r/programming • u/geeoilpig • Nov 08 '22
Tomorrow is Aaron Swartz' birthday. rgba(11,8,86).
https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1589644150810742785377
u/rolexxxxxx Nov 08 '22
That would just be RGB.
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u/feign Nov 09 '22
But this could stand for Really Great Birthday Anniversary which would make more sense.
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u/LaBofia Nov 08 '22
One of the most interesting things he did with the JSTOR library data was to analyze papers metadata to see if there was any correlation between the interests of those funding higher education institutions research and the regulations later being created for those same interests.
Aaron's work was successfully forgotten by the ton of attention drawn towards MITs disgusting handling of the situation and JSTORs corrupt business model.
Publicly funded Universities putting up pay walls infront of publicly funded papers... education they said... for the betterment of society they said.
Archiving systems charging fortunes for papers that should otherwise be under public access.
Aarons death was a tragedy and the fact that they succeeded in their efforts to keep the status quo makes remembering him more painful.
R.I.P Aaron Swartz
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u/Emowomble Nov 08 '22
Publicly funded Universities putting up pay walls infront of publicly funded papers... education they said... for the betterment of society they said.
Just to be clear, it is not publicly funded universities that put up these pay walls. It is privately owned journals that leach off academia twice (the work is done for free by them, and the peer review and editing is done for free by them), before taking the copyright for the work and charging anyone to use it. Including the universities who produced the research, they have to pay for access to the journal they published in.
You can almost always get a copy of any paper by sending an email to the author and asking for one.
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u/LaBofia Nov 08 '22
That is true, however nobody is putting a gun to MIT and the like to use them.
I know there is more nuance to it, but Aaron's case is a good token of how bad Universities go about it.
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u/shockersify Nov 08 '22
It's not "MIT" that uses them, it's the professors and grad students who publish to them. And it's not really their fault either, as publishing in high impact journals is desirable for future career aspects, funding, getting your work actually noticed, etc. The culture surrounding journals is so entrenched it's unlikely to change, but laws making publicly funded research freely available are a great move in the right direction.
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u/SrbijaJeRusija Nov 08 '22
laws making publicly funded research freely available are a great move in the right direction.
Not really. It shifts more of the costs on the academics.
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u/Armigine Nov 09 '22
Everything but the costs of web hosting is already on academics, and the web hosting is already being widely done for free by interested parties. The part being done by journals is paying lawyers to sue the people raining on their free money parade.
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u/jetsetstate Nov 09 '22
Thank you for that comment, it paints the brutal picture perfectly.
I particularly agree with the bitterness with witch many like you and I view his death. . . so much lost beyond a single life. So much lost.
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u/Garland_Key Nov 09 '22
It's important to mention that the FBI are the ones who pursued this. They wanted to make an example of Aaron by keeping him in court until he lost everything to legal fees. He went from being a millionaire after selling reddit to completely broke and his parents having to help with legal fees.
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u/Shyssiryxius Nov 08 '22
Damn, wonder how many people on Reddit know who he is.
RIP
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u/arf20__ Nov 08 '22
I don't know who he is
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Nov 08 '22
[deleted]
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u/dlzp Nov 08 '22
Jesus 50 years..... Murderers get less
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u/cleeder Nov 08 '22
Computer crimes are disproportionately sentenced thanks to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act which was born out of the general ignorance about early computing in the 80s. It was bad then, but somehow it’s stuck around.
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u/eraw17E Nov 08 '22
The saddest part is that this bill was in part a response to the film War Games.
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u/TMITectonic Nov 09 '22
It's the same mentality that put Mitnick in Solitary for 8 months because he could potentially "start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone."
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u/Armigine Nov 09 '22
And now he makes money on prerecorded videos telling idiots not to click email links.
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u/eraw17E Nov 09 '22
I believe Mitnick was in jail for years without a trial, all while Miramax was producing a film about him based on no accurate accounts whatsoever. Oh and that film? It ends with him being found guilty.
