Aaron Swartz Would've Been 40 Today. His 'Legacy Lives On' Says FSF (fsf.org) 44
"Aaron Swartz would have turned forty this year," writes FSF deputy director Sean O'Brien. "November 8 is Aaron Swartz Day, when we remember a pioneer of free software and information sharing whose contributions helped shape the modern internet."
The Internet Archive will host a hackathon Sunday in San Francisco celebrating Aaron's Swartz's life "and the projects he worked on, many of which are still going strong today," including SecureDrop, OpenLibrary, and Creative Commons. "We are also spreading the word about projects he inspired," including OnionPress and the EFF's Atlas of Surveillancedocumenting police tech use through open source research, now a collaborative effort with volunteers, the University of Nevada, Reno, and the Reynolds School of Journalism. The event is also supported by Free Law Project, and organizers are asking attendees to "bring a color print out of your favorite photos of Aaron for a huge collaborative collage."
From the Internet Archive's blog: Aaron was also a co-founder of Creative Commons, where he worked with Lisa Rein developing the RSS-enhanced HTML code that sits behind Creative Commons licenses, much of which is still in use today. The "Quantifying the Commons" project was designed to help measure open-licensed and public-domain works worldwide, and is one of the projects participants can work on. Aaron loved Tor and created tools such as "Tor2web" (with Virgil Griffith) to help more people publish Tor-accessible websites. Onion Press is a Tor-based publishing system designed for decentralized, censorship-resistant publishing, and participants can work on the code base...
We also encourage you to have a hackathon in your own town using our materials — or materials of your own. Please let us know if you plan to do this (although it's not required!). If you do let us know, we can include you on our website and help you spread the word about your event. So far, there is an event in Portland sponsored by Portland Civic Lab where they will be screening The Internet's Own Boy and celebrating Aaron's life.
"EFF was proud to call Aaron a friend and ally," the digital rights organization posted this week. And the FSF's deputy director writes "It is particularly striking that some of the world's largest companies now rely on technology Swartz helped to develop." One of Swartz's most important technical contributions was his collaboration with John Gruber on Markdown, the simple text formatting system introduced in 2004. Markdown allows users to create structured documents using ordinary text, without requiring proprietary software. More than twenty years later, Markdown has become one of the most popular formats for documentation and publishing, and is widely used in community websites such as forums and wikis. This is not a minor contribution. Companies developing LLMs use Markdown extensively in their products and development tools. OpenAI, for example, recommends Markdown for organizing instructions and communicating structure to its ChatGPT models... Swartz also developed web.py, a public domain framework for building Python applications, and contributed to RSS 1.0, a public internet standard for distributing news and other information between websites.
Swartz developed web.py while rewriting the software running Reddit after Reddit acquired Swartz's company Infogami.
Reddit recently licensed its content to AI companies, and the FSF's deputy director notes "the enormous scale of the alleged 'piracy' by giant technology corporations" while Aaron himself had "faced criminal prosecution for downloading academic research that he wanted to distribute with no monetary gain." In 2011, federal prosecutors charged Swartz with computer fraud and related offenses after he downloaded millions of academic articles from the JSTOR collection through MIT's university network... Although he was not charged with copyright infringement, he faced aggressive federal prosecution and the possibility of decades in prison before he tragically died by suicide in January 2013, at just twenty-six years old...
Swartz helped build tools that made the internet more useful and accessible, and his contributions continue to shape a world he never lived to see. On Aaron Swartz Day, we should remember his achievements and the access-to-knowledge principles that guided them. The companies benefiting from his legacy should respect those same principles by giving users true freedom and control, rather than imposing more restrictions on us all.
The Internet Archive will host a hackathon Sunday in San Francisco celebrating Aaron's Swartz's life "and the projects he worked on, many of which are still going strong today," including SecureDrop, OpenLibrary, and Creative Commons. "We are also spreading the word about projects he inspired," including OnionPress and the EFF's Atlas of Surveillancedocumenting police tech use through open source research, now a collaborative effort with volunteers, the University of Nevada, Reno, and the Reynolds School of Journalism. The event is also supported by Free Law Project, and organizers are asking attendees to "bring a color print out of your favorite photos of Aaron for a huge collaborative collage."
From the Internet Archive's blog: Aaron was also a co-founder of Creative Commons, where he worked with Lisa Rein developing the RSS-enhanced HTML code that sits behind Creative Commons licenses, much of which is still in use today. The "Quantifying the Commons" project was designed to help measure open-licensed and public-domain works worldwide, and is one of the projects participants can work on. Aaron loved Tor and created tools such as "Tor2web" (with Virgil Griffith) to help more people publish Tor-accessible websites. Onion Press is a Tor-based publishing system designed for decentralized, censorship-resistant publishing, and participants can work on the code base...
