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Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz58 posts

Aaron Swartz was an American entrepreneur and internet activist. He was known as one of the early members of Reddit and for helping to create the RSS specification. He had been charged with stealing computer documents from MIT but before the trial he committed suicide on Jan 11, 2013, at the age of 26.

 

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8 Nov, 1986

Aaron Swartz born in Chicago

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Aaron Swartz is born in Chicago to William and Susan. He has two younger brothers, Noah and Ben.

Swartz paternal grandfather, William Swartz, was a multimillionaire businessman and founding director of the Albert Einstein Peace Prize Foundation.

William Swartz, who died in 1987 at age 75, was active in the nuclear-disarmament group Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. He also served as a director of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a Chicago-based magazine that calls out threats from nuclear weapons, climate change and emerging technologies in the life sciences.

Though Swartz attended North Shore Country Day School, a small private school in Winnetka, he became a teen-aged proponent of “unschooling.” He left high school during his freshman year to study on his own at home.

6 Dec, 2000

Contributes to RSS 1.0 Spec

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Swartz contributes to the specification for RSS 1.0. RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.

2004

Attends Stanford

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Swartz attends Stanford University for a year, leaving to start the software company Infogami, a startup that was funded by Y Combinator’s first Summer Founders Program. Infogami was built around a wiki backend, a subject of interest for Swartz since his early effort to develop ”theinfo”, a wiki-based encyclopedia

2006

Swartz merges Infogami with Reddit

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Aaron Swartz merges Infogami with Reddit where he joins Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. The four Reddit staff work out of a small 3-bedroom apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts.

4 Sep, 2006

‘Who Writes Wikipedia’

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Swartz writes an article examining the contributions to Wikipedia articles written during his candidacy for the Wikimedia Foundation board election in 2006. In the article Swartz disproves JimmyWales notion that the encyclopedia was created by 500-1000 core writers, and shows it was mainly created by occasional writers, many of whom did not register. He says this knowledge should inform Wikipedia policy:

If Wikipedia is written by occasional contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit. Unfortunately, precisely because such people are only occasional contributors, their opinions aren’t heard by the current Wikipedia process. They don’t get involved in policy debates, they don’t go to meetups, and they don’t hang out with Jimbo Wales. And so things that might help them get pushed on the backburner, assuming they’re even proposed. Out of sight is out of mind, so it’s a short hop to thinking these invisible people aren’t particularly important. Thus Wales’s belief that 500 people wrote half an encyclopedia. Thus his assumption that outsiders contribute mostly vandalism and nonsense. And thus the comments you sometimes hear that making it hard to edit the site might be a good thing.

31 Oct, 2006

Reddit bought by Condé Nast

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Condé Nast Publications acquires Reddit for a reported $20 million. All four Reddit employees relocate from Boston to Wired’s San Francisco office and become part of Wired Digital, which the company bought three months previously. Conde Naste:

Our goal will be to build Reddit as an independent company by collaborating with Wired through the integration of its core technology, and by offering partnerships to allow other companies to do the same.

At this time the site has 70,000 daily unique visitors and approximately 700,000 or so page views.

1 Jul, 2008

Publishes ‘Guerilla Open Access Manifesto’

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Swartz, while in Eremo, Italy, releases a “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto,” calling for activists to “fight back” against the sequestering of scholarly papers and information behind pay walls.

It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file-sharing networks.

4 Sep, 2008

Downloads PACER database

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Carl Malamud, the founder of nonprofit group, Public.Resource.org puts out a request for activists to go to 17 libraries around the country and download federal court decisions, briefs and other legal papers form the (fee-based) PACER database so he can post them for free on the web. Swartz manages to download an estimated 20 percent of the entire database: 19,856,160 pages of text. The downloads continue until September 22, 2008.

29 Sep, 2008

PACER system suspended, FBI investigates

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The Government Printing Office announces that that the free PACER pilot program is suspended, “pending an evaluation.” A couple of weeks later, a Government Printing Office official, Richard G. Davis, tells librarians that “the security of the Pacer service was compromised. The F.B.I. is conducting an investigation.” No charges were brought against Swartz.

Sep 2010

Downloads JSTOR database

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Swartz allegedly uses several methods to grab articles from the JSTOR database, including breaking into a computer-wiring closet on the M.I.T. campus and setting up a laptop with a false identity on the school network for free JSTOR access under the name Gary Host — or when shortened for the e-mail address, “ghost.” When retrieving the computer, he hides his face behind a bicycle helmet, peeking out through the ventilation holes. The flood of downloads is so great that it crashed some JSTOR servers and JSTOR blocked access to the network from M.I.T. and its users for several days.

