Hactivist, Internet innovator Aaron Swartz commits suicide - guyloctatintoo

Aaron Swartz, the smart as a whip Cyberspace pioneer, passionate political activist and computer programming prognosticatio, committed suicide on Friday as he visaged hacking-affinal charges that could have landed him in jail for decades, according to published reports.

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Aaron Swartz

Swartz, who was 26, killed himself in his New York City apartment, according to The Technical school, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) newspaper that first reported his passing on Sat.

Swartz played key roles in the ontogenesis of the RSS online capacity syndication technology, in the world of the Creative Park licenses, in a campaign against the SOPA and Genus Pipa bills and in the success of the Reddit intelligence sharing site.

He apparently hanged himself and was found by his girlfriend, according to The New York State Times.

Swartz faced a variety of charges in a Massachusetts federal woo, including computer intrusion, telegram fraud and data theft stemming from allegations that he stole millions of donnish articles and documents from an MIT subscription-based service called JSTOR.

If convicted, Swartz, whose intentions allegedly were to make the articles and documents freely available, could have been hit with a 35-year jail sentence and a U.S.$1 million fine. Swartz had been entangled in premature efforts to "liberate" government documents whose access require fees, so much Eastern Samoa those in the PACER database of court filings.

"Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer bid or a wrecking bar, and whether you take documents, data Beaver State dollars," Carmen Ortiz, U.S. lawyer for the District of MA, said in a statement when the indictment was unsealed in July 2022. "IT is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you consume stolen or springiness information technology away."

Family blasts prosecution

In a affirmation posted Saturday connected Tumblr, Swartz's family goddam some MIT and the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's Office, blaming them for playing a part in his dying.

"Aaron's demise is not simply a individual calamity. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with determent and prosecutorial beat," reads the statement, which also provides information nearly funeral plans for Swartz next week.

Swartz's folk besides eulogized him saying that he was deeply committed to social Do, a life-shaping pursuit, and that he had unquenchable curiosity, creativity and brilliance, as well as "reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, infinite lovemaking."

"He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Cyberspace and the world a fairer, better place," they wrote.

Online tributes

E. O. Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard University Law School Professor and a supporter of Swartz's, reacted to the news with an ireful blog mail service in which he characterized the U.S. government's prosecution of the gifted technology innovator as disproportionately belligerent and punitive.

"From the beginning, the government worked as concentrated as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The 'property' Aaron had 'stolen,' we were told, was worth 'millions of dollars'—with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his intent must have been to profit from his crime," Lessig wrote. "But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of Scholarly ARTICLES is either an idiot OR a prevaricator. Information technology was clear what this was non, yet our government continuing to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-one-handed."

Swartz, Lessig wrote, was always motivated by what the young man considered the public good, never business riches. Lessig described him as "brilliant, and questionable. A kid ace. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron intend?"

"That person is gone now, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don't get both, you wear't deserve to have the power of the United States government buttocks you," he wrote.

In his attribute site, Swartz faced a short biographical sketch in which he highlighted several of his current and gone projects, including his founding of Demand Progress, which advocated against the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) bills out of concern they'd give the US Government power to engage in Internet security review. The bio as wel mentions Swartz's work with Web creator Tim Berners-Lee at MIT, and the fact that he co-authored the RSS 1.0 specification.

Novelist, journalist and Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow, other friend of Swartz's, posted a tribute to him in which he also questioned the wisdom of the prosecution. Doctorow also brought up Swartz's bouts with impression, which Swartz had publically discussed.

"We have entirely lost someone today WHO had more work to do, and who made the world a break rank when he did it," Doctorow wrote.

Juan Carlos Perez covers enterprise communicating/collaboration suites, operational systems, browsers and general technology break news for The IDG News Service. Follow Juan happening Chirrup at @JuanCPerezIDG.

This level was updated from an earlier version.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/456438/hactivist-internet-innovator-aaron-swartz-commits-suicide.html

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