I am removing MIT as a benefactor from my will and ceasing donations to the alumni association. I will not reconsider until the institution provides a full accounting and takes responsibility for the actions of its legal counsel in deciding to refer the matter to federal authorities.
If you are a current member of the student body or faculty you have a lot more power than me. Please read about this matter and learn what your institution chose to do on your behalf and take some action fully in the spirit of MIT to reclaim what it has lost.
I just wrote an email to admissions@mit.edu indicating that I will dissuade my children from attending, and that I will bring up this matter repeatedly throughout my life to dissuade others as well. Being an "innocent bystander" is not true innocence.
I'd be interested to know what people were expecting from MIT (and would also like a public statement).
The dockets (1) suggest MIT made the poor (perhaps incidental?) decision to involve the Secret Service, at which point the evidence became part of a federal investigation.
I think the paragraph about MIT's "tepid" interest in the investigation is telling.
For what it's worth, if you're looking for another place to put your money, Aaron appreciated the work that Givewell (givewell.org) is doing. It's worth investigating how you can support them and the charities they endorse.
On what grounds? That they reported a crime, that lead to an overzealous prosecution even after JSTOR said they had no interest in pressing charges, that may or may not have been the reason, or a reason, someone took their life.
People here and in other friends are discussing what they consider a blatant misuse of the law. To my mind, attempting to sue MIT for responsibility in Swartz's death would be a similar misuse.
Yeah, in reality they probably don't have any. They referred a minor crime to an overzealous federal agency who had it in for the guy. To Godwin this thread, they would have reported Anne Frank for trespassing to the Nazis. Perfectly legal, but if they had full knowledge of what would result, perfectly immoral as well.
They will never see another dime or kind word from me, though.
This is clearly out of my purview, but why in the world would you have an institution as a beneficiary unless it's one you control? Are they really that accomplished at brainwashing people?
Not that it is any of your business but because I have no children and the education of future generations is about the most important thing there is to me. What is important to you?
Thanks for trolling me. I will try and make your contribution positive by reminding readers that if they lack a will with benefactors or executors with real world power, the state generally takes everything often ignoring legal documents you leave behind.
If you don't want people to read and comment on something, maybe don't bring it up to them, hm? It's not trolling to continue a conversation about your will that you began.
Also, shaming someone for asking a reasonable question with "I will try and make your contribution positive" seemed deliberately offensive. It's not clear to me why you lashed out at that person as though they were prying into a private matter, when you opened the discussion on it.
I would agree with your comment except that seiji used the derogatory term, "brainwash," to refer to an activity that shawn-butler clearly chose to participate in. This frames the conversation in a very negative light (it was quite unnecessary), and it's not surprising that shawn-butler's response was not entirely positive. I thought the reply showed appropriate restraint.
No intent to troll here. I was just curious, seeing as I hold my academic institution in such high contempt.
Now that you mention it, I'm not sure where I would leave any form of wealth I had. My first intuition would be needy organizations of some sort (cancer/hiv/troubled youth--and there's always hackerdojo). Intelligence finds a way. I'm not too worried about the world on that front.
I'm glad you took a few minutes to think about it. Even if you are not wealthy it helps focus on what is valuable.
Regarding your bad experience it sounds like you weren't able to make the best out of your time and maybe your school failed in some respect. I find universities valuable because they are basically reincarnated every 4 or 5 years. They exist and function as an expression of the values of the students and to a lesser extent the faculty hired in that time. I simply cannot fathom how the Institute in any incarnation that I have been involved with would set out to destroy a productive community member for something so inane. Perhaps handle it internally but to ask for a formal prosecution? Something is really broken and I hope it is brought to light before the institution fails its students further.
I find universities valuable because they are basically reincarnated every 4 or 5 years.
Ah ha! That's where we differ.
My university experience made me feel it was a huge cancerously-growing bureaucracy that doesn't really want to change. A huge bureaucracy with draconian rules whose goals were to never inconvenience any employee of the university at the expense of student time and frustration.
