Saturday, 19 January 2013

RIP Aaron Swartz Legacy

In 1970, a 14-year-old boy dialed into a nationwide computer network, uploaded a virus he had written and caused the entire network to crash.

That boy was Bill Gates. Five years later, he founded Microsoft.

A few years later, two young men went around college dorms in California selling boxes of wires that let students bypass telephone-company restrictions and make long-distance calls for free.

Those young men were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and a later venture they started, Apple, is now the most valuable company in the