a member of the MIT community working on a project while connected to the MIT network, I don't drop my stuff and run away when MIT PD approach me asking to speak with me if I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.

I agree that the culture at MIT has changed over the past decade (in mostly a negative way), in large part because of the administration, but in this specific instance I feel like MIT is getting more hate than it should.

    What's really evil is that the MIT administration continues to uses Swartz as an example to intimidate community members into compliance with what it wants them to toe the line.

To answer your questions, though: In the generic case, the MIT administration lies or at the very least badly misleads in these reports (see the Epstein report, for example). In this specific case, MIT chose Abelson to author the report precisely since he has unimpeachable integrity. I'd trust whatever he signed his name to, as would everyone else in the MIT community.

3) It sort of depends. I wouldn't e.g. walk into a random biology lab where I knew no one, and no one knew me, in the middle of the night and use a centrifuge. On the other hand:

* There were plenty of times when I walked into 38-501 lab, which was a big undergraduate EE lab, and made things, even long after I graduated (and other alumni did too), waving "hi" to the desk workers if they were around (who knew me and knew I had no affiliation). It was pretty normal. And I think that extended to any member of the MIT community. Cheap things like resistors were also free. More expensive things, unaffiliated people were respectful of (indeed, more respectful than the people managing the lab expected them to be).

* I used a few machine shops around MIT, where I was safety trained by the staff but had no formal affiliation with the shop or lab. I'd walk into these and use them casually. When the people who managed these came in, we'd usually have a friendly chat about what I was making.

* There was one makerspace in the Media Lab where I used equipment regularly without asking. I knew the prof in whose jurisdiction it was, and it was sort of symbiotic. I reverse-engineered a lot of his equipment in the process, which was useful to his research group. There were plenty of hanger-ons too, doing likewise.

* Institute-wide communal resources, like classrooms or network drops, you'd just use. You definitely didn't ask anyone. I can't imagine I'd think twice about leaving a laptop connected (except for having it stolen; theft was not uncommon). Indeed, I'd likely look for a place like a network closet where it wouldn't be as likely to be casually stolen.

And there were plenty of places which were restricted-use. For example, Edgerton shop made it clear it could only be used for specific uses. I didn't use that one. You got a feel for the specific lab.

That's actually a lot of what made MIT great. If you wanted to make something (virtually anything) you had the resources at your disposal to do it. I learned a lot from more experienced people who were hanging out making things when I was an undergrad, and I think undergrads learned a lot from me once I was an alumnus.

To be clear, that culture is dead now. I couldn't go to MIT and use a machine shop or EE lab right now, at least without paying an annual alumni membership fee.

And to be clear, there were people doing the same who weren't alumni too, but who were accepted as members of the community.

4) re: Using Swartz as an example: I can say that happens with 100% certainty, but these things wind up under NDA, so I don't know of public sources.

re: Doing something wrong: I don't disagree he knew he was doing something sketchy, but it comes back to who the victim is. It was JSTOR, not MIT.