[[ At one point, they threatened to suspend my registration privileges because I WWW::Mechanize-automated my registration against their crappy web registration system. They kept telling me I was a horrible person for violating the "honor code" and "computer use policy" and I had no recourse but to write a lengthy letter of apology before they allowed me to register again. fun times. ]]
They kept telling me I was a horrible person for violating the "honor code" and "computer use policy" and I had no recourse but to write a lengthy letter of apology before they allowed me to register again. fun times.
I bet it would've been fun if you'd automated that, too, using a Markov chain.
Okay, poorly worded on my part. I was thinking more in line with Gates leaving everything to the Gates Foundation.
My brain can't reconcile why someone would want to donate to something that already takes money from people in return for services. Kinda like the onion half-headline: "Man Has Alarming Level Of Pride In Institution That Left Him $50,000 In Debt."
I don't know MIT's specific financial situation, but my impression was that, while tuition covers a great many things such as salaries and programs, every academic institution is dependent on generous endowments in order to pursue large capital projects and initiatives. Hence, why many stadiums are named after their donors.
Remember that some of those donations go to scholarships/etc so that there may be a reason for reciprocity. (That being said-it doesn't really seem to exist in Australia. I've never been contacted by my old university (a Gof8) and asked for donations.
There's some in Australia who do. UWA telephones & writes to me every year for donations to their Alumni fund - this year they even invited past students to a cocktail party called "A Celebration Of Giving". I don't donate anymore but did once in the past, specifically because the funds went towards scholarships.
Go dedicate a year to read about a small fraction of MIT's contributions to the world, and then post an update to your comment. We aren't talking about ITT or U of Phoenix here.
I've been thinking about the family today, and what might have caused Aaron to make such a terrible decision. One thing that caught my attention, was Lessig's comment in his post:
" ... Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge."
So - MIT brings in the Feds, the Government threaten him with 30+ years of Prison, somehow there is no way for him to appeal to the public for support for his lawsuit (which would have been very popular, I'm certain).
Does he try and look to his family to liquidate everything they have to help support his defense? Does he plead out to something that he truly believed was not wrong?
I can't even imagine how horrible this situation must have been for him, and why he couldn't see how he was going to get out of it...
What would cause an MIT IT executive (and this would have to be an executive decision) to bring in the Secret Service for someone running curl against academic journal website.
I have done precisely that type of thing dozens of times in the last 10 years, and it would have never occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong. And yes, I always had to login first through a browser, figure out how the hell the cookie was stored, export it into a format that curl liked, figure out the URLs for all the docs, etc, etc...
And yes - when I was younger and more energetic, sticking my laptop in unlocked cabinet with an open ethernet port is exactly the sort of thing I would have done, without for a second believing I was doing anything "criminal".
I have to believe that MIT has hundreds (thousands?) of these types of webscraping events occurring all the time.
What made this one different from their perspective?
He wasn't a member of the MIT Community, and was in a wiring closet.
If they'd charged him with trespassing, I would have contributed to his legal defense fund and bought him a drink when he finished his ~30 days of community service or whatever. Minimal harm, minimal foul.
I did way worse stuff from my machines at MIT when I was an undergrad. I actually was called to testify in a federal case over it, but told them to eat a bowl of dicks (well, more politely, and through the awesome attorney Jennifer Granick -- I was out of the country and didn't return until the trial was over, because you NEVER win if you set foot in a federal court, even as a witness).
MIT sold out Drink or Die, too, so fuck them in general.
Secret Service was involved prior to MIT knowing who was web-scraping JSTOR. Does MIT normally call the Secret Service when they find Laptops w/Hard Drives in wiring closets, particularly unlocked wiring closets that Homeless people were known to store their stuff in? This is all very strange.
"On January 4, MIT police officers were notified that a member of the university's technical-security staff had discovered a laptop in the wiring closet. That morning, a team including a Secret Service agent and police officers from Cambridge and Boston visited the site and installed a Webcam....JSTOR never contacted any law-enforcement authorities about the matter. The decision to pursue criminal charges, she says, was not JSTOR's."
