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Aaron Swartz Sculpture's Unveiling at Internet Archive Attended by 300 (sfstandard.com) 51
"The Internet's Own Boy" was inscribed below the bust, according to the San Francisco Standard, adding that the 312-pound marble statue "was crafted using a mix of AI-driven robotic milling and traditional hand carving."
It was unveiled Friday at the Internet Archive auditorium for a crowd of around 300 people. "Aaron's legacy is bringing people together to make change, said Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "There's a renaissance happening now in Aaron Swartz-land," said Lisa Rein, the co-founder of Creative Commons, a nonprofit devoted to expanding public access to information. She founded Aaron Swartz Day in 2013, an annual hackathon and tribute held on his birthday. There's now an Aaron Swartz Institute in Brazil, a documentary, multiple books and podcasts — even an Aaron Swartz memecoin ("Do not buy," she warned).
"It's great that people idolize him as long as they get the story right: He was not a martyr," Rein said, her eyes welling with tears. "He stood for freedom of access to information, especially for scientific research — things the public had already paid for."
The evening included a number of video tributes, which Rein played on a large screen behind the stage. They included commentary from science fiction author Cory Doctorow, members of the Aaron Swartz Institute in Brazil, and Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation... Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch and a partner at Y Combinator, was one of the few people who knew Swartz personally. "I'm glad he's become a symbol, he would approve of that," he shared, his voice slightly breaking. "I really miss him."
Starting next week, the bust will be moved to the [Internet Archive] lobby, where it will remain until Peniche secures a permit to place it in a local park [said Evan Sirchuk, the Internet Archive's community and events coordinator]... "Aaron really means something to the San Francisco community," [Rein said]. "He can keep inspiring generations — even the ones who weren't alive when he was."
Tech blogger John Gruber thinks Swartz would appreciate that the bust came from people "aligned with Aaron's own righteous obsessions." But at the same time "I think he'd be a little weirded out. He wasn't a 'I hope they erect a larger-than-life statue of me' sort of guy.
"And if he had been, we wouldn't have loved him like we did. It's just a terrible thing that we lost him so young."
It was unveiled Friday at the Internet Archive auditorium for a crowd of around 300 people. "Aaron's legacy is bringing people together to make change, said Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "There's a renaissance happening now in Aaron Swartz-land," said Lisa Rein, the co-founder of Creative Commons, a nonprofit devoted to expanding public access to information. She founded Aaron Swartz Day in 2013, an annual hackathon and tribute held on his birthday. There's now an Aaron Swartz Institute in Brazil, a documentary, multiple books and podcasts — even an Aaron Swartz memecoin ("Do not buy," she warned).
"It's great that people idolize him as long as they get the story right: He was not a martyr," Rein said, her eyes welling with tears. "He stood for freedom of access to information, especially for scientific research — things the public had already paid for."
The evening included a number of video tributes, which Rein played on a large screen behind the stage. They included commentary from science fiction author Cory Doctorow, members of the Aaron Swartz Institute in Brazil, and Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation... Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch and a partner at Y Combinator, was one of the few people who knew Swartz personally. "I'm glad he's become a symbol, he would approve of that," he shared, his voice slightly breaking. "I really miss him."
Starting next week, the bust will be moved to the [Internet Archive] lobby, where it will remain until Peniche secures a permit to place it in a local park [said Evan Sirchuk, the Internet Archive's community and events coordinator]... "Aaron really means something to the San Francisco community," [Rein said]. "He can keep inspiring generations — even the ones who weren't alive when he was."
Tech blogger John Gruber thinks Swartz would appreciate that the bust came from people "aligned with Aaron's own righteous obsessions." But at the same time "I think he'd be a little weirded out. He wasn't a 'I hope they erect a larger-than-life statue of me' sort of guy.
"And if he had been, we wouldn't have loved him like we did. It's just a terrible thing that we lost him so young."
