The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)

#81

Post by mrtranscendence » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 7:31 PM UTC

nzmsv wrote: post #61

pipeline_peak wrote: post #56

"His girlfriend Taren always dealt with taxi-drivers, with waitresses." "The guy in front of me’s leaning all the way back, but I’m in the last row so my seat doesn’t go back, and I have to lift my legs up to stretch out a muscle that was sitting funny while I was asleep" I feel like Aaron Swartz was never truly an adult, just a boyish intellectual. I can't imagine his submissive behavior was a net positive to his me…

And it sounds like he was perfectly aware of this. This feeling of being "not really a man" can be overwhelming, and I feel like this is an incredibly toxic thing perpetuated by our culture. It's possible to spend an entire lifetime trying to prove the opposite of this statement to the world, and most importantly oneself, and fail at this impossible task. But the saddest part is that because the majority of people th…

> So perhaps living up to the stereotype of manliness is not the most important thing in the world.

I think some things are being conflated here. There is the stereotype of manliness, conforming to which requires you to do or have interest in stereotypically manly things (sports, cars, home improvement, working outside, being tough, being reticent to show emotion). But there's also failure to conform to adultness -- being able to call a cab, order food, pay bills, manage finances, maintain steady employment.

It sounds that Swartz, though not stereotypically manly, was also not stereotypically adult. The former's not a problem -- I'm not manly either, I say as I cuddle my pet rabbit -- but failure to be an adult can cause issues (at least for those without such indulgent friends and family as Swartz had).

Re: The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)

#82

Post by cryptica » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

xibalba wrote: post #28

cryptica wrote: post #26

It's sad how the system punishes smart altruists. If you're smart, you'd better be evil or the system will destroy you.

I don't agree that "the system" punished a smart altruist. As this article makes clear, Swartz did something he knew to be illegal. This was not his first brush with mass copyright violation. He was then prosecuted for his crimes. IMO, the charges were vastly disproportionate, but you expose yourself to prosecutorial overreach when you (knowingly) commit crimes. This appears to have been a trend with Swartz. He seems…

I think it's a big deal that the charges were disproportionate in this case. Maybe what he did was illegal on paper, but it was not unethical.

Disturbingly, there seems to be increasingly many things in our modern society which are ethical yet illegal. You'd think that in those cases, authorities should be more lenient; that they would have a sense of what is right and wrong from the perspective of the average citizen. The fact that they seem to be particularly more aggressive in those cases is what I find disturbing and why I'm saying that altruism is being punished.

In many countries, the concept of right and wrong is increasingly being decided from the perspective of a tiny minority. We appear to be reverting to a society of lords and serfs. The government's moral compass is increasingly based on the elites' perspective.

Re: The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)

#83

Post by mrtranscendence » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 7:40 PM UTC

tonguez wrote: post #39

pm90 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or, possibly, Hacker News doesn't represent hacker culture, but finance-adjacent right-wing techbro culture, which knows perfectly well which side of the copyright issue its bread is buttered on. Spot on. I like HN for certain topics, but it’s by no means representative of the Hacker culture. Even the name seems like duplicitous marketing at best. As an example, the topic of immigration will bring out the nastiest…

Actually the opposite is true here; if you talk about certain data which is considered "bad", like crime statistics, your post will be shadowbanned because it's considered wrongthink (or as you might put it, "straight up racism"), just like Twitter.

> if you talk about certain data which is considered "bad", like crime statistics, your post will be shadowbanned

Utter nonsense. Seriously. This is pure claptrap. I've seen so many instances where posters here have brought up "crime statistics" in the context of race or claimed that left-leaning cities are unlivable crime-ridden hellholes, and none where such posts were "shadowbanned".

Re: The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)

#84

Post by photochemsyn » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 7:43 PM UTC

GhettoComputers wrote: post #58

photochemsyn wrote: post #18

This article carefully avoids any analysis of the reasons why MIT chose to persecute Aaron Swartz. Here's a quick take on the actual situation, off the top of my head: "The Darker Side of MIT and the Academic Publishing Industry" While the Internet has been hailed from its inception as a tool that would open up access to information for the whole world, the reality has not matched that expectation. Much of the most i…

Hasn’t it always been corporate interests in academia? Stanford was a joke when it was founded, MIT was being petitioned into becoming a tech school. Patrons of sciences have always been funded by private interests, there isn’t any corruption. > This 'public-private' partnership situation has corrupted American academics, placing the profitability of research well ahead of the accuracy and reliability of research. Pr…

As I noted, it's really Bayh-Dole exclusive licensing that's the problem. Make all exclusively licensed federally financed patents held by academic institutions available to anyone who wants to utilize them via a no-fee license, that's the fix.