MIT undergrads and at least one sysadmin were allegedly involved in the software releasing group DoD (who did some stuff related to DeCSS, as well as commercial scene piracy).
Course 14 (economics) machines got raided during Operation Buccaneer.
Yeah, I remember she was winding down her drunk driving practice when I first talked to her. I kind of miss the 90s -- fighting ITAR was a whole lot less depressing than fighting hollywood-funded congresspeople.
What made this one different from their perspective?
He was downloading millions of articles, well more than the rest of the campus all put together. That caught their attention.
And they kept on stopping him, by locking out his MAC addresses. And he kept on working around the ways they were stopping him.
and it would have never occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong
When you are going into a wiring closet wearing a mask over your face to hide your identity, you pretty much know you are "doing something wrong." Probably not something that necessarily warrants Federal prosecution, of course, but he was under no illusion his actions were approved.
You transposed my text a bit. The "wrong" reference was to me webscraping journals via curl.
I realize that sneaking into Wiring Closets and plugging in a laptop to get onto a privileged vlan isn't something sanctioned by the school. If I was caught, I probably would expect to get my hand slapped if I'm a student, and if I'm not a member of the community maybe even charged with trespass (though, I understand at MIT they dropped those charges)
But if I was a student, I wouldn't (and didn't) consider that behavior to be "criminal."
But what I find astonishing about the MIT case is that they pulled the secret service into the case (A) Just because someone was webscraping from a laptop and (B) Before they knew that the person doing the webscraping wasn't a student.
If it were me in charge of IT - I would have probably just asked campus security to lock the closet moving forward, make sure there are locks on all the wiring closets, and replace the laptop with a sign explaining campus-security had confiscated the laptop, and please go have a conversation with them to pick it up - return of Laptop being subject to (A) Apology for slamming JSTOR, and (B) Return of all the JSTOR IP.
Please read the indictment. It wasn't like he walked in on Monday to do this and they called the police on Tuesday. They were repeatedly trying to keep him out, and he knew it, and he kept on trying to get back in anyway. This went on for months. When they finally had a piece of physical evidence they called the Secret Service because they could get the guy. And he fled when campus police approached him.
I've read through the case - I understand what happened.
It's just that everything that was described was the type of thing that my university had to deal with all of the time. People were always spoofing MAC addresses, trying to get onto privileged VLANs, and the Campus IT was always playing Cat and Mouse with them, and, in a very, very few rare circumstances where the student did something really stupid, brought Campus Police into the conversation.
But Campus police was the absolute escalation - I don't ever recall my university calling in the RCMP (Canadian Federal Police, and municipal as well) to investigate someone doing the equivalent of what Aaron had done.
I absolutely agree with Aaron's parents. MIT and the Prosecutor over-reacted, and, when the truth of the matter surfaced, failed to course correct.
They made a choice to involve the feds. This could very easily have been handled internally, and the result would have been effective from their viewpoint. Catch him using the same methods and give him a stern talking to from campus police, then not press charges. Pretty much what happened to people bending and even openly breaking the rules on campuses around the world for decades, if not centuries.
But someone at MIT wanted to call in the feds. Make case hard and tough and send someone to prison for causing them inconvenience. This was a decision someone there made.
Yes, because someone -- they did not know who, but someone -- kept on breaking into their network. Over and over and over and over.
handled internally
He wasn't a student.
the result would have been effective from their viewpoint
They kept on telling him "no" and he kept on going in anyway. It seems you think the 13th time they told him "no" he would have stopped, when he ignored the first 12 times.
By the time you get to the police chasing someone through the halls, you have passed the point where you can expect to get away with "a stern talking to." (I shouldn't have to say it, but I will anyway: that doesn't mean that a Federal prosecution for decades in prison is the proper response, either.)
Whether or not he was a student has nothing to do with whether or not MIT could choose to handle it internally.
And yes, I do believe that being taken in by campus law enforcement and read the riot act, so to speak, would have been effective. That's much more serious than the previous attempts to tell him no.
