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4 Sep, 2014

MIT bookstore accepts Bitcoins

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MIT’s Kendall Square bookstore may be the  first campus retail store to accept Bitcoins as a form of payment. Jerry Murphy, president of the The Harvard Cooperative Society, the corporate branch that manages the MIT COOP and the Harvard COOP in Harvard Square:

In the college industry, to my knowledge, I believe we are…Part of our decision to do this was based on the fact that we have had a Bitcoin exchange in our store for six months now. MIT has a reputation of being on the cutting edge of a lot of things, and the student body has an interest in Bitcoin. All these factors came together and we said, ‘let’s give it a shot and see if it makes sense.

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.