If you want to honour him... (Score:4, Insightful)
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You mean disablijng JSTOR access for an entire campus, and trying to steal both the copyrighted material for free distribution but the vital JSTOR index and cutting off the income JSTOR uses to purchase the periodicals and and pay editors to organize the data? Creating a "free library" by stealing the books and cutting off the library's traffic is selfishness at its arrogant Ivy League tower worst.
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Creating a "free library" by stealing the books
To be fair, even if you legitimately pay for the books, then digitize them and lend them out, that's still illegal (as Internet Archive painfully discovered [wired.com]).
The worst part is, this guy ended up exit bagging himself over something that ultimately would be less popular to pirate than the latest iteration of Star Wars - The Search for More Money from Disney+, or the final season of Stranger Things the College Years, whenever Netflix finally gets around to releasing it. At least if you're gonna break internat [youtube.com]
AarÃn 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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"Nope. Why would I suggest replaying previous battles, and badly at that? "
In other words, pointing out the inconvenient facts of the crimes he committed interferes with the hagiography you want to construct.
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Does this describe your interaction with Slashdot?
If not, you have knowingly accessed a computer system in excess of authorization.
Welcome to yo
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You mean disablijng JSTOR access for an entire campus
he downloaded 70gb with curl in a python loop in a single process over wifi. you can't possibly ddos a system with that. those were bullshit claims and charges.
and trying to steal both the copyrighted material for free distribution but the vital JSTOR index and cutting off the income JSTOR uses to purchase the periodicals and and pay editors to organize the data?
the material never got shared and even if it had there is no basis to say it would have sensibly impacted jstor revenue. jstor settled immediately and subsequently made part of their pd content accessible at no cost and instituted a no-cost access plan, stating that swartz's actions had just accellerated their plans to free up access.
jstor didn't eve
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Yep, definitely no crimes committed then, this post proves it!
"...the material never got shared and even if it had there is no basis to say it would have sensibly impacted jstor revenue."
Yep, that's why rape is not a crime either, there is no basis to say it would have sensibly impacted future sexual intercourse.
"...jstor settled immediately and subsequently made part of their pd content accessible..."
Subsequently? Subsequent to what? Subsequent to the crime.
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Lick them boots harder, surely your betters will see and appreciate your efforts and elevate you to licking their assholes clean after they shit.
Nothing he did should have been a crime, that information was paid for in part by grants underwritten by The People and you are arguing against their having access to what they paid for.
Re: If you want to honour him... (Score:2)
"Facing consequences is what every true rebel is all about."
At least I don't have to ask whether you're ignorant or a troll
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"Yep, that's why rape is not a crime either,"
Yeesh.. just stick to posting AC
If you want to honour him... don't. (Score:3)
You mean disablijng JSTOR access for an entire campus
he downloaded 70gb with curl in a python loop in a single process over wifi. you can't possibly ddos a system with that. those were bullshit claims and charges.
Turns out you could, and he very nearly did. JSTOR saw that somebody on the MIT network was systematically downloading their entire database and told MIT that they would revoke their access if they continued. Yes, his actions would have disabled JSTOR for the entire campus.
Since he was doing this clandestinely, there wasn't even any way for the MIT admins to talk to him and ask him what he was doing and why it was a problem for them. All they could do is cut off his access when they found him doing it, wh
Re: If you want to honour him... (Score:2)
Similar to what every company working on llm is doing to feed information to it. The difference is they are too large to sue.
That's not to say he didn't do anything wrong, just pointing out the hypocrisy of it all.
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Swartz wasn't too large to sue. MIT declined to do so.
This is about the criminal statute at play- the CFAA.
Those companies are accessing computer systems in excess of authorization- they are criminals.
They're too large to prosecute, and that's the real problem.
The law, de facto, though not de jure, makes criminals of nobodies who access a computer, in any way, shape, or form, in excess of what is allowed in the TOS, while the prosecutors roll their eyes at charging OpenAI, Google, or an
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Civil suits are normally pursued _after_ criminal charges are prosecuted, for a whole stack of reasons. We can assume that MIT was awaiting its turn, to see if it was worth pursuing after Aaron's day in criminal court.
