互联网上的一代风云人物 Aaron Swartz 离世，27岁 (抱歉，英文)（图）

大清太平

主要根据NY times 和 wiki 节选，重点标记是由我本人所加。

NYTimes没有提到SOPA行动 (到底谁应该住手？  （图）大清太平® (1297 字, 点击111次) 2012-1-18 18:7:8)，wiki上有描述。 

--- 大清太平注

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/technology/aaron-swartz-internet-activist-dies-at-26.html?_r=0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Internet Activist, a Creator of RSS, Is Dead at 26, Apparently a Suicide

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

An uncle, Michael Wolf, said that Mr. Swartz, 26, had apparently hanged himself, and that a friend of Mr. Swartz’s 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, who had written in the past about battling depression and suicidal thoughts, 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.

Mr. Swartz led an often itinerant life that included dropping out of Stanford, forming companies and organizations, and becoming a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

He formed a company that merged with Reddit, the popular news and information site. He also co-founded Demand Progress, a group that promotes online campaigns on social justice issues — including a successful effort, with other groups, to oppose a Hollywood-backed Internet piracy bill.

But he also found trouble when he took part in efforts to release information to the public that he felt should be freely available. In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents.

The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of public.resource.org, have long argued that such documents should be free because they are produced at public expense. Joining Mr. Malamud’s efforts to make the documents public by posting legally obtained files to the Internet for free access, Mr. Swartz wrote an elegant little program to download 20 million pages of documents from free library accounts, or roughly 20 percent of the enormous database.

The government shut down the free library program, and Mr. Malamud feared that legal trouble might follow even though he felt they had violated no laws. As he recalled in a newspaper account, “I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.” He recalled telling Mr. Swartz: “You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer.”

Mr. Swartz recalled in a 2009 interview, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.” He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while and then called his mother.

The federal government investigated but did not prosecute.

In 2011, however, Mr. Swartz went beyond that, according to a federal indictment. In an effort to provide free public access to JSTOR, he broke into computer networks at M.I.T. by means that included gaining entry to a utility closet on campus and leaving a laptop that signed into the university network under a false account, federal officials said.

Mr. Swartz turned over his hard drives with 4.8 million documents, and JSTOR declined to pursue the case. But Carmen M. Ortiz, a United States attorney, pressed on, saying that “stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”

Founded in 1995, JSTOR, or Journal Storage, is nonprofit, but institutions can pay tens of thousands of dollars for a subscription that bundles scholarly publications online. JSTOR says it needs the money to collect and to distribute the material and, in some cases, subsidize institutions that cannot afford it. On Wednesday, JSTOR announced that it would open its archives for 1,200 journals to free reading by the public on a limited basis.

Mr. Malamud said that while he did not approve of Mr. Swartz’s actions at M.I.T., “access to knowledge and access to justice have become all about access to money, and Aaron tried to change that. That should never have been considered a criminal activity.”

Mr. Swartz did not talk much about his impending trial, Quinn Norton, a close friend, said on Saturday, but when he did, it was clear that “it pushed him to exhaustion. It pushed him beyond.”

Recent years had been hard for Mr. Swartz, Ms. Norton said, and she characterized him “in turns tough and delicate.” He had “struggled with chronic, painful illness as well as depression,” she said, without specifying the illness, but he was still hopeful “at least about the world.”

Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and online activist, posted a tribute to Mr. Swartz on BoingBoing.net, a blog he co-edits. In an e-mail, he called Mr. Swartz “uncompromising, principled, smart, flawed, loving, caring, and brilliant.”

 “The world was a better place with him in it,” he said.