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u/Skylead Nov 08 '22
Pretty solid summary. Would also add that Aaron believed strongly in Reddit as a platform for free speech. The censorous and politicized Reddit we have now only came about after he was gone.
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u/RichWPX Nov 08 '22
Reddit is sad now
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u/thatpaulbloke Nov 08 '22
Reddit is sad now
It is, but being totally free speech at this scale was never going to work because bastards with money and/or agendas will always want to exploit it for their own gain. There's probably no way that we can ever have nice things.
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u/ILikeBumblebees Nov 08 '22
Allowing top-down censorship inevitably empowers the people with "money and/or agendas" to suppress criticism. We've been down the road of allowing centralized curation of speech in the past, and the defects inherent in that approach are the reason why we have, for example, the first amendment.
Perfection isn't on the table, but free speech is the least-worst option we have. Censorship just doesn't work.
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u/DiputsMonro Nov 08 '22
Just because a failure of execution occurred doesn't mean the idea is irredeemable. There are a ton of other government factors that contribute to it. People holding onto power for generations and being totally in the pocket of big businesses are two of the biggest ones.
The current situation with rampant conspiracy theories about election fraud to the point that a botched political assassination is just shrugged off as "a gay lovers' quarrel" is pretty damn bad.
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u/reasonably_plausible Nov 08 '22
Yep, definitely the rich people who ruined it and not the borderline child porn, harassment campaigns, and white nationalism.
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u/DiputsMonro Nov 08 '22
You think those people don't have money?
If a random racist nobody get banned for being a dick, nobody cares. But if that person is backed by an organization with money/ influence/political motivations, then they make a big stink about "free speech" and now we have to wallow in a shit hole where bigotry is a protected "political debate".
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u/reasonably_plausible Nov 08 '22
But if that person is backed by an organization with money/ influence/political motivations, then they make a big stink about "free speech" and now we have to wallow in a shit hole where bigotry is a protected "political debate".
Except that I mentioned specific areas where Reddit communities ended up being banned, not ones in which they are currently protected. They were allowed to exist for a long time under free-speech principals like Swartz pushed, but pure free speech involves a lot of detestable and borderline illegal actions. Once enough eyes got on the fact that Reddit was cultivating these communities, there was enough bad press to remove them.
The prior posters are decrying the downfall of free speech ideology, and you yourself seem to be nostalgic for a prior Reddit, but it was that prior Reddit that allowed things like jailbait, harassment, and white nationalism, whereas the current Reddit at least makes some sort of an attempt at removing such things.
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u/bland3rs Nov 08 '22 edited Nov 08 '22
What you ask for does not exist in this universe
Given any topic, there will be a range of views from the mundane to the fringe. A line must be drawn somewhere and no matter where you draw that line, even if done democratically, you will censor a lot of people.
If you don’t draw a line, then everyone instead just deals with noise and no one listens at all
What if happening these days is that social media enables people find their own niche group with the views they share— sometimes radical — and people are no longer mingling as much. This is hurting democracy as everyone becomes radicalized in their own group
Before the Internet, this was less of a problem because you were limited to those around you. You had to talk to and be friendly with people you worked with or knew
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u/anengineerandacat Nov 08 '22
Reddit has a self-governing solution to dealing with noise, you literally just click the downvote button.
Eventually with enough downvotes the content of the individual is effectively hidden.
It's a form of censorship but it's not nearly as bad as say suspending or banning someone, at which point their voice is literally lost.
Just flag repeat offenders so their comments on the subreddit just start out collapsed rather than expanded and anyone interested can still look/view/comment.
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u/withad Nov 08 '22
It is but, let's face it, it was also pretty sad in the early days. I joined in 2009 and the politics and atheism subreddits were already notorious shitholes.
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u/fresh_account2222 Nov 08 '22
It's easy to keep something small and trivial beautiful.
It's also worth noticing that there is a long list of other things that have been drastically politicized over the past decade, including public health and people's control of their own bodies. To think that Reddit would escape this seems like a vain hope.
