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Two interesting deaths this week: FPSRussia founder and Reddit founder.

N

Neomega

Deity
Joined
Feb 9, 2002
Messages
11,261
Aliens did this.
 
I think it's good that a reddit guy is dead but maybe the circimstances are not the best
 
Reddit users have a conspiracy against aliens.
 
I was thinking about making a thread about Aaron Swartz's death. I guess this will have to do.

Swartz tried to make the articles on JSTOR, a university publishing network, free for everyone to read. The US government felt that this terrible crime merited locking him away for the rest of his life.

Swartz was a child prodigy who became a self-made millionaire. He could have done anything he chose to, but he chose to try to help others less fortunate than himself. He believed that free access to knowledge was the foundation of human progress and tried to make that knowledge freely available to everyone, all of us, without exception.

When the US government moved to lock him away for the rest of his life, no-one spoke up for him. Not the journalists, not the Democratic party, not the millions of people who used the Reddit site and RSS technology that he was central to designing.

In the end, he decided that this cold, selfish world which he did so much to try to help wasn't worth living in anymore. Frankly, I think he may have been right.

RIP, never forgotten.
 
I hardly think Schwartz would have been imprisoned for life for piracy of articles that anybody can read and download if they simply pay the modest fee.

Swartz surrendered to authorities, pleading not guilty on all accounts, and was released on US$100,000 unsecured bail.[33][34] Prosecution of the case continued, with charges of wire fraud and computer fraud, carrying a potential prison term of up to 35 years and a fine of up to $1 million.[35][36] After Swartz's arrest, JSTOR put out a statement saying it would not pursue civil litigation against him,[33][37] though MIT remained silent on the proceedings.[38]
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And he wasn't much of a "child prodigy". He was merely a member of the working group that drafted RSS, which is cool enough without exaggeration.

But I think it is always sad when someone commits suicide.
 
Patroklos said:
Nothingnhe did helped people less fortunate than himself.
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If he had managed to do what he set out to do, everyone who has an internet connection would have been able to access the great wealth of human knowledge that our colleges and universities produce. Your life, along with millions of others, would have been improved by it.

He could have simply sat back and lived the rest of his life in some villa in Tuscany, but he chose to risk everything he had to help others. To create more freedom and more knowledge for you, along with everyone else.
 
~Corsair#01~ said:
If he had managed to do what he set out to do, everyone who has an internet connection would have been able to access the great wealth of human knowledge that our colleges and universities produce. Your life, along with millions of others, would have been improved by it.

He could have simply sat back and lived the rest of his life in some villa in Tuscany, but he chose to risk everything he had to help others. To create more freedom and more knowledge for you, along with everyone else.
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Definitely, the whole concept that progress would not happen without some sort of profit motive is completely ridiculous.
 
~Corsair#01~ said:
You didn't even read the Wikipedia article, did you?
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What part of the article claimed he would be imprisoned for life as you alleged? One appeals court even maintained the more serious charges against him had no basis at all, although it didn't have jurisdiction in Massachusetts.

I seriously doubt he would have gotten much more than a slap on the wrists, as evidenced by such a low bail.
 
Some pics and articles on JS on the Cyber thread.
 
Formaldehyde said:
And he wasn't much of a "child prodigy". He was merely a member of the working group that drafted RSS, which is cool enough without exaggeration.

But I think it is always sad when someone commits suicide.
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Dude, he was part of that group when he was 14!! That's pretty prodigy-like for me.

Federal prosecutors already hated this guy for his previous public records data dump (PACER), so I think it is reasonable to expect for him to get a higher sentence than somebody else.

