His crime was scraping a website. The accusers killed an innocent man for violating Terms of Service. Who's the real criminal here?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/ninth-circuit-doubles-...
Aaron, 5 years later
31–40 of 133 posts
Re: Aaron, 5 years later
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
We should also celebrate people's flaws. There's no such thing as an entirely good person. Aaron had mental issues. But those same issues were what gave him strength, because they were a part of him. If you took them away, Aaron wouldn't be Aaron. If we celebrate people's flaws, maybe people won't feel like they're not allowed to have flaws. And maybe that might help people who feel like ending it. https://news.ycomb…
Mental issues are flaws but they don't make a person bad in my book.
Mm, yes and no. It's one of those things where if you reveal you have them, you feel like less of a person. People look at you differently.
Be honest: If you were in a position of authority, would you place someone with known suicidal tendencies in a position of power? What if things went very badly? How about someone with outbursts of anger, or serious sleep issues that prevent them from showing up to work on time?
When people feel pressure to conceal their problems, the pressure builds.
Aaron had some political aspirations, and a felony conviction would've precluded him from running for certain offices. Maybe that, combined with his internal issues, may have made him feel like less of a person. I don't know. I just want people to feel okay with themselves, however they are.
Once people realize that it's genuinely ok to have issues, hopefully society will relax a bit.
Or maybe there is no solution, and people will eventually take their own lives for one reason or another. And that's ok too. We can remind them that it's not the only option, and give them some space to unwind.
That seems like the crux of it: People are so hung up on doing well or being a good person or accomplishing their careers, that their whole self-worth is tied up in it. When it goes badly, it's easy to take it out on yourself. But there's no reason to. The chips fall wherever they fall.
Re: Aaron, 5 years later
#33"I convinced Google to allow me to give their USENET archives to the Internet Archive." Thank you.
I also thought this was interesting, but I don't see what this is referring to. Google has bought the DejaNews archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups and I haven't find any reference of the fact that they would have given it to Internet Archive, neither on the wikipedia article nor on places where it could have been mentioned like https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php/Usenet or https://archive.org/details/usenet. Does anyone know what this implies?
Re: Aaron, 5 years later
#34I'm happy he died for a good reason
Re: Aaron, 5 years later
#35The scariest thing to me is how fast people forget.
Re: Aaron, 5 years later
#36I lived in Highland Park when he committed suicide and attended the same high school he did(NSCDS). NSCDS talked a lot about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. They also talked a lot also about Gandhi and other activists. It is a day school so they have an alternative form of teaching. I feel comfort saying this influenced his decisions for later in his life.
Good education is so important. Some high profile hackers such as Alan Kay have spent a lot of effort on tools for education and for children. We should all take a leaf out of his book and try to dedicate some resources to assist with free online public education and related technologies for the benefit of subsequent generations.
Re: Aaron, 5 years later
#37Just in case it ever comes to this, if I die, it was NOT a suicide.
RIP Aaron, I wish I knew you.
Re: Aaron, 5 years later
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Egyptian and Babylonian religions of antiquity were dedicated to maintaining the status quo and they did so for centuries. They did this by carefully guarding who was allowed to have access to sacred knowledge to control who had power in their hierarchical societies. Those with access to specialized knowledge had to be limited in number and properly initiated. Unfortunately, it seems like this pattern of social o…
That comparison only holds if you consider those attending cheap state school on student loans as "the vetted privileged few". Not to mention, even at the state schools, we just download the PDFs off Google Scholar because searching the databases is annoying. Nothings's really changed other than rhetoric.
I'm just saying that Aaron in that quote is describing a very old civilizational anti-pattern. Obviously, things are a lot better than they were, especially after the invention of the printing press and the Internet.
There is also a lot of information, such as how to make rockets capable of reaching orbit, that is covered by ITAR that is still jealously guarded knowledge available only to the initiated few.
Re: Aaron, 5 years later
#39I really like this piece, but your font size is WAY too small, especially on mobile.
Re: Aaron, 5 years later
#40"I convinced Google to allow me to give their USENET archives to the Internet Archive." Thank you.
I also thought this was interesting, but I don't see what this is referring to. Google has bought the DejaNews archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups and I haven't find any reference of the fact that they would have given it to Internet Archive, neither on the wikipedia article nor on places where it could have been mentioned like https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php/Usenet or https://archive.org/detail…
I'd also be keen to know. I had assumed it was https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical .. which is pretty good, but I just discovered comp.lang.javascript only goes back to 2001 there, so my posts from the 90s are not to be found :) Other groups do go back to the mid 90s, however.