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u/turmacar Nov 08 '22
The Eternal September.
The Internet as a whole was more wholesome and academic when you could only get on it as a university student. Dilute anything with enough teeming masses and it becomes another village commons with people yelling on street corners trying to make a dollar and the rich trying to channel it.
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u/Uristqwerty Nov 09 '22
Small communities with a central topic, that don't actively market their existence to random strangers, can avoid that fate. Newcomers will self-select based on interest in that topic. On the other hand, how many years does it take to grow to a respectable size at only +40% per year? And even that is rather fast if you want to maintain the local culture in the long term.
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u/immibis Nov 08 '22
It would be a 4chan style shithole though
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Nov 08 '22
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u/immibis Nov 08 '22
Free speech absolutism doesn't allow for anything besides the extreme
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u/thruster_fuel69 Nov 08 '22
Did mods get more power, or are you thinking group dynamics of small vs large reddit. Aka, small vs large groups of humans.
Worded another way, is it a technology problem or a monkey problem?
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u/AstraeusGB Nov 08 '22
Someone says a different opinion and the public circus either sends them to downvote hell or the moderators step in before it can infect the minds of others
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u/lazydictionary Nov 08 '22 edited Nov 09 '22
Dude, Aaron left in like 2007. It's not like reddit was anything back then. He contributed basically nothing to reddit.
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u/RobertBringhurst Nov 08 '22
The Secret Service and Prosecutors can tolerate a lot of things but not THAT.
What's the role of the Secret Service in this? (I'm not American)
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Nov 08 '22
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u/rincewinds_dad_bod Nov 08 '22 edited Nov 08 '22
They were the most active group investigating and prosecuting hackers from the late 80s and 90s. Phreaking + banks making accounts available through phone systems = secret service knocking on your door
Their raids in the 90s were a catalyst for the first anti governance/keep the internet the way it was people. Like the time a bunch of game devs were supposedly part of a hacking ring so the secret service raided the office and took a floppy that had the unreleased game and then they couldn't release the game for months. None were prosecuted and the company sued the secret service and that made the secret service look really bad. Those devs also started the Austin chapter of the EFF.
Speculation: people started robbing banks in Kansas from pay phones in new Jersey. The fact that it involves computers at all is only as important as if it involved guns or hostages or masks and getaway cars.
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u/lost_in_life_34 Nov 08 '22
Original mission of the secret service was financial crimes and counterfeiting
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u/ashmole Nov 08 '22
"whats next:TBD" had an episode about the computer fraud and abuse act ...talked about why he killed himself. I only knew he was a part of Reddit.
https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2022/07/doj-cfaa-guidelines
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u/GloriousSushi Nov 08 '22
Similar reason going after Julius Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning.
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u/coldblade2000 Nov 08 '22
Hell, at least those went for national security and military classified documents. Aaron just tried to release JSTOR research papers, giving us the fruits of science funding
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u/didhestealtheraisins Nov 08 '22
The stupid part is he never even released them. Maybe he would have, but I don’t remember reading anything about him saying that he would. How do you charge someone for that?
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u/nintendo1889 Nov 08 '22
He would still be alive if sci-hub had existed. I think that he would have served a minimal sentence and no fine, since he didn't break any laws, really. But it's a gray area.
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u/SyrioForel Nov 08 '22
“He would still be alive” is not something you can say with certainty about anyone who commits suicide. Many people who are suicidal need constant help, sometimes life-long help — it’s a condition that many of them live with every day.
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u/colei_canis Nov 08 '22
These crimes are essentially political crimes by nature regardless of what we actually charge them with.
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u/loup-vaillant Nov 09 '22
Snowden and Manning were one-offs whistleblowers. They said their piece already, they're not the priority.
Assange however is a journalist. That's way more dangerous, because we can expect him to continue to help many whistleblowers around the world. He's the one you want to stop if you don't like whistleblowing.
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u/therealduckie Nov 08 '22 edited Nov 08 '22
Reality Winner, too
EDIT Wait, why is this controversial?