27 Sep, 2010

Starts Demand Progress

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Swartz founds Demand Progress, a Progressive Political Action Committee and grassroots activism organization. The group runs online campaigns and lobbies in Washington, D.C. and in various states for progressive causes, such as stopping Internet censorship and issues of privacy.

6 Jan, 2011

Swartz arrested at MIT

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After investigators at MIT began to suspect that someone is illegally downloading material from the JSTOR archive they trace the leak to a basement wiring closet where they find a laptop and external hard drive hooked up directly to a network. The laptop and the hard drive are hidden from view by a cardboard box. Secret Service Agent Michael places a surveillance camera in the closet. The surveillance images show Swartz entering the closet three days in a row. Using his white bicylce helmet as a mask, Swartz attempts to cover his face from the cameras as he tries to retrieve the computer equipment that he left their weeks before. On January 6th an officer sees Swartz attempt to leave MIT property with the laptop and hard drive. At 2:11 p.m. Swartz is ID’d on a bicycle on Massachusetts Avenue by an MIT police officer, according to his own report. That report states that when he encounters Captain Albert Pierce of the MIT Police Department, Swartz jumps off his bike and runs down Lee Street. He runs approximately 400 feet before being handcuffed and charged with breaking and entering.

24 May, 2011

MPA attacks Demand Progress

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The Motion Picture Association of America accuses Demand Progress of being allied with “offshore rogue websites that promote the theft and illegal marketing of American products like movies, video games, and software.” The basis of the accusation was a post on the front page of BitTorrent tracker Demonoid linking to the Demand Progress petition against Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). The MPAA also accused Demand Progress of faking signatures on their petitions.

16 Jun, 2011

Demand Progress denies

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Demand Progress denies any affiliation with Demonoid and says that there is a verification process for signatures collected online.

19 Jul, 2011

Charged with illegal download of JSTOR database

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Swartz is charged by U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer, in relation to downloading 4.8 million articles worth $1.5 million dollars and other documents — nearly the entire library — of JSTOR, a nonprofit online service for distributing scholarly articles online. Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines. United States attorney, Carmen M. Ortiz, said:

Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.

According to the indictment, in September of 2010, Swartz used several methods to grab articles, including using a program called keepgrabbing.py and breaking into a computer-wiring closet on the M.I.T. campus and setting up a laptop with a false identity on the school network for free JSTOR access under the name Gary Host — or when shortened for the e-mail address, “ghost.”

Swartz is accused of repeatedly spoofing the MAC address — an identifier that is usually static — of his computer after MIT blocked his computer based on that number. The grand jury indictment also notes that Swartz didn’t provide a real e-mail address when registering on the network.

When retrieving the computer, he hid his face behind a bicycle helmet, peeking out through the ventilation holes. The flood of downloads was so great that it crashed some JSTOR servers, the indictment stated, and JSTOR blocked access to the network from M.I.T. and its users for several days.

Swartz returned the hard drives containing the articles to JSTOR and promised that the material would not be disseminated. JSTOR did not pursue charges but referred the case to the United States Attorney’s Office. Swartz surrenders to authorities the same day, pleading not guilty on all accounts, and is released on $100,000 bail.

23 Jul, 2012

Art Project

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Lauren Cornell uses Image Atlas as the front page of his site.

16 Sep, 2012

Seeks donations for Swartz legal defense

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Bettina Neuefeind, wife of Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig  organizes free.aaronsw.com to raise money for Swartz defense. Larry Lessig, is the director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University, of which Swartz is a former fellow. His alleged crime is based on the belief in fair use, an ideal that Creative Commons is know for promoting.

Neuefeind describes herself as “a housing and disability rights lawyer, mother of three and social activist very focused on public health, nutrition, sustainability and social justice.”

11 Jan, 2013

Aaron Swartz commits suicide age 26

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Swartz body is found by his girlfriend at his home in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn at around 9.30am. He was 26. Swartz’ attorney confirms in an email to The Tech blog.

The tragic and heartbreaking information you received is, regrettably, true

He left no suicide note. Swartz’s mother writes on Hacker News:

Aaron has been depressed about his case/upcoming trial, but we had no idea what he was going through was this painful. Aaron was a terrific young man. He contributed a lot to the world in his short life and I regret the loss of all the things he had yet to accomplish. As you can imagine, we all miss him dearly. The grief is unfathomable.

12 Jan, 2013

‘He belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter’

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Doctorow at BoingBoing writes:

I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. He was working on XML stuff (he co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14) and came to San Francisco often, and would stay with Lisa Rein, a friend of mine who was also an XML person and who took care of him and assured his parents he had adult supervision. In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.

This morning, a lot of people are speculating that Aaron killed himself because he was worried about doing time. That might be so…. But Aaron was also a person who’d had problems with depression for many years. He’d written about the subject publicly, and talked about it with his friends.