Prior to that, if academics wanted to get involved in industry and make some money thereby, the route to take was called consulting, which seems fine with me, as long as conflicts of interest are stated honestly.

Re: The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)

#85

Post by tiahura » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #74

senko wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he was facing 13 felony charges and up to 50 years in prison[0] Pretty hard slap, that. [0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/why-did-...

He faced nothing resembling 50 years, even on paper, even in the least charitable plausible analysis. You get to these nosebleed sentences by assuming that there are no sentencing guidelines, and no grouping of charges, and that instead you're likely to serve the sum of the maximum sentences spelled out in the statutes you violated. That makes no sense even as a story: the CFAA statutes capture behavior ranging from…

Thank you 10,000x over. The reporting about this aspect really couldn’t have been any worse and drove too many equally misinformed opinion pieces.

And agree completely with your assessment of prosecutors and press releases - I told my US Attorney that I only wanted to see him on TV after a conviction. Alas, I hate defending prosecutors, but it seems completely unfair to blame her for his death.

As you suggest, my guess was that the sentence was largely going to be driven by the damages. My understanding is that the “victims” had been sufficiently browbeat into being reluctant witnesses and as you suggest, it would have just been cleanup costs.

Re: The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)

#86

Post by jedberg » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

borski wrote: post #77

pipeline_peak wrote: post #56

"His girlfriend Taren always dealt with taxi-drivers, with waitresses." "The guy in front of me’s leaning all the way back, but I’m in the last row so my seat doesn’t go back, and I have to lift my legs up to stretch out a muscle that was sitting funny while I was asleep" I feel like Aaron Swartz was never truly an adult, just a boyish intellectual. I can't imagine his submissive behavior was a net positive to his me…

I’m not diagnosing, obviously, but a lot of this, including the phobia of fruit and non-white and yellow vegetables seems… on the spectrum, at the very least. I wonder if Aaron had undiagnosed autism of some sort.

He was a super taster. When he stayed with me he insisted on the plainest of food and told me it's because he's a super taster. Although thinking back now, maybe that was just an excuse to cover for something else.

Re: The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)

#87

Post by MereInterest » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 7:46 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #53

senko wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he was facing 13 felony charges and up to 50 years in prison[0] Pretty hard slap, that. [0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/why-did-...

The article says they offered a 6 month jail time plea bargain though. It sounds like from his own writing that he was cognizant of the fact he broke the law, but didn’t agree the law should have been a law in the first place. It also sounds like he didn’t really expect there would be any consequences whatsoever. Look at this from the prosecutors point of view. They have hard evidence of a crime. They have evidence o…

A prosecutor choosing to seek a 6-month jail sentence is acceptable. A prosecutor choosing to seek a 50-year jail sentence is also acceptable. A prosecutor who is offering a 6-month jail sentence in exchange for waiving basic human rights, while threatening a 50-year jail sentence if those rights are exercised, has crossed the line into persecution.

It's an analogous situation to blackmail. Suppose Alice has found evidence that Bob robbed a bank. Alice is legally allowed to reveal that evidence to the police, but is under no obligation to do so outside of a subpoena. However, even though both choices are legally permissible, Alice is not allowed to make her choice be conditional on receiving payments from Bob, as that would cross the line into blackmail.

Plea bargains are a form of extortion, and should not be part of the legal system.

Re: The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)

#88

Post by nzmsv » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 7:46 PM UTC

mrtranscendence wrote: post #81

nzmsv wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it sounds like he was perfectly aware of this. This feeling of being "not really a man" can be overwhelming, and I feel like this is an incredibly toxic thing perpetuated by our culture. It's possible to spend an entire lifetime trying to prove the opposite of this statement to the world, and most importantly oneself, and fail at this impossible task. But the saddest part is that because the majority of people th…

> So perhaps living up to the stereotype of manliness is not the most important thing in the world. I think some things are being conflated here. There is the stereotype of manliness, conforming to which requires you to do or have interest in stereotypically manly things (sports, cars, home improvement, working outside, being tough, being reticent to show emotion). But there's also failure to conform to adult ness --…

True. This one hit close to home for me personally, but I can say with confidence that therapy can make things a lot better.