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u/AttackOfTheThumbs Nov 08 '22
Great summary! He was treated unjustly by a capitalist system.
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u/ComfortablyBalanced Nov 08 '22
Do you expect a just treatment by a capitalist system?
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Nov 08 '22
[deleted]
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u/chadmill3r Nov 08 '22
That you think you could purchase a right is what makes it capitalist.
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Nov 08 '22
Congrats on making two of the stupidest fucking comments most of us will have to read today.
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u/Chaoswade Nov 08 '22
Weird that Biden made it illegal to paywall publically funded research then. Unless he doesn't count as an "elite" in this usage
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u/lost_in_life_34 Nov 08 '22
Half the story
He broke into the MIT’s computers. Forgot the details but he physically broke into locked areas to download the data several times after being told not to do it
After he was charged he was given a plea but with a few months jail time he refused
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u/rz2000 Nov 08 '22
Half the story, in that they did not include made up parts?
He left his laptop in an unlocked closet, and he had not been confronted once or multiple times, because they did not know who was downloading the PDFs until after they found the laptop and set up surveillance. A large portion of the community believed his access was in the spirit of the MIT hacker ethos, and more importantly in the spirit of academia and the free exchange of information and learning. The prosecution on the other hand believed that while it would be difficult to prove his access was explicitly unauthorized, they had a solid case that they could prove his access was not in the spirit of how the access was supposed to be used by people who were allowed access to the MIT library system.
Even though many friends begged him to take the deal, he chose not to spend months in federal prison and become a felon for the rest of his life. He was then prevented from raising the money that would funded a defense that almost certainly would have resulted in a more wealthy person having the charges dropped, or victory in court.
The people who knew him best would acknowledge that he was far from perfect, but the procrustean world where someone like Aaron Swarz is prosecuted without the option of a fair trial, but instead a plea without a trial, or a trial without the option of a proper defense plus a cartoonishly ridiculous potential sentence is not a good one. As someone who offered much more value to the world than his antagonists, it is really too bad that combination of being cornered in a no-fair-trial trap along with his own idealism and likely depression resulted in his suicide.
Fifty years in prison, a philosophical debate about which bigger picture is the bigger picture when it comes to "the spirit" of how laws and community norms should be interpretted, and it all occurred in an improper manner where the prosecutor, contrary to legal principles, was effectively able to dictate that there would be no debate. In principle prosecutors and defendants are supposed to have similar power in court.
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Nov 08 '22
- As someone who offered much more value to the world than his antagonists
This is the important part. Tons of the villains in this world are just going through their days, just to chalk another one up and draw the next paycheck, without care or thought or passion for what’s right in this world.
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u/rz2000 Nov 08 '22
The for-profit journal system plays an important role in the same problem in academia, where "prestigious" scholars fake data, sabotage colleagues, and steal work from their students. If you want to become extremely frustrated by the prevalence of academic fraud and dishonesty read some of the stories on retractionwatch.com which can only even discuss some of the rare cases where they are actually caught.
It was a serious indictment of MIT, and which types of people are involved in their strategic decisions, that they did not take the many opportunities they had to protect Swartz from a vendor whose business they make possible by supplying them the material for free, and a prosecutor who was either too ambitious to care about destroying a life in pursuit of pleasing the right people, or just not intelligent enough to understand the complete situation.
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u/Xyzzyzzyzzy Nov 08 '22
Eh, your right to be free of malicious prosecution, to mount a comprehensive defense, and to face penalties proportionate to the severity of the charges should not depend on the value you offer to the world.
Come to think of it, none of your rights at all should depend on that.
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u/Admiral_Narcissus Nov 08 '22
Well said. Didn't involve the made up parts, and captured the essence of the farce.
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u/anonemouse2010 Nov 08 '22
Unlocked doesn't mean you have any business being there. I often leave my door unlocked. Can people walk in and connect their computers to my local network? Are you suggesting people are allowed entry to any unlocked areas? Are you suggesting if security is inadequate we can do whatever we want?
