RIP Aaron Swartz

[unokitty]

You dodo heads....

Name calling is your response to facts that don't agree with your provincial preconceived notions? Nonetheless, the facts remain independent of you and your preconceptions. Specifically:

"Nobody knows for sure why federal prosecutors decided to pursue Swartz so vindictively, as though he had committed some sort of major crime that deserved many years in prison and financial ruin. Some theorized that the DOJ hated him for his serial activism and civil disobedience. Others speculated that, as Doctorow put it, "the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them."

-- From The inspiring heroism of Aaron Swartz

Everyone can see the facts. And everyone can see your adolescent name calling.

I'm okay with that.

Uno

 

[Markbnj]

As everyone familiar with the case knows, nothing that Aaron did was even remotely close to being a felony. It is pretty apparent that as Aaron's family has stated: "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."

I won't challenge the idea that the feds can get the prosecution of technology crimes massively wrong. But let's not pretend that he thought that what he was doing was legal. He knew he was breaking the current rules. Let's also not pretend that he was headed to jail for any significant length of time for downloading academic articles. Hell, Mitnick is a well-off security consultant now. I can't imagine fear of the outcome of his trial was what motivated this sad event.

 

[Jeff7]

http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartzs-crime/

- At the time of Aaron’s actions, the JSTOR website allowed an unlimited number of downloads by anybody on MIT’s 18.x Class-A network. The JSTOR application lacked even the most basic controls to prevent what they might consider abusive behavior, such as CAPTCHAs triggered on multiple downloads, requiring accounts for bulk downloads, or even the ability to pop a box and warn a repeat downloader.
- Aaron did not “hack” the JSTOR website for all reasonable definitions of “hack”. Aaron wrote a handful of basic python scripts that first discovered the URLs of journal articles and then used curl to request them. Aaron did not use parameter tampering, break a CAPTCHA, or do anything more complicated than call a basic command line tool that downloads a file in the same manner as right-clicking and choosing “Save As” from your favorite browser.

- I don't remember where it was, but I had the DOS window open on a Windows 98 or XP system so I could troubleshoot a simple networking issue by seeing if I could at least ping another system on the network. I later found out that there were people talking about how I was in there hacking their network.
- At work, I had a DOS window open again, and someone asked "what I was hacking into now."
- At high school, I decided to defragment a PC during a lecture in a computer programming class. The teacher happened to see the screen at some point, and acted a bit on edge as she asked me what I was doing to the computer, as if I was busy downloading top secret military documents or some such thing.


So this guy apparently used a command line tool to download unencrypted files, that were, or were being prepared to be, readily available for free?

Yeah. That certainly deserves felony charges, millions of dollars in fines, and decades of jailtime.
If I take 7 pennies from a take-a-penny bowl because I'm also missing a nickel, can that get me a year of jail for each "excessive" penny? Sure it might be rather inconsiderate to do that, but I don't think it's quite enough to be a felony offense.


I'm constantly given the idea that the people in government who do these kinds of prosecutions also send and receive lots of e-mails that start out with "FWD: Re: OMG OMG Fwd: >> Fwd: FWD:>>>."

 

[Red Squirrel]

- I don't remember where it was, but I had the DOS window open on a Windows 98 or XP system so I could troubleshoot a simple networking issue by seeing if I could at least ping another system on the network. I later found out that there were people talking about how I was in there hacking their network.
- At work, I had a DOS window open again, and someone asked "what I was hacking into now."
- At high school, I decided to defragment a PC during a lecture in a computer programming class. The teacher happened to see the screen at some point, and acted a bit on edge as she asked me what I was doing to the computer, as if I was busy downloading top secret military documents or some such thing.


So this guy apparently used a command line tool to download unencrypted files, that were, or were being prepared to be, readily available for free?

Yeah. That certainly deserves felony charges, millions of dollars in fines, and decades of jailtime.
If I take 7 pennies from a take-a-penny bowl because I'm also missing a nickel, can that get me a year of jail for each "excessive" penny? Sure it might be rather inconsiderate to do that, but I don't think it's quite enough to be a felony offense.


I'm constantly given the idea that the people in government who do these kinds of prosecutions also send and receive lots of e-mails that start out with "FWD: Re: OMG OMG Fwd: >> Fwd: FWD:>>>."

Yep it's sad, it's all driven by fear of the unknown. What they don't know anything about, they fear, and overreact on.

 

[Jeff7]

Yep it's sad, it's all driven by fear of the unknown. What they don't know anything about, they fear, and overreact on.

And unfortunately, some of it helps bolster the all-too-common notion of, "You're smart and you're good with computers? We'll be watching you; it's only a matter of time before one of your kind does something awful."

Like what happens every time there's a school shooting - "the quiet ones" are now suddenly murder suspects. Columbine happened when I was in high school. I noticed a temporary how people acted around me, as well as others "outside" the normal cliques; the few goth kids there definitely caught it as well. Wearing a trenchcoat? You were probably seconds away from whipping out an automatic shotgun in the cafeteria. A nerd who doesn't talk to many people? Gotta be packin' a grenade launcher somewhere.