I would appreciate it if you would stop misconstruing my position. I said that I had webscraped and didn't think it was wrong. I said as a student I would have stuck a laptop in an unlocked closet on campus with an Ethernet port and not thought that it was criminal. And, at no point, have I tried to characterize Aaron's thought and motives. Honestly - he working for higher principles than I ever have, so I am in no position to comment on his behavior, just mine.
Not everyone wants to solicit support to fight their battles. I can see why Aaron chose suicide. I wish he had fled to one of the few places in the world where American depravity couldn't effectively kill him, but I can see why he didn't.
Are we talking about the same US that tried to extradite Richard O'Dwyer over some copyright bs or nutcase Gary McKinnon? Both of them are not even US citizens, it only gets worse when you "belong" to the country that wants to put you on trial.
There are few countries that are not in bed with the US. Usually they don't feel like getting into even more diplomatic difficulties unless there is some gain for them.
Assange, for example, could've made a deal with the Kremlin - in exchange for keeping silent about Russia and friends... But he's a different category.
India would have been one possibility. We have hosted the Dalai Lama long enough.... and I would say ever since the U. S. started denying extradition of the 26/11 suspects, they wouldn't have had a lot of friends in the establishment here.
Accused of a crime thought so horrific it warrants 30 years in prison, I doubt that. The US has grabbed people on the other side of the world for lesser charges.
This was prosecutorial overreach. It was probably not in their short list of major issues, and thus I don't think they would have devoted huge resources to it.
Which makes this whole thing even sadder. It's entirely possible his (great) IP law firm could have gotten him off, or at least ended up with a brief or suspended sentence. Even though worst case he was facing 50 years, it would have almost certainly been far less. But I am sure he was depressed and so involved in it that he wasn't thinking about it rationally.
> It's entirely possible his (great) IP law firm could have gotten him off, or at least ended up with a brief or suspended sentence.
That is possible. But what life would he have then, with $1.5 million of debt? If not for my kids I'd probably jump off a cliff myself than work a lifetime paying that off.
I think he had some assets from Reddit, as well as some of the work being pro bono, and contributions.
Killing yourself over $1.5mm in debt is not rational. You can default on it and go bankrupt and be back to normal in 7-10 years. You can get most of it written off. You can do consulting for 5-10 years and live slightly frugally and probably pay enough of it off to have the rest written off. You can start 1/1000th of a kind-of-shitty photo sharing site. You can flee to China, start over, and no one will pursue you.
They basically don't expect you to put 100% of your income toward fines, back taxes, etc. even if it's to the Government (and hence can't be discharged in bankruptcy). In that case, you just live on 25-50k post-tax and either hide a bunch of cash income while making small payments, or find benefactors who cover most of your costs and work on free software or something.
We essentially ended debtors prisons a long time ago.
35 years in federal prison might actually be a case for killing yourself (although I'd just read a lot of books and be the hacker Mumia Abu-Jamal, and hopefully get out on appeal).
I can't say I've been depressed—I'm not qualified to diagnose that. I can say I've felt so hopeless I've made an attempt on my own life. Thankfully, it was a pretty lame attempt (after a lot of alcohol) that I aborted, leaving only a ring around my neck as evidence. I failed to even send myself to the hospital.
It's more than hopelessness. Life felt like an unbearable burden, a source of pain that would never end… until I ended it.
My life wasn't actually hopeless. My problems weren't as bad as they seemed—literally the day after this began the best two or three years of my adult life.
Had I been more competent, or maybe just more committed, I wouldn't have been around for that to happen. And there's no way you could've talked me into believing I'd appreciate living to see tomorrow—the very problem was I believed my life would be more of the same until I died, and I welcomed death over what I thought life had in store for me.
This story cuts deep for me because I survived and this man who's contributed so much more to society than I have didn't make it. It also cuts deep because I fear going back to that place, and seeing another man fall makes me fear a little for my own life. I've done my research since: if I try again, I'm convinced I'll succeed.
I'm among the most rational people I know. My own family thinks I'm just about incapable of emotion. Yet I've struggled with this.
People aren't rational. Not even the rational ones.