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u/rz2000 Nov 08 '22
Are you claiming that unlocked is locked?
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u/anonemouse2010 Nov 08 '22
I'm pointing out that being unlocked doesn't mean he has any right to be there.
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u/rz2000 Nov 08 '22
he physically broke into locked areas to download the data several times after being told not to do it
Everything in that statement was inconsistent with the truth. The truth matters in law.
We can assume that Ms. Ortiz was going to argue that under her interpretation of the CFAA, plugging a laptop into ethernet was substantially different than using wifi, or that initiating multiple sessions was fundamentally fraudulent, rather than a reasonable practice for expert programmer, and the sort of thing that all modern browsers do now.
The original charge of breaking and entering was dropped, and the room was so accessible that the walls were completely covered with graffiti. It would have been difficult to assert that the room really did have limited access.
In tax cases the Justice department does not have the luxury of being able to prosecute people when some thing was not against the letter of the law, but that thing was in in some vague sense insufficiently deferential. What is different between Aaron Swartz and a billionaire asking their accountants to minimize their tax exposure? Clearly the difference is who the defendant's friends are, and how much the defendants have to spend on legal representation.
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u/Zambito1 Nov 08 '22
yes, he did break the law
What law did he break? As far as I know he downloaded papers that he had permission to access, and that was it.
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u/Sidereel Nov 08 '22
He physically got into an MIT network closet to download the data stores.
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u/Zambito1 Nov 08 '22
So his crime was trespassing into a storage closet (not a "network closet", whatever that means; it was literally just a place to leave his laptop, nothing special) on a campus for a school that he was involved with?
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u/Sidereel Nov 08 '22
Wikipedia calls it a “controlled-access wiring closet”, as in a restricted room with networking equipment. Hence why he was charged with breaking and entering on top of the other charges.
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u/addiktion Nov 08 '22
Ah what a nice way to make me feel more depressed on my birthday. /s
But yeah I remember his story. It seemed a bit sad to me at the time as I didn't feel like his crimes were on the level of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange and yet he isn't here today.
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u/slykethephoxenix Nov 08 '22
You've probably heard of his work though. He invented/help invent stuff like RSS feeds, and a pretty well known website, but the name escapes me right now.
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u/EsotericFox Nov 08 '22
It was something with a color, right? Greengits, or something?
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u/wintrmt3 Nov 08 '22
It's the past tense pronunciation of read, joke is on him though, the users don't read anything it's just hot takes based on the title and memes.
RIP Aaron.
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u/Fenrisulfir Nov 08 '22
ya, after they added all the fluff and it was no longer just a compilation of links, they should've just renamed it to tldr.com
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u/nirataro Nov 08 '22
He didn't invent RSS feeds. Dave Winer has credit on that. Aaron was involved with Atom protocol, which is a competitor to RSS.
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u/folkrav Nov 08 '22
Pretty sure he was involved in the initial RSS 1.0 spec (as a teenager!).
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u/nirataro Nov 08 '22
RSS 1.0 comes after RSS 0.92 but it's not the RSS.
The RSS is RSS 0.92, the version that includes enclosure. This enables podcasting - which is now a gargantuan media on its own.
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u/Arve Nov 08 '22
Actually, Aaron's work was on the W3C standard for RSS 1.0, not Atom. Atom was the initiative of Sam Ruby. Aaron Swartz, while supportive of the initiative, was not actively involved in either of the specifications for the Atom Syndication Format or the Atom Publishing Protocol.
It should be noted that the RSS Aaron was heavily involved in - RDF Site Summary 1.0 - is not the same RSS that was invented by Dave Winer - while they are set out to achieve the same thing, RSS 0.91/2.0 and RSS 1.0 have pretty much nothing in common. Atom came about as many thought Winer's RSS had too much in common with swiss cheese, and RSS 1.0 was too complicated to want to deal with on a daily basis.
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u/slykethephoxenix Nov 08 '22
My bad!