 

[halik]

Didn't want to hit this with too big of a stick. But I thought that JSTOR had a pretty sweet business model.

That is, take other peoples content, don't pay them, don't get permission from them to charge for access, ignore the fact that much of the content is based on research funded by the government and then charge third parties to access the content.

The numerous articles talking about how Aaron was 'stealing' this content, just triggered my irony gene.

That is, here is JSTOR that is taking content without compensating the authors, being 'stolen' from... Ironic, no?

Legal? Apparently. Ethical? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

One positive for JSTOR, they dropped all legal action against Aaron and requested that the Federal Government drop their charges as well..

Uno

You seem to have a gap in your grasp of what stealing is (taking stuff w/o someone's consent), given that you insist on drawing a comparison between JSTOR's business model and what the guy did.

I would imagine that JSTOR wouldn't be too happy if all of their DB randomly appeared on wikileaks, given the agreements they have with the publishing journals.

Your arguments about being able to download infinite number of articles while on MIT's network amounts to straw man; the issue is the fact he intended to redistribute them. I have access to all articles to wall street journal, but if I try to scrape them with the intent to redistribute, they will most certainly bring a legal action against me.

 

[unokitty]

You seem to have a gap in your grasp of what stealing is (taking stuff w/o someone's consent), given that you insist on drawing a comparison between JSTOR's business model and what the guy did.

As a registered guest user on MIT's network, Aaron had permission to download each article. See:

At the time of Aaron’s actions, the JSTOR website allowed an unlimited number of downloads by anybody on MIT’s 18.x Class-A network.


On the other hand, even though some of my articles are on JSTOR. I have never given them consent to sell access to them. While I've never thought of it that way, according to your definition of stealing, it seems that you are saying that JSTOR stole those articles from me.

In a previous post, I referred to JSTOR's business model of selling other people's work without compensating them as sweet. If you want to refer to it as stealing, as you do in your post, I'm okay with that.

Uno

 

[halik]

As a registered guest user on MIT's network, Aaron had permission to download each article. See:

At the time of Aaron’s actions, the JSTOR website allowed an unlimited number of downloads by anybody on MIT’s 18.x Class-A network.


On the other hand, even though some of my articles are on JSTOR. I have never given them consent to sell access to them. While I've never thought of it that way, according to your definition of stealing, it seems that you are saying that JSTOR stole those articles from me.

In a previous post, I referred to JSTOR's business model of selling other people's work without compensating them as sweet. If you want to refer to it as stealing, as you do in your post, I'm okay with that.

Uno

You gave full consent to the journal that they were published in and I can guarantee you the thing you agreed to gave the journal permission to use third part aggregators like JSTOR to warehouse the paper.

Strawman arguments like the latter half of your post won't get you anywhere; whatever you published had something like this attached to it. Arguing otherwise is disingenuous and quite honestly idiotic.

 

[Printer Bandit]

shoulda waited until after getting the verdict.

edit: Feds dismiss charges

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/t...-internet-case-against-aaron-swartz-1B7956773

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

i read about this on a rss feed.

 

[SKORPI0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#JSTOR

Swartz's funeral services were scheduled for January 15, 2013, at Central Avenue Synagogue in Highland Park, Illinois.[58]

Venue is 46 miles from my place. It would be interesting to pay a visit and observe how people would pay homage to him. Perhaps some media coverage.

 

[tcsenter]

I always shielded my face when I used to check-out too many library books and then sprinted away when a librarian said "Umm...young man?"

 

[halik]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#JSTOR

Venue is 46 miles from my place. It would be interesting to pay a visit and observe how people would pay homage to him. Perhaps some media coverage.

why?

 

[BoberFett]

Absolutely disgusting what our government has become.

 

[nixium]

Absolutely disgusting what our government has become.

Agreed.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/pe...z-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck

Need to get this psycho bitch out of office ASAP.

 

[silverpig]

Did someone say ripoff? Do you realize that JSTOR is a company that publishes scholarly articles and doesn't pay the authors anything?

What Aaron is charged with is the equivalent to checking out too many library books.

When even JSTOR refused to prosecute Aaron, the Federal Government charged him with criminally violating JSTOR's web site's terms of service.

Aaron was looking at paying his defense lawyers a million dollars.

Interesting isn't it that the news media seems hell bent on broadcasting that Aaron downloaded millions of articles. However, none of these news articles mention that the 'stolen' articles were free to download on the campus where Aaron downloaded them.

Three questions

Is it ethical for JSTOR to sell access to millions of scholarly articles without paying the authors anything?

Why did the Federal Government decide that the electronic equivalent of checking out too many library books was a crime?

The next time you ignore a web site's terms of service are you prepared to be charged with a federal crime?

Uno

Really? Geez.