原文后面内容略去。。。。

from wiki ========================>

Life and works

Swartz in 2002 (age 15) with Lawrence Lessig at the launch party for Creative Commons

Swartz was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Susan and Robert Swartz.[11] Swartz's family lived in Highland Park, Illinois. His father founded a software company, and from a young age Swartz was interested in computing, ardently studying computers, the Internet and Internet culture.[12] When he was 13, Swartz was a winner of the ArsDigita Prize, a competition for young people who created "useful, educational, and collaborative" non-commercial Web sites. The prize included a trip to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and meetings with Internet notables. At the age of 14 Swartz was collaborating with experts in networking standards as a member of the working group that authored the RSS 1.0 Specification. Writing in Yahoo! News, Virginia Heffernansaid about Swartz, "he agitated without cease—or compensation—for the free-culture movement."[13]. Swartz attended North Shore Country Day School, a small private school in Winnetka, Illinois. [14]

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

This section requires expansion.(January 2013)

Swartz in 2012 protesting against SOPA

Swartz was significantly involved with a campaign to prevent the passing of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill that sought to monitor the Internet for copyright violations. Following the defeat of the bill, Swartz was the keynote speaker at the F2C:Freedom to Connect 2012 event in Washington DC, US on May 21, 2012—Swartz's speech was entitled "How we stopped SOPA"[24] and he informed the audience:

It was really stopped by the people; the people themselves—they killed the bill dead. So dead, that when members of Congress propose something now that even touches the Internet, they have to give a long speech beforehand about how it is definitely not like SOPA. So dead, that when you ask Congressional staffers about it, they groan and shake their heads, like it's all a bad dream they're trying really hard to forget. So dead, that it's kind of hard to believe this story; hard to remember how close it all came to actually passing. Hard to remember how this could have gone any other way. But it wasn't a dream or a nightmare—it was all very real. And it will happen again; sure, it will have another name, and maybe a different excuse, and probably do its damage in a different way, but make no mistake, the enemies of the freedom to connect have not disappeared. The fire in those politician's eyes has not been put out. There are a lot of people, a lot of powerful people, who wanna clamp down on the Internet. And to be honest, there aren't a whole lot who have a vested interest in protecting it from all of that ... We won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom ... the senators were right—the Internet really is out of control![24]

Swartz also presented on this topic at an event organized by ThoughtWorks.[25]

Legal problems

[edit]PACER

In 2009, he allegedly downloaded and publicly released approximately 20% of the PACER database of United States federal court documents managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.[28][29] He had accessed the system as part of a free trial of PACER at 17 libraries around the country, which was suspended "pending an evaluation" as a result of Swartz's actions. Those actions brought him under investigation by the FBI, but the case was closed two months later with no charges being filed.[29]

[edit]JSTOR

On July 19, 2011, Swartz was charged by Carmen Ortiz, the 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 roughly 4 million academic journal articles from JSTOR.[30] According to the indictment against him, Swartz surreptitiously attached a laptop to MIT's computer network, which allowed him to "rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR."[31] Prosecutors in the case claim Swartz acted with the intention of making the papers available on P2P file-sharing sites.[32]

Swartz surrendered to authorities, pleading not guilty on all accounts, and was released on US$100,000 unsecured bail.[33][34] Prosecution of the case continued, with charges of wire fraud and computer fraud, carrying a potential prison term of up to 35 years and a fine of up to $1 million.[35][36] After Swartz's arrest, JSTOR put out a statement saying it would not pursue civil litigation against him,[33][37] though MIT remained silent on the proceedings.[38]

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Stephen P. Heymann and Scott L. Garland[39][40][41] pursued the criminal case against Swartz under U.S. attorney Carmen Ortiz, who justified the charges by stating "stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars."[33] The case tested the reach of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in 1984 to enhance the government’s ability to prosecute hackers who accessed computers to steal information or to disrupt or destroy computer functionality.

Shortly before Swartz's death, JSTOR announced that it would make "more than 4.5 million articles" available to the public for free.[42]—but capped at three articles every two weeks[43]—This announcement did not effect the prosecution, ongoing before his death.

Public response

Supporters of Swartz responded with an effort called #pdftribute to promote Open Access, a cause Swartz had long supported.[52][53] More than 10,000 people signed a petition to the White House calling for the removal of Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney involved in the case, "for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz."[54]

 

  本贴由[大清太平]最后编辑于：2013-1-14 13:12:27  

www.ddhw.org---

salmonfish

an assault weapon too, what could happen?