If it's a purely economic or "political" crime, I think it's a lot easier to deal with. I mean, even if you accept that Aaron did all these things and that they were crimes, there's nothing morally repugnant about it.
The worse thing is if you're accused of a morally repugnant crime. Say, rape, or child molestation, or maybe some kind of betrayal of trust (like embezzling), or even not a crime but something like snitching on a close friend over an immoral law and sending Anne Frank to the Nazis. Then, there's both all the moral scorn from other people and from yourself -- just the accusation is hurtful, even if you know at some level it's false.
If you could simply file bankruptcy then most everyone in that situation would do that. Presumably the lawyers are on to that strategy and mitigate around it.
You could be right that $1.5 million in debt is not worth killing oneself, but not everyone will take it that way. It would be a major drag on your life in any case. It would be difficult for all but the strongest people to go on enjoying life.
I can understand a US Attorney being reckless, but I cannot believe MIT would act so cowardly. If not even hacker-friendly institutions like MIT will side with people like Aaron, it's a sad state of affairs.
I'm reminded of the time MIT threw Star Simpson under a bus when she wore a breadboard on a sweatshirt to Logan Airport and the local authorities freaked:
I think "EFF and the students involved handled it well, and MIT didn't do anything egregiously wrong." MIT didn't provide any legal assistance; that was all EFF.
Did he really leave? His office is in the Stata center at MIT. I thought he was still an unpaid "research associate" at MIT. Is that no longer correct?
Stallman stopped taking a salary from MIT so that MIT would have no claim of ownership of GNU. He continued (continues?) to keep on office on the campus, referring to himself as a "squatter".
There was a big shift in the 70s and 80s to a bigger administration and to administrators who were "professional university administrators" (BU/random liberal arts alumni with a mssters in admin), vs. students/alumni/faculty.
This was a product of a greater "in loco parentis" and services available for students, as well as bigger government grants (requiring more admins on that side)
It correlated with the downfall of MIT as an amazing place, outside bio/biotech. It would not be my first choice of CS school today (Stanford by a mile, then CMU, then maybe a few others including Waterloo), or science (Caltech). For computer security, I'd probably say Cambridge (UK), maybe Stanford, maybe Technion, and a few others.
In loco parentis wasn't the problem. There was a time when the MIT president would bail students out of jail in loco parentis. The rest of your comment is on target though.
He's being hyperbolic; MIT is still a very friendly hacker school. Aaron DID break the law, and I would not expect ANY school to stand behind him when he blatantly violated the law. It's pretty simple: don't break the law, much less using MIT resources to do so.
That said, they could have handled it with a lot more finesse, especially when it is such horrible publicity for them. I suspect this has more to do with eager lawyers than it does MIT's culture.
Keep in mind that MIT is an academic organization and is committed to, well, academics, not politics; e.g. Stallman did not belong there anyway.
> MIT is an academic organization and is committed to, well, academics, not politics
Politics is too important to be left to politicians. If you refuse to take control over your environment, you cannot expect it to remain friendly to you, for you are no longer a force shaping it. Academics is politics.
Yeah, what do academics have to say about law, government, management, or medicine, anyway? These important fields should be left to professionals, why are schools sticking their noses in?
> Yeah, what do academics have to say about law, government, management, or medicine, anyway? These important fields should be left to professionals, why are schools sticking their noses in?
You misunderstand me. Of course, you are correct, but it's not the role of the school to be political, but instead to inform their students on how to be political. When people choose a school to go to, it should be about their academics and should not be swayed by politics. (Of course, politics always creeps in, which is why I'm never going to give one of my alma maters and money.)
I don't think that I've ever seen anything like this (the sheer number of submissions related to one event) on HN before. I, like most others, follow the tussle between those who desire a world where the barrier to access information is lower and those who want to copyright, lock up and monetize all the information that we generate.
Most of the time I feel that it is like a high tech soap opera but this events brings it home to me that alarmingly the stakes can be very high and that the weight of the collective system can crush any one individual. Is this naive of me but would it be possible to set up some kind of fund or foundation that could provide real monetary support to help those that are a braver than the rest of us when they confront the system and as a result get overwhelmed.
