Aaron Swartz: passionate advocate for making public documents and as much information as possible available on the Web
By pertl
-
At age 13, wins a a competition for young people who create “useful, educational, and collaborative” noncommercial websites.
-
At age 14, Swartz was a member of the working group that authored the RSS 1.0 web syndication specification, a lesser-used offshoot of an earlier RSS version
-
Swartz acquired the Library of Congress's complete bibliographic dataset: the library charged fees to access this, but as a government document, it was not copyright-protected within the USA. By posting the data on Open Library, Swartz made it freely available
-
Reddit is a social news and entertainment website where registered users submit content in the form of either a link or a text ("self") post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down", which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.
-
In 2010, he founded DemandProgress.org, a “campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.”
-
Swartz was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly downloading millions of documents from JSTOR through the MIT network — using a laptop hidden in a basement network closet in MIT’s Building 16 — with the intent to distribute them. Wire fraud and computer fraud. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, lead prosecuter, has been sharply criticized following Swartz' suicide for her office's handling of the hacking case against him
-
Swartz appeared in court and pleaded not guilty to all charges.
-
MIT ArticleAaron Swartz commits suicide by hanging in Brooklyn, NY.
-
Alex Stamos, a computer forensics investigator employed by the Swartz legal defense team, posted an online summary of the expert testimony he had been prepared to present in the JSTOR case, had Swartz lived to see trial. He wrote: If I had taken the stand as planned and had been asked by the prosecutor whether Aaron’s actions were “wrong”, I would probably have replied that what Aaron did would better be described as “inconsiderate”.
-
