Aaron Swartz, Precocious Programmer and Internet Activist, Dies at 26

[WestVirginiaRebel]

New York Times:

Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment.

He was 26.

An uncle, Michael Wolf, said that Mr. Swartz had apparently hanged himself, and that Mr. Swartz’s girlfriend had discovered the body.

At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that allows users to subscribe to online information. He later became an Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public. But in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the entire library.

Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were pending at the time of Mr. Swartz’s death, carrying potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.

“Aaron built surprising new things that changed the flow of information around the world,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who served in the Obama administration as a technology adviser. She called Mr. Swartz “a complicated prodigy” and said “graybeards approached him with awe.”

Mr. Wolf said he would remember his nephew as a young man who “looked at the world, and had a certain logic in his brain, and the world didn’t necessarily fit in with that logic, and that was sometimes difficult.”

The Tech, a newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported Mr. Swartz’s death early Saturday.

________

 

Death by prosecution?

[Valin]

@WestVirginiaRebel

 

 

 

I'd make a small wager the conspiracy nuts are going full bore with this. I can hardly wait for Alex Jones's highly informed take on this.

[clearvision]

precocious at 26?

 

He was facing extensive prison time. Maybe more than he wanted to deal with.

 

By the way, where is the rope ban lobby?

[Rheo]

@WestVirginiaRebel

 

 

 

I'd make a small wager the conspiracy nuts are going full bore with this. I can hardly wait for Alex Jones's highly informed take on this.

Are you referring to the potential pharmas's he was on? I would like to know.

Doesn't change anything, but would be interesting to see if he was.

[Valin]

precocious at 26?

 

He was facing extensive prison time. Maybe more than he wanted to deal with.

 

I'm thinking he might have had Issues, by that I mean here we have (apparently) a prodigy, and he moved in a world where he met nothing but success, then he suddenly got push back (Federal charges) and was not able do deal with it.

 

 

@WestVirginiaRebel

 

 

 

I'd make a small wager the conspiracy nuts are going full bore with this. I can hardly wait for Alex Jones's highly informed take on this.

Are you referring to the potential pharmas's he was on? I would like to know.

Doesn't change anything, but would be interesting to see if he was.

 

Maybe but more your grassy knoll 2nd gunman, truther/birther types. Who see giant insidous plots everywhere.

[Valin]

Via Meadia: The Death of Aaron Swartz

1/13/13

 

 

(Snip)But we did spend some time yesterday reading his blog and other writings around the web, and we were struck by the young man’s probing, hungry intellect. One passage in a talk he gave, titled “How To Get a Job Like Mine“, particularly stands out:

 

What’s the secret? How can I boil down things I do into pithy sentences that make myself sound as good as possible? Here goes:

 

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.

Say yes to everything. I have a lot of trouble saying no, to a pathological degree — whether to projects or to interviews or to friends. As a result, I attempt a lot and even if most of it fails, I’ve still done something.

Assume nobody else has any idea what they’re doing either. A lot of people refuse to try something because they feel they don’t know enough about it or they assume other people must have already tried everything they could have thought of. Well, few people really have any idea how to do things right and even fewer are to try new things, so usually if you give your best shot at something you’ll do pretty well.

 

Good advice for young people everywhere. Be sure to read the whole thing.

 

Like many of the incredibly talented, larger-than-life people who have emerged from the tech sector in the past two or three decades, Aaron Swartz was the product of an America that encourages wild free-thinking and risk-taking. And while we certainly wouldn’t go so far as to say that his suicide signals the end of that particularly American ethos (as the Washington Post‘s Wonk Blog does), it’s terribly sad that he met his end like this. We are the poorer for his passing, but we believe that the passions that shaped him live on.

[Valin]

MIT president orders review of Aaron Swartz episode

JOSH GERSTEIN

1/13/13

 

The president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced Sunday that he has ordered a top-to-bottom review of the university's actions in a computer hacking case that led to the federal prosecution of renowed programmer and web activist Aaron Swartz, who killed himself last week as he awaited a federal trial on 13 felony counts.

 

"Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT," MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in an email sent to the university community Sunday afternoon and relayed to POLITICO by an MIT spokesperson.

 

Reif said he had asked a computer science and electrical engineering progfessor at the Cambridge, Mass. school, Hal Abelson, "to lead a thorough analysis of MIT's involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present."

 

(Snip)

[Draggingtree]