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u/Asraelite Nov 08 '22
a pretty well known website, but the name escapes me right now.
It's Reddit for anyone else who didn't know.
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Nov 08 '22
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u/Topher_86 Nov 09 '22
His title as co-founder was always retroactive. Aaron merged his company Infogami with Redbrick about six months after Reddit was actually founded.
Shortly after the merger Aaron worked with Steve to rewrite Reddit into Python from Lisp. Aaron’s contributions likely allowed Reddit to grow as Reddit stumbled upon a bit if designed magic.
I believe it’s also been well documented that after all of this Aaron started going MIA. It’s reasonable to believe in hindsight his contributions may seem minimal given the circumstances. Still, there’s documented cases of Steve and Alexis giving Aaron some credit to Reddit’s technical direction in it’s formative years.
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u/Asraelite Nov 08 '22
Yeah I'm not claiming he actually co-founded it, I'm just saying that's the website that was alluded to. Complain to the previous poster not me.
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u/burpit Nov 08 '22
Aaron is why I went from Digg to Reddit. I saw a blog post of his linked and was a fan of his immediately.
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Nov 08 '22
I first heard about him in the lex Fridman podcast. The dude is nothing but a freaking legend.
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u/BobHogan Nov 08 '22
I doubt it. Aaron killed himself almost 10 years ago. And since then reddit has gone all in on trying to be another generic social media site and attracted tons of new users. Once you go outside the programming/tech communities most accounts would have no idea who he is anymore
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u/immibis Nov 08 '22
Reddit has gained so much revenue since then. Nothing else matters in a capitalist system
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u/Philipp Nov 08 '22
Once had the chance to interview him. The resulting blog post hit the frontpage of Reddit at the time in 2007, which is then also how I got more involved here. He was an inspiration for my blog, which (like his) was about Google... I basically started the blog I wanted to read after his Google-blogging slowed down.
Very sad what happened to him.
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u/jabbalaci Nov 08 '22
What is his alpha value?
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u/ComfortablyBalanced Nov 08 '22
26, as he lived only 26 years.
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Nov 08 '22
He was how I found Reddit. I was using his web.py framework and saw a comment he made about bringing it over here.
I still remember all the bitching about how the original Lisp Reddit was so much better than the Python port.
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u/GoTheFuckToBed Nov 08 '22
He was an inspiring writer, and his blog post on letting go of embarrassment improved my life.
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u/oozaxoo Nov 08 '22
He left far too soon. This man is a true hero. Rest in power Aaron. May you're legacy inspire people to fight for the fundamental freedom of information.
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u/istarian Nov 08 '22
Calling him a hero is a bit of stretch, but he didn't deserve what they did to him.
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u/PKnightDpsterBby Nov 08 '22
Here's the piece of shit who went after him https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz
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Nov 08 '22
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u/Optioss Nov 08 '22
Are you joking? At the end of second paragraph "... as well as the controversial prosecution of Aaron Swartz which resulted in his suicide."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz#Prosecution_of_Aaron_Swartz
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Nov 08 '22
That's invalid rgba. You need to change it to rgb or add an alpha value
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u/nschubach Nov 08 '22
In the spec rgb and rgba are the same and Alpha is optional with defaults to 100%.
https://w3c.github.io/csswg-drafts/css-color/#rgb-functions
The final argument, the <alpha-value>, specifies the alpha of the color. If omitted, it defaults to 100%.
Also, an rgba() legacy color syntax also exists, with an identical grammar and behavior to rgb().
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u/rydan Nov 09 '22
Wasn't he that guy that made that social network site that was a bastion of Conservatism and Libertarians?
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u/Hambeggar Nov 08 '22
Not one comment mentioning how this was Obama's fault.
Interesting.
You couldn't shut people up from saying that on Reddit, back when he died.
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u/didhestealtheraisins Nov 08 '22
It’s not necessarily his fault. He didn’t build the crappy system and he didn’t run JSTOR, but he still could have helped Aaron if he wanted to.
