Harvard's Aaron Swartz indicted on MIT hacking charges

Source: The Guardian

A self-styled digital Robin Hood downloaded more than 4 million academic articles before being tracked down by US authorities in a case that promises to become a cause célèbre for data use and freedom of information.

A grand jury in Massachusetts has indicted Aaron Swartz, a 24-year-old programmer and fellow at Harvard University's Safra Centre for Ethics, on charges of wire and computer fraud for his marathon downloading spree.

The indictment also alleges that Swartz caused damage of at least $5,000 (£3,000) to computers and unlawfully obtained information over more than three months while he was copying the huge cache of articles from the database of Jstor, the giant US-based online academic repository.

Starting with a standard Acer laptop, Swartz began by using anonymous log-ins on the network of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in September 2010. As the size of his downloads began to alarm MIT and Jstor staff they kept trying to block Swartz's access – only for the 24-year-old to evade their attempts using simple techniques to disguise his log ins and mask his computer.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/21/aaron-swartz-indicted-hacking-charges

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Mark Zuckerberg wannabe?

This has been the subject of much merriment among my fellow Yale alumni. :rofl:

-K-A, Y'85, cum laude

(CBS News) Hostile sexual environment at Yale?

Federal civil rights officials are looking into complaints by Yale University students that the Ivy League school in New Haven, Conn. has a sexually hostile environment.

They also allege the university failed to adequately respond to incidents of sexual harassment.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/04/04/earlyshow/living/parenting/main20050348.shtml

He was a legacy and all, y'know.

Hahvahd let him into grad school after he'd already shown what a :dunce: he was.

Also, our admissions standards for legacies tightened up quite considerably right around '68. Coincidence? I think not. :tinfoilhat:

...that the authors of those papers were denied anything by Aaron Swartz's "piracy." In fact, I'll bet you'd be hard pressed to find more than a handful of authors who actually object to their papers being downloaded and distributed as broadly as possible. It's unclear to me who is actually harmed here other than Jstor, which charges a fee for access to those articles (many of which are also freely available from their original authors, either on their own websites or via a simple email request). Academic publishing is not like the arts in that the authors of academic journal articles never expect to receive any monetary compensation for distributing their work, so only the middle-men can claim any financial loss.

i'm not catching the risk/reward here...

who would like to do their work without draining their budget? Just a guess.

More at http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/07/reddit-co-creator-turned-progressive-activist-aaron-swartz-charged-in-mit-theft.php?ref=fpblg and http://blog.demandprogress.org/2011/07/federal-government-indicts-former-demand-progress-executive-director-for-downloading-too-many-journal-articles/ .

The implication seems to be that Swartz may have acted in deliberate provocation – possibly to bring to a head the issue of whether information should, per the "Hacker Ethic," be free. (See http://c-cyte.blogspot.com/2011/07/hacker-ethic.html ).

He is, if anything, the opposite of a Zuckerberg.

Swartz's act may in fact have been intended as the next salvo in the infowars.

that would be cruel and unusual punishment.