My computational physics prof spent a week on bash scripting with us. Our assignment was to use a bash script to batch download ~100 images from NASA's image of the day server. Once you have that code, it's a 5 second editing job to make it download all the images.

It seems like Aaron did the same thing but with JSTOR.

Am I going to a FPMITAP?

 

[Nintendesert]

Really? Geez.

My computational physics prof spent a week on bash scripting with us. Our assignment was to use a bash script to batch download ~100 images from NASA's image of the day server. Once you have that code, it's a 5 second editing job to make it download all the images.

It seems like Aaron did the same thing but with JSTOR.

Am I going to a FPMITAP?

Oh Silverpig! :wub: You don't need to go to a prison for that.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Agreed.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/pe...z-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck

Need to get this psycho bitch out of office ASAP.

And throw the book at her, literally. Every single book in that library should be printed on cardstock paper and thrown at her, then set on fire. Actually, guess that would be mean. Think of the trees it would waste.

 

[Acanthus]

- I don't remember where it was, but I had the DOS window open on a Windows 98 or XP system so I could troubleshoot a simple networking issue by seeing if I could at least ping another system on the network. I later found out that there were people talking about how I was in there hacking their network.
- At work, I had a DOS window open again, and someone asked "what I was hacking into now."
- At high school, I decided to defragment a PC during a lecture in a computer programming class. The teacher happened to see the screen at some point, and acted a bit on edge as she asked me what I was doing to the computer, as if I was busy downloading top secret military documents or some such thing.


So this guy apparently used a command line tool to download unencrypted files, that were, or were being prepared to be, readily available for free?

Yeah. That certainly deserves felony charges, millions of dollars in fines, and decades of jailtime.
If I take 7 pennies from a take-a-penny bowl because I'm also missing a nickel, can that get me a year of jail for each "excessive" penny? Sure it might be rather inconsiderate to do that, but I don't think it's quite enough to be a felony offense.


I'm constantly given the idea that the people in government who do these kinds of prosecutions also send and receive lots of e-mails that start out with "FWD: Re: OMG OMG Fwd: >> Fwd: FWD:>>>."

I lost a job for opening a DOS window and doing network diagnostics because they thought i was hacking.

 

[linuxboy]

RIP. It is insane to contemplate the state of the world, and even more insane to consider that real people with real lives are thwarted from their real pursuit of freedom. Those with more sensitivity who suffer, as Aaron did, may you find rest that was unavailable in your life. And despite all odds, may we as a species more forward.

 

[unokitty]

“It is no accident that Silicon Valley is in America, and not France, or Germany, or England, or Japan,” Graham wrote. “In those countries, people color inside the lines.” The article is accompanied by a picture of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, prior to the founding of Apple, experimenting with a “blue box,” a device that tricks the phone system into allowing free phone calls. Wozniak says he once used a blue box to call the Pope.

Graham reports that while working on the Manhattan Project, the physicist Richard Feynman made a hobby of cracking military safes. Graham said that there was something very American about the fact that American officials didn’t throw Feynman in jail for his antics. “It’s hard to imagine the authorities having a sense of humor about such things over in Germany at that time,” he noted wryly.

I worry that Swartz’s prosecution is a sign that America is gradually losing the sense of humor that has made it the home of the world’s innovators and misfits. A generation ago, we hailed Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg as a hero. Today, our government throws the book at whistleblowers for leaking much less consequential information.

Our nation’s growing humorlessness won’t just mean that insubordinate idealists like Swartz lose their freedom or their lives. As our culture becomes steadily less accepting of people with Swartz’s irreverant attitude toward authority, we’ll all be poorer as a result. Revolutionary new technologies and ideas don’t come from people with a reverence for following the rules. They come from iconoclasts like Jobs, Wozniak, and Swartz. It’s a bad idea to lock them up and throw away the key."

-- From the Washington Post, Aaron Swartz, American hero

If today's America can't tolerate the actions of Aaron Swartz, it seems fair to ask if Jobs and Wozniak were young today, would they be able to build an enterprise like Apple? Or would the two Steves become another notch in some zealous Federal Prosecutor's gun?

Uno

 

[Soundmanred]

He messaged me the other day saying he wanted to hang out.
I didn't reply.
Wait a minute...

 

[Jeff7]

...
If today's America can't tolerate the actions of Aaron Swartz, it seems fair to ask if Jobs and Wozniak were young today, would they be able to build an enterprise like Apple? Or would the two Steves become another notch in some zealous Federal Prosecutor's gun?

Uno

A bunch of guys working out of their garage, using sophisticated electronics? Probably working to take down the FBI.

 

[darkewaffle]

Yep it's sad, it's all driven by fear of the unknown. What they don't know anything about, they fear, and overreact on.

Kind of similar to your opinion on how the government behaves, no?

 

[PottedMeat]

A bunch of guys working out of their garage, using sophisticated electronics? Probably working to take down the FBI.