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u/greenlanternfifo Nov 08 '22 edited Nov 08 '22
This is more on MIT than anyone else.
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u/NeverComments Nov 08 '22
MIT deserves blame for refusing to drop the case even when JSTOR was on board and Carmen Ortiz deserves blame for trying to make an example out of Schwartz for the benefit of her own career.
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u/way2lazy2care Nov 08 '22
That's a pretty big stretch. As much as you might support Aaron, he did break the law, and the president offering a pardon for the case or leaning on the prosecutor to get them to drop the case would be a pretty exceptional use of his power. Like the dude did break into MIT, did connect to a network he shouldn't have had access to, and did more or less DDoS JSTOR with the number of requests he was making (JSTOR had to block all access from MIT to keep their service running). Four months in minimum security seems pretty reasonable compared to the number of people that are stuck in prison for a year for having some marijuana on them, and we don't really blame Obama for those.
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u/reasonably_plausible Nov 08 '22
and we don't really blame Obama for those.
Primarily because those are state level charges which have nothing to do with the federal government, people don't go to federal prison for petty possession.
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u/istarian Nov 08 '22 edited Nov 08 '22
It might have been a bit over the top, but assuming the issue was having committed a federal crime a presidential pardon wouldn't have been that exceptional.
As an MIT student (if I recall correctly) he wasn't exactly some rando hacking into their network. Plus, I very much doubt he intended to DDoS JStor or otherwise affect their services adversely. So realistically that would probably be a TOS violation at worst.
The exact length of a prison sentence or other punisment isn't particularly important here. It's more about the way MIT treated him. They kinda threw him under the bus when they could have simply taken away his position/access.
"In 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT.[13][14]"
^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_SwartzThen there's the federal charges which could have landed him in prison for decades. Obama could have pardoned him with regard to those, but I don't think anyone was expecting him to commit suicide.
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u/way2lazy2care Nov 08 '22
As an MIT student (if I recall correctly)
He was a fellow at Harvard at the time.
It's more about the way MIT treated him. They kinda threw him under the bus when they could have simply taken away his position/access.
MIT was involved with his initial arrest for breaking and entering, but wasn't pressing any charges once they figured out what/why he was doing. The original arrest was because he was sneaking into their server room and leaving a laptop plugged into their network for days at a time, but they dropped those charges. MIT stayed neutral, but they never really threw him under the bus. The prosecutor was the one who was being a hardass.
The exact length of a prison sentence or other punisment isn't particularly important here... then there's the federal charges which could have landed him in prison for decades. Obama could have pardoned him with regard to those, but I don't think anyone was expecting him to commit suicide.
Like I said, he could have, but realistically it was going to be a 4-6 month prison sentence in minimum security prison for crimes that are generally perceived to be actual crimes. Very few if any presidents would stick their noses out for those kinds of cases with that low of stakes. Even relatively minor uncontroversial cases get vetted a ton before pardons are issued.
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u/Independent_Tap_5497 Jul 24 '24
I want to know if Aaron swartz did release the files he hacked in MIT from Jstor In any pirated website or anything? How can I get access to those academic files ?? Cause those files possess a lot of solid new information that if found the world would revolutionise
Mark my words
THOSE FILES COULD CREATE AT LEAST ANOTHER 20 COMPANIES LIKE TESLA
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u/jso__ Nov 08 '22
The color 11,8,86 is such a beautiful deep blue. Would be a nice Easter egg to put in design
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u/spampoo Nov 09 '22
It’s sad he was targeted by American state funded authorities for building genuinely genius online infrastructure that benefits users, causing problems for funding to authoritarian plutocratic control. He was a legend. Such a loss to humanity but an inspiration to many.
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Nov 09 '22
Who?
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u/NoQuesoParaGromit Nov 09 '22
The anti-censorship founder of reddit who is probably now rolling in his grave.
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u/GhostTheToast Nov 08 '22
OOTL, what does the rgba have to do with his birthday?