Also, Aaron was working for Harvard when he committed these abuses. Harvard would try to whitewash the incident, just as they've done.
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Civil suits are normally pursued _after_ criminal charges are prosecuted
There is no analogue by which you can say "normally", here.
There's nowhere else where being in violation of a contract is a crime, without intent to commit fraud.
You are, as usual, completely full of shit.
Further, MIT flat out stated they had no intent to sue, and didn't support the criminal charges.
We can assume that MIT was awaiting its turn, to see if it was worth pursuing after Aaron's day in criminal court.
Wrong. At least you're growing- normally you would have asserted that MIT was awaiting your turn, because you seem to have no compunction whatsoever on just making shit up.
Also, Aaron was working for Harvard when he committed these abuses.
Not relevant. He was granted access
Re: If you want to honour him... (Score:2)
They should focus on mental health. He was suicidal before he was locked up, his "friends" and "family" encouraged him to do something which was foolhardy at best, life changing at worst, and he was already suffering from mental illness.
It's their fault, and they keep trying to make him into a hero, because the alternative is to look into the mirror and recognize they did this to him.
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"They should focus on mental healt"
He killed himself due to the government'a prosecutorial overreach trying to ruin his life with a lawsuit that MIT wanted dropped. The government probably also targeted him for meeting with Julian Assange. This take of blaming his friends and family is just dumb.
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Nobody was suing him.
As you noted- MIT declined to sue him.
The Government charged him with felonies, with 50 years of jailtime attached.
That's a very different thing than a lawsuit.
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Are you saying this wasn't a lawsuit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
My point stands, it was prosecutorial overreach on the government's part to ruin his life, and it dovetails with the government's prosecutions against journalists like Barrett Brown and hacktivists like Jeremy Hammond in 2011 / 2012.
and to this day when Swartz cones up on slashdot, you see people shitting on him with the same pettiness and concern trolling that they did for Assange or Snowden. all because he leaked a bunch of papers from
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Are you saying this wasn't a lawsuit?
Uh, yes.
lawsuit (n):
a problem taken to a law court by an ordinary person or an organization rather than the police in order to obtain a legal decision.
United States v. Swartz was a criminal prosecution. Which is not a lawsuit.
My point stands, it was prosecutorial overreach on the government's part to ruin his life, and it dovetails with the government's prosecutions against journalists like Barrett Brown and hacktivists like Jeremy Hammond in 2011 / 2012.
Oh I don't disagree with you in the slightest. Only that calling it a lawsuit greatly diminishes just how much of an overreach it was.
Had it been a civil lawsuit, with equivalent statutory penalties to the criminal prosecution- Swartz would have been quite alright.
But it wasn't.
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Re: If you want to honour him... (Score:2)
As I said, he tried to kill himself before he was ever locked up.
His friends and family lead him to the cliff and pushed him over. That blood is in his hands.
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Dude took his own life.
However, the Government is complicit in pushing this unstable person over the edge in pursuit of a fucking draconian conviction.
The moral crime committed by the Government was the prosecution. That a person killed themselves because of it is just a sentence enhancement.
Re: If you want to honour him... (Score:2)
He'd be dead anyway.
His family and friends failed to give a shit about him when he was alive.
How do you think the notoriety would have worked out for him? He'd still have likely killed himself.
Forget the hero worship. This guy as a sad victim of mental illness, and everyone in his life betrayed him.
CFAA (Score:2)
I'd love to know the names of the people who kept the 2 attempts at passing Aaron's Law from getting out of committee.
Re:CFAA (Score:5, Interesting)
He was _charged_ with crimes with a maximum penalty of more than 100 years because he did the same penny ante crimes so very many times. This was the third time Aaron had abused free or generous access to documents and taken down the service for others in the process, and he'd evaded jail time twice. This was at least his third such abuse, and larger in scope than his previous abuses. He'd certainly earned jail time, though with his wealth and Harvard and MIT's unwillingness to see Harvard staff prosecuted it's not likely he'd have received any prison time for these charges, either.