I'm not sure if you can necessarily pin his suicide to just the JSTOR legal problems, since he was reported to have struggled with depression for several years. I think it's a very sad story, given that Swartz accomplished more at 26 than just about any of us will in our entire lives.
 
downtown said:
Dude, he was part of that group when he was 14!! That's pretty prodigy-like for me.
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Literally anybody can volunteer to take part in working groups. While it is fairly unusual for 14-year-olds to take part merely because they don't usually have the interest to do so, it is hardly that significant. They may not have even known how old he really was, not that it really matters.

downtown said:
I'm not sure if you can necessarily pin his suicide to just the JSTOR legal problems, since he was reported to have struggled with depression for several years. I think it's a very sad story, given that Swartz accomplished more at 26 than just about any of us will in our entire lives.
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Indeed. If this caused him to commit suicide it was far more the trigger than the reason.

He didn't really "accomplish" all that much in terms of the software industry. But I have no idea how much his part ownership of Reddit was worth.

One thing is for certain. He did a really stupid thing by stealing intellectual property in such a blatant manner. He also likely violated the trust of a fairly influential person at MIT to gain unrestricted access to JSTOR in the first place.
 
Formaldehyde said:
He also likely violated the trust of a fairly influential person at MIT to gain unrestricted access to JSTOR in the first place.
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Did I miss something about what happened? JSTOR and MIT have essentially nothing in place to prevent unlimited access, all he used was a python script to scrape URLs for cURL.

I could walk over to my local university tomorrow and do the same thing.
 
According to Wiki, there is only a limited amount of older public domain info on JSTOR. That you even need a special non disclosure to get access to the full text versions of the material.

JSTOR (pronounced jay-stor;[3] short for Journal Storage) is a digital library founded in 1995. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now also includes books and primary sources, and current issues of journals.[4] It provides full-text searches of more than a thousand journals. More than 7,000 institutions in more than 150 countries have access to JSTOR. Most access is by subscription, but some old public domain content is freely available to anyone, and in 2012 JSTOR launched a program of free access to some further articles for individual scholars and researchers who register.
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In addition to the main site, JSTOR's labs group operates an open service that allows access to the contents of the archives for the purposes of corpus analysis at its Data for Research service.[8] This site offers a search facility with graphical indication of the article coverage and loose integration into the main JSTOR site. Users can create focused sets of articles and then request a dataset containing word and n-gram frequencies and basic metadata. They are notified when the dataset is ready and can download it in either XML or CSV formats. The service does not offer full-text, though academics can request that from JSTOR subject to a non-disclosure agreement.
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The availability of most journals on JSTOR is controlled by a "moving wall", which is an agreed-upon delay between the current volume of the journal and the latest volume available on JSTOR. This time period is specified by agreement between JSTOR and the publisher and is usually 3–5 years. Publishers can request that the period of a "moving wall" be changed or request discontinuation of coverage. Formerly publishers could also request that the "moving wall" be changed to a "fixed wall" – a specified date after which JSTOR would not add new volumes to its database. As of November 2010, "fixed wall" agreements were still in effect with three publishers of 29 journals made available online through sites controlled by the publishers.[21]

However, in 2010, through its Current Scholarship Program, JSTOR started adding current issues of certain journals.[22]
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Why do you think Schwartz was prosecuted for stealing the material if it is all freely accessible?

He was like the Bradley Manning of unclassified scientific journals.
 
~Corsair#01~ said:
I was thinking about making a thread about Aaron Swartz's death. I guess this will have to do.

Swartz tried to make the articles on JSTOR, a university publishing network, free for everyone to read. The US government felt that this terrible crime merited locking him away for the rest of his life.

Swartz was a child prodigy who became a self-made millionaire. He could have done anything he chose to, but he chose to try to help others less fortunate than himself. He believed that free access to knowledge was the foundation of human progress and tried to make that knowledge freely available to everyone, all of us, without exception.

When the US government moved to lock him away for the rest of his life, no-one spoke up for him. Not the journalists, not the Democratic party, not the millions of people who used the Reddit site and RSS technology that he was central to designing.

In the end, he decided that this cold, selfish world which he did so much to try to help wasn't worth living in anymore. Frankly, I think he may have been right.

RIP, never forgotten.
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Don't forget. JSTOR later released all the files for free anyway.
 
Source?
 
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