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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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.