"Is this naive of me but would it be possible to set up some kind of fund or foundation that could provide real monetary support to help those that are a braver than the rest of us when they confront the system and as a result get overwhelmed."
I think the EFF would be pretty close to this already.
I am only vaguely familiar with Aaron Swartz, so the magnitude of the response on this site surprised me and reminds me of the HN front page when Steve Jobs died: http://www.waybackletter.com/archive/20111005.html
It's rather presumptuous for you to speak on behalf of everybody. I would consider them both "one of us", though I prefer to leave "us" vs. "them" labels to religious, political, and sports nuts.
Aaron was part of HackerNews, he posted and answered
and Reddit was a company in the first batch of YCombinator founded companies and Aaron was one of the partners.
In that sense he was "one of us"... the HackerNews community
By "one of us" I mean a part of our community (Hacker news in particular, and the internet hacker/programmer community at large), and I am referring to his involvement in Y Combinator.
I think it is actually not a good thing that a suicide leads to this much attention. it might encourage others to choose death to be turned into martyrs. same as the coverage from school homicides.
Beware would be activists of the forces you put to your axe.
Like the tip of an iceberg, their great heft can remain unseen.
These machinations have no appreciation for hacks.
Even lawful men have much to fear from their vision keen.
The unlucky must contend with a 13 stringed marionette.
Whose deadly snare targets all free men.
Probing at the six lines in every hearts quartet.
The song it plays is fell indeed.
Moments of silence won't bring this man back.
But we can rally as our thoughts are often not thought alone. [0]
We can repel the forces who's wishes for the public domain is to sack.
We can refuse to reap for us what others have sewn.
Don't falter at the sight of a martyers fall.
There is always work to be done with one less hand at the helm.
Stand up and shout, silence strangles us all!
Strangled, by this intellectual miasma that seeks to consume our world with hell.
And though this life has been bought,
full speed ahead! Eight knots!
[0]: In the interest of honesty, I don't feel like I'm doing enough.
Without any disrepect to Aaron's memory (very sad news), no.
Interested to hear what reminded you, but Turing committed suicide based on an unjust persecution of a minority by society as a whole. While Aaron's situation also involved injustice, I hadn't (and probably wouldn't) link the two.
Did you not feel like his death was the result of authority pushing a him into a corner? Wasn't Turing persecuted by authority as well? Two brilliant tech minds lost before their time.
Aaron was accomplished, but Turing far overshadowed. Turing was forced or compelled to take synthetic estrogen because he was gay as well as being convicted and stripped of his security clearance. The hormone replacement could be seen as rather more directly responsible for his suicide than the still relevant stresses of overzealous prosecution.
This is the state of America, a kid with a laptop will go to jail for 30 + years and a banker cunt that stole billions or laundered billions for drug cartels gets nothing.
Being a chronic depressed and chronic pain sufferer, I wonder how much problems like these contributed to him killing himself. I think about killing myself everyday. I haven't done it yet because I am a devout Catholic and I believe I can be in a worst place (or better) after death.
Perhaps someone could explain or confirm how anyone really knows that this is actually the "official" statement of the family and partners of Aaron. I understand that this was linked to in some major media, but I can find any way of determining that by the page itself or in any of the stories linking to it. There isn't any contact info and the domain name (which redirects there) was registered by this person:
Domain name: rememberaaronsw.com
Registrant Contact:
Brian Guthrie ()
179 Stockwell Dr
Mountain View, CA 94043
US
As I've mentioned in a comment elsewhere it seems odd to me that all these people got together and got this up so quickly after such a shocking event.
Here is one of the stories linked to it that doesn't verify the source:
I was a colleague of Aaron's at ThoughtWorks (he joined early last year), and, I hope, a friend. We're devastated by his loss. For a history of the work he was doing over the last year, check https://github.com/victorykit/victorykit.
We're in close contact with Aaron's family and partner Taren. You can take my word for it or not, I guess, but the site and the statement are official.