We also encourage you to have a hackathon in your own town using our materials — or materials of your own. Please let us know if you plan to do this (although it's not required!). If you do let us know, we can include you on our website and help you spread the word about your event. So far, there is an event in Portland sponsored by Portland Civic Lab where they will be screening The Internet's Own Boy and celebrating Aaron's life.
"EFF was proud to call Aaron a friend and ally," the digital rights organization posted this week. And the FSF's deputy director writes "It is particularly striking that some of the world's largest companies now rely on technology Swartz helped to develop." One of Swartz's most important technical contributions was his collaboration with John Gruber on Markdown, the simple text formatting system introduced in 2004. Markdown allows users to create structured documents using ordinary text, without requiring proprietary software. More than twenty years later, Markdown has become one of the most popular formats for documentation and publishing, and is widely used in community websites such as forums and wikis. This is not a minor contribution. Companies developing LLMs use Markdown extensively in their products and development tools. OpenAI, for example, recommends Markdown for organizing instructions and communicating structure to its ChatGPT models... Swartz also developed web.py, a public domain framework for building Python applications, and contributed to RSS 1.0, a public internet standard for distributing news and other information between websites.
Swartz developed web.py while rewriting the software running Reddit after Reddit acquired Swartz's company Infogami.
Reddit recently licensed its content to AI companies, and the FSF's deputy director notes "the enormous scale of the alleged 'piracy' by giant technology corporations" while Aaron himself had "faced criminal prosecution for downloading academic research that he wanted to distribute with no monetary gain." In 2011, federal prosecutors charged Swartz with computer fraud and related offenses after he downloaded millions of academic articles from the JSTOR collection through MIT's university network... Although he was not charged with copyright infringement, he faced aggressive federal prosecution and the possibility of decades in prison before he tragically died by suicide in January 2013, at just twenty-six years old...
Swartz helped build tools that made the internet more useful and accessible, and his contributions continue to shape a world he never lived to see. On Aaron Swartz Day, we should remember his achievements and the access-to-knowledge principles that guided them. The companies benefiting from his legacy should respect those same principles by giving users true freedom and control, rather than imposing more restrictions on us all.
You know what I think (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: You know what I think (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: You know what I think (Score:5, Informative)
Obama's wanted to make an example out of him, to scare every future potential Swartz.
Aaron is sorely missed. (Score:1)
His groundbreaking work in the field of boy bands and his role as a founding member of the Backstreet Boys will never be forgotten.
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Whether that's the case or not, it's not going to cause a person to kill himself out of the blue, and comments like this probably make the situation worse.
The thing with suicide is nobody ever really knows exactly why any given person does it. Sometimes it's just a total mystery. Even if somebody says why they're going to do it before they did it, such as a suicide note, it's often not the truth. Look at the way some narcissists threaten to kill themselves if a person they're fixated on leaves them. The per
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Yes. Obama appointee US District Attorney Carmen Ortiz. This should be her legacy.
Re: You know what I think (Score:4, Interesting)
He tried to off himself before he was ever threatened with prison.
He was mentally unstable and instead of accepting that he needed help them blame the government.
He was used by the people wanting to liberate data, and he died for it.
Re: You know what I think (Score:4, Interesting)
Aaron Swartz committed crimes and got caught.
I think you meant to say that Aaron Swartz was *accused* of committing crimes.
This is the intellect of /.
Projecting much?
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Aaron Swartz committed crimes and got caught. The open source community cannot admit to this basic fact.
What he did should not have been illegal. This is the argument actually being made.
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What he did should not have been illegal. This is the argument actually being made.
After the Van Buren v. United States SCOTUS verdict, it'd have just been an issue of copyright law and not hacking. Still illegal, but violating copyright law is much lower on the totem pole as far as computer crimes are concerned.
Either way though, definitely not something he should've killed himself over.
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This is the intellect of /.
No, that would be morons like you who love to shout "MAGA" or "fascist" damn near any time somebody doesn't see something exactly your way.
Re: You know what I think (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
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From the Wikipedia:
He was arraigned in Cambridge District Court on two state charges of breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony.[19][8][12][20] The door Swartz had used was never locked;[13][14][15] in Massachusetts as in most jurisdictions, "breaking" means exerting physical force to remove an obstruction to entry, including by opening an unlocked door.[21] On July 11, 2011, Swartz was indicted in federal District Court on four felony counts: wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer.[3][18][22][23] On November 17, 2011, Swartz was indicted by a Middlesex County Superior Court grand jury on state charges of breaking and entering with intent, grand larceny, and unauthorized access to a computer network.[24][25]
I feel like the prosecutors were overzealous and that led to Aaron's suicide.