There's a tendency to either coddle a person with these issues, or try to get them to change through tough love. The reality is that neither of these things is helpful - what is really needed is a good therapist.

P.S.: In case someone is reading this and nodding along: you have likely spent years on the roller coaster of trying to prove yourself through pathological self-sufficiency interleaved with breakdowns and "failure to adult". It's OK to seek help. Even pro athletes use coaches and personal trainers if they are stuck in a rut. This is no different. Oh, and you are far from alone in this.

Re: The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)

#89

Post by tptacek » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 7:50 PM UTC

tiahura wrote: post #85

tptacek wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He faced nothing resembling 50 years, even on paper, even in the least charitable plausible analysis. You get to these nosebleed sentences by assuming that there are no sentencing guidelines, and no grouping of charges, and that instead you're likely to serve the sum of the maximum sentences spelled out in the statutes you violated. That makes no sense even as a story: the CFAA statutes capture behavior ranging from…

Thank you 10,000x over. The reporting about this aspect really couldn’t have been any worse and drove too many equally misinformed opinion pieces. And agree completely with your assessment of prosecutors and press releases - I told my US Attorney that I only wanted to see him on TV after a conviction. Alas, I hate defending prosecutors, but it seems completely unfair to blame her for his death. As you suggest, my gue…

This, to be fair, is the biggest problem with the CFAA. It's sort of an inchoate statute (you generally use computers as a means to conduct other offenses --- in fact, some of the reason we have a CFAA in the first place is that legislators felt that there weren't statutes that addressed computer crimes that didn't have immediate financial benefits, which themselves could be charged as fraud). The major sentencing knob CFAA comes with is 2B1.1(b), which is a table of offense level by dollar loss incurred.

There are crimes where I think 2B1.1(b) probably makes sense (like, if you're literally stealing, or deliberately incurring monetary damage --- remember, your intent in committing a crime is extremely important, despite a common message board belief that it is somehow unknowable and a non-factor in legal decisions). But in a lot of cases, it's literally just the induction variable in a loop, and it makes no sense to boost an offense by 10 levels because you wrote "2000" in your for-loop instead of "20".

It's 2B1.1(b) that takes you from offense level 8 (0-6 months, probation eligible) to level 24 (5 years) based on 2 million dollar of incurred loss.

Again, though: the 2 million dollar figure is highly implausible. Prosecutors could have argued for it (they can argue anything they want), but it's hard to see them getting it for a non-remunerative crime that involved publishing academic journal articles.

Swartz's attorney was probably a bit rosey-eyed here, though: figure any charged computer offense probably incurs losses at least in the mid-5 figures (almost mechanically, because real companies have insurance obligations to conduct external forensic investigations when incidents like this happen), and you get to a year and change sentence pretty easily.

Re: The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)

#90

Post by gruez » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 7:51 PM UTC

MereInterest wrote: post #87

ModernMech wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says they offered a 6 month jail time plea bargain though. It sounds like from his own writing that he was cognizant of the fact he broke the law, but didn’t agree the law should have been a law in the first place. It also sounds like he didn’t really expect there would be any consequences whatsoever. Look at this from the prosecutors point of view. They have hard evidence of a crime. They have evidence o…

A prosecutor choosing to seek a 6-month jail sentence is acceptable. A prosecutor choosing to seek a 50-year jail sentence is also acceptable. A prosecutor who is offering a 6-month jail sentence in exchange for waiving basic human rights, while threatening a 50-year jail sentence if those rights are exercised, has crossed the line into persecution. It's an analogous situation to blackmail. Suppose Alice has found ev…

>Plea bargains are a form of extortion, and should not be part of the legal system.

So you think that every case should be tried, even if it's plainly obvious the perpetrator is guilty? After all, even if the perpetrator has a 1% chance of winning, there's no reason not to go to trial under that system.