Thank you Brian, for all you're doing in what must be incredibly hard times. I can't begin to express how this all makes me feel, it will take weeks to sort it all out I'm still too stunned to properly react. What a terrible loss. I have a short list of people that I think I've identified that will change the world in a material way, Aaron was at the top of that list. The fact that we persecute such people rather than give them the benefit of the doubt and encourage them to right what is obviously wrong is what bothers me most, the one thing that stands out for me about Aaron at the moment is that he consistently came down on the right side of any argument.
It would be gracious of you if you stopped questioning each and every bit about this story that doesn't mesh with your paranoid fantasies. What would it take for you to be satisfied? Birth certificates? Passport copies?
Take it for what it is or prove that it isn't until you have proof that it is not have the good grace to be quiet and let these people grieve without adding insult to injury.
Sorry but I stand behind what I said which brings up a realistic question given the way the information was presented and that lack of contact info (at the time I viewed the page). You can choose to be trusting and you could very well be correct. I'm just asking a question.
At the risk of antagonizing an upset crowd - to me, no, he wasn't.
A hero is someone admired for courage and/or other noble qualities.
It's also a word greatly overused in culture today.
Swartz was accomplished, certainly. Though to me "co-founded the website reddit.com, co-wrote one of many specifications for syndicating content and repeatedly hacked and trespassed to download content to which he was not authorized" does not a hero make.
I agree with GP, even after having read that. It is okay for people to have different definitions of "hero", without one of them having to be a fool.
In a way it hits home even more, because it shows how any poor sap not unlike myself can be steamrolled by the justice system. I've probably done "worse", or at least comparable things.
Weev is about to go to jail for something equally preposterous.
I think it's the height of arrogance to tell someone they are a fool for having a different perspective of heroism from yours.
I read that article and see some very worthwhile beliefs and endeavors, though beyond contributions to fighting SOPA, I'm not sure what I didn't "know about".
So yes, I'll stand by my belief that I don't see anything particularly 'heroic' there. Which isn't to say he didn't make many valuable contributions to things.
All right, you're being a bit pompous. You imply that someone is ignoble for technically breaking a law. In the same way would you condemn Rosa Parks? Even if you don't agree with the cause, to dismiss so rashly is a bit childish and pedantic. You could say he was naive but to say someone that had no profit driven motive and only sought to make information free for the people that actually paid for that information, tax payers, is somehow of low character is just kind of ridiculous.
I don't know what to say anymore. It really saddens me to see such a great person ending his life. I can imagine the amount of stress he was going through..RIP..
One sort of reform many have not discussed, or I have not seen, is in changing the way federal prosecutors pursue cases and sentencing. Very, very few federal cases ever go to trial because of obscenely long prison sentences. The defendant in federal cases is at such a disadvantage.
If we use the death of this great person to do what we want, there is no different between we and the BAD people. Justice will be served. At this moment, I think we should just wish Aaron Swartz R.I.P..
No. Every post with a tumblr.com link gets automatically banned.
A week ago I posted something to a subreddit I've founded and it got banned. This spam filter isn't even allowing moderators to post these links. But I was allowed to unban it.
So, I wrote to the moderators of /r/technology a few minutes ago and instead of unbanning it they said that tumblr.com is banned reddit wide. No, he hasn't unbanned the link. :-(
Fortunately or not, there are whole sections of Reddit devoted more or less to quickmeme.com. Some subreddits auto-ban quickmeme which I highly encourage, but a sitewide ban is unreasonable because of how engrained it is in the culture.
Image captioning is, in our opinion, a bit worthless, but this is what we actually find objectionable not just one site of many which provides this.
Blogging itself is not what is objectionable just the general quality of the content from Tumblr, so comparing quickmeme to tumblr is unfair.
"Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death...The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims."
It's nothing personal, just business. They use these cases to run for higher office by "being tough on crime" and other nauseating BS.
If you are a current member of the student body or faculty you have a lot more power than me. Please read about this matter and learn what your institution chose to do on your behalf and take some action fully in the spirit of MIT to reclaim what it has lost.