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I feel like his pre-existing mental health issues did him in.
Re:You know what I think (Score:4, Insightful)
You sound like a cheerleader for authoritarian police states. Civil disobedience is widely considered to be a valid form of protest against unjust laws. Should Rosa Parks have just sat at the back of the bus? Should Gandhi have told people to just follow the law?
Re: You know what I think (Score:2, Insightful)
What he did was a lot more intrusive than "civil disobedience".
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Civil disobedience is widely considered to be a valid form of protest against unjust laws.
And the consequence of such disobedience is being persecuted by the state for your cause. You don't elevate your own self importance or that of your political view by offing yourself.
What would have happened if the gov't had sentenced him to time served, then released with a fine and probation? Nobody would have remembered who he was or what his data freedom cause was. He might still be remembered for RSS and any other contributions he made, like web.py and .... Well, ok. He deserves death for that.
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The idea beind civil disobedience is you disobey openly and then take the punishment. Governments have closed off this tactic by making punishments far too terrible. MLK Jr. himself only spent short stints in jail; he never faced felony charges.
Nowadays, if the government wants, you'll spend more time in jail without bail awaiting trial than MLK spent in jails total. And if you are convicted of a felony and aren't already wealthy (Hi Martha and Don), your life is basically over: you will be denied nearly
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He committed copyright infringement. Same thing all the AI companies are doing.
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He committed copyright infringement. Same thing all the AI companies are doing.
Uh, no. Works produced by the federal government are explicitly in the public domain. There is literally no copyright to infringe upon.
(He was accused of "improperly accessing a computer system" in the process of obtaining said public domain materials)
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There is literally no copyright to infringe upon.
(He was accused of "improperly accessing a computer system" in the process of obtaining said public domain materials)
If you can't freely access something, is it really in public domain?
Re: You know what I think (Score:2, Insightful)
He trespassed and installed a computer on the network, he didn't just cause downtime by hammering the server to fetch documents.
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Well, he was accused of unauthorized access to a computer system, but the owners of the computer system involved made it emphatically clear they didn't want charges pressed. So technically you're correct, which is the best type of correct, but the nuance is that, no, the law he supposedly broke was too much for this specific case.
The other thing he was accused of was copyright infringement, but that's not illegal unless you intend to profit from it (simplification), it's normally merely a civil, not crimina
a spark in the darkness (Score:2)
that's a bit over the fence. you could say that metaphorically, and that he was a victim of the system and the ruling class for which the government is just the legitimizing facade. and these people for sure wouldn't shy away of getting someone offed if need be, mind, but he was not really that much of a threat and they didn't need to make a martyr out of him. he would have simply been unceremoniously convicted, sent to prison, made an example of and forgotten.
he was young, idealist and bold. who knows what
AI (Score:2)
What he did is exactly what these AI companies is doing now. Except he was downloading public available documents.
AI companies is also downloading copyrighted and DRM protected content. The DOJ should should go directly after these companies. All this proves is if you are very rich in the US, you can break any laws you want.
Re: AI (Score:2, Insightful)
No it isn't. Did these companies illegally bypass IP bans by installing computers inside networks to steal data? Because that's what he did.
Duality of Man and the System (Score:5, Insightful)
Aaron did both good and bad things.
Belief that we should have open access to scientific data that's largely sponsored by public funds is a noble idea. And expressing it by breaking into network closets and downloading so fast that the system breaks is a bad idea.
Likewise there is undoubtedly injustice in a system that throws 35 years in a federal prison at one activist while Facebook can torrent 100's of terrabytes of journals, books, and media without consequence and the judge finds it as mostly fair use.
Too much of the situation seemed like it was the script to a campy 1990's film [youtube.com] with characters shouting Hack the Planet. But in real life the characters aren't one dimensional. People both making him out to be either the hero or the villain are living in that fantasy world, where instead he was the standard tragically flawed human being.
Standards have changed (Score:1)
I generally don’t have much sympathy for dumb young hackers who think laws don’t apply to them. I also tend to roll my eyes at the “software should be free” crowd. Sure. So should food, clothing, shelter, energy, sex, medical care, and everything else while we’re at it. I don’t know wh
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He didn't just scrape data; he smuggled a laptop into a cabinet to do it.
Wired article on Aaron Swartz .. (Score:3)
“Infogami's Aaron Swartz (left), wearing a Foo camp T-shirt, Steve Huffman (center) of Reddit and Zak Stone (right) of Memamp share ideas on Y Combinator's office couch. View Slideshow Having just finished his sophomore year at Stanford University, Sam Altman spent this summer holed up in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, apartment paid for with a little []”