大清太平

http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/01/rss-creator-aaron-swartz-dead-at-26 AARON SWARTZ, the 26-year-old computer genius, activist, and technology innovator known as a hero of the open-access movement—which promotes use of the Internet to provide free and easy access to the world’s knowledge—committed suicide last Friday in New York City, according to authorities and various media outlets. He was a Safra fellow studying ethics at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society in July 2011 when a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading five million articles and documents—nearly the entire library, according to Insidehighered.com. Swartz helped create RSS—a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works (blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video) in a standardized format—at the age of 14. He later became an Internet folk hero, according to theNew York Times, fighting to make many Web files free and open to the public. TheLos Angeles Times reported that he studied sociology as a freshman at Stanford, but left after a year because, he later explained,  he “didn’t find it a very intellectual atmosphere.” He then moved to Cambridge, where he began work on a project that in 2005 turned into the social news website Reddit, which taps “the wisdom of the crowds” by letting users submit and rank news and other online content. Reddit was purchased by Condé Nast in 2006 for a little less than $5 million, according to Forbes. Although Swartz had legal access to JSTOR through his Harvard affiliation, the indictment describes his use of an MIT guest account to download the articles, something he had no legal right to do. Swartz, who was open about his struggle with depression, pleaded not guilty; his trial in federal court was scheduled to begin next month. He faced a jail term of as much as 35 years and fines of up to $1 million. JSTOR has released a statement in the wake of Swartz’s death: “We have had inquiries about JSTOR’s view of this sad event given the charges against Aaron and the trial scheduled for April. The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset, since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge. At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content. To that end, Aaron returned the data he had in his possession and JSTOR settled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011.” The statement issued by Swartz’s family called his death “not simply a personal tragedy,” and blamed a “criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach,” as well as decisions made by leaders at MIT: The U.S. Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles. Lawrence Lessig, Furman professor of law and leadership at the Law School and director of the Safra Center for Ethics, served as Swartz’s lawyer until Harvard—according to Lessig’s blog—“created a conflict that made it impossible for him to continue.” In a recent post, Lessig recalls his friendship with Swartz and states: …the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April—his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. Gordon McKay professor of computer science Harry Lewis used his own blog to comment on the Internet response to Swartz’s death, mentioning one petition to pardon him posthumously for the crime for which he was to stand trial, another to remove the U.S. attorney responsible for prosecuting his case, and a paper-posting protest on Twitter, “in honor of Swartz’s JSTOR-liberating hack.” “I leave it to others to speculate on the symbolic significance, but it’s pretty clear he wasn’t accessing anything he wasn’t already authorized to have, and he wasn’t planning to make any money by doing it,” Lewis wrote. “Put yourself in the shoes of the alleged criminals, and don’t try to build your career by showing how harsh you can be. Hounding a young person may cost a career, or a life. Gentle hands, I beg you all.” Swartz’s family said in a statement: Aaron’s insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We’re grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world.       本贴由[大清太平]最后编辑于：2013-1-14 18:29:29       本贴由[大清太平]最后编辑于：2013-1-14 18:29:51   www.ddhw.org---

大清太平

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/letter-on-death-of-aaron-swartz.html MIT President L. Rafael Reif emailed the following message to the MIT community. To the members of the MIT community: Yesterday we received the shocking and terrible news that on Friday in New York, Aaron Swartz, a gifted young man well known and admired by many in the MIT community, took his own life. With this tragedy, his family and his friends suffered an inexpressible loss, and we offer our most profound condolences. Even for those of us who did not know Aaron, the trail of his brief life shines with his brilliant creativity and idealism. Although Aaron had no formal affiliation with MIT, I am writing to you now because he was beloved by many members of our community and because MIT played a role in the legal struggles that began for him in 2011. I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many. It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.  I will not attempt to summarize here the complex events of the past two years. Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT. I have asked Professor 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. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it. I hope we will all reach out to those members of our community we know who may have been affected by Aaron’s death. As always, MIT Medical is available to provide expert counseling, but there is no substitute for personal understanding and support. With sorrow and deep sympathy, L. Rafael Reif       本贴由[大清太平]最后编辑于：2013-1-14 18:37:36   www.ddhw.org---

大猫日记

  Condolence, though I've yet subscribed any RSS.

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veil

  天才爱走极端，不易“和谐”。可惜了

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拜晴MM所赐, 帅

大清太平

  "理想主义“

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