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All 11 CFAA charges stemmed from a single ongoing event that they allowed to continue happening.
If you have to rely on sidechannels in the justice system to keep people who commit benign tort from losing their civil fucking rights, then your just system is fucking broken.
It might sound good to say he "evaded jail time", but in the context of an argument that jail time should ne
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There is no other case in US law where breaking a contract makes you a fucking felon.
Sure there is. If you enter into a contract with the intent to deceive or defraud, that is a felony. Happens plenty in the construction industry. Here is just one example [abc7news.com].
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Sure there is.
No, there isn't.
If you enter into a contract with the intent to deceive or defraud
You are not in trouble for violating the contract- you are in trouble for fraud.
That applies to any fraud. What is being discussed is not fraud, which is why they needed a new law for it.
This is a critical and rather elementary legal distinction. Re-evaluate your position.
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"The prosecutor in charge of this was looking to make a name for themselves."
By bringing justice to a lifetime criminal. That would be the very job definition for a prosecutor.
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If you knowingly access a computer system in excess of authorization (i.e., do not agree to/follow the TOS to the T) then you have committed a crime.
Don't be stupid.
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In fact, Elon Musk broke far more serious laws and is getting away with it. Rules for thee and not for me, much?
All Aaron Schwartz did was download something using campus WiFi and shared it with other like-minded people. And this is against an industry notorious for abusing access and information to scientific researchers. The various claims that Aaron Schwartz was a violent information criminal is a LIE. There are far worse abuses performed DAILY by the billionaires. They’re called Facebook, X and Ti
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He committed trespass, hacking MIT's network services, and denial of service attacks on JSTOR that brought down their servers. Don't pretend he was "harmless".
MIT's failure to file civil charges is interesting, but should not be taken as evidence of innocence or acceptance by MIT. I suspect that MIT was _very_ reluctant to prosecute a member of Harvard staff, partly because the return-on-investment would be so low, but also because it would display, in court, how very poor MIT security was.
Don't pretend tha
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He committed trespass
No, he did not. He was authorized to use the network. Why are you a liar?
hacking MIT's network services
No, he did not. He was authorized to use the network. Why are you a liar?
and denial of service attacks on JSTOR that brought down their servers
No, he did not. Denial of service requires intent. Why are you a liar?
Don't pretend he was "harmless".
Is your point so weak, that you can't make it without literally every component of it being a lie?
I've seen piece of shit bootlickers like you in the old pictures of the Nuremburg Rallies.
You are so wrong on this, that had he survived until 2021, the Supreme Court would have overturned his c
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he did the same penny ante crimes so very many times.
exactly one time, pacer, before the jstor thing.
This was the third time Aaron had abused free or generous access to documents and taken down the service for others in the process
pacer was charging huge money to distribute public documents, and there is no evidence whatsoever of any service disruption. the leak of those documents though exposed systematic lawyer's malpractice failing to protect private data, prompting reforms by the judicial conference.
and he'd evaded jail time twice.
what jail time? the pacer thing just prompted an fbi investigation, they never pressed any charges.
i get that you might not share his ideas or approve of his methods, but ... you're full
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Unless you're Zuck and then you get celebrated for doing that and releasing llama.
Probably Sam too.
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There's a renaissance happening now ... (Score:2)
"There's a renaissance happening now in Aaron Swartz-land"
What does she want to tell us with this?
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It's a good thing that the summary is so complete (Score:3)
in explaining exactly who Aaron Swartz was and what he did / what happened to him. I'm sure there aren't any readers of Slashdot who weren't born yet at the time who might be confused by this summary.
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Obama Administration (Score:3)
Wasn't it Obama who wanted to make an "example out of Aaron Swartz"? The irony is, Aaron is dead while Obama won the Nobel peace prize!
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His administration did, however, fight attempts at making the CFAA not apply to people who weren't pulling and trafficking on ill-gotten personal information, or ransom such computer systems, and that's pretty bad in my book.
Busted? (Score:3)
They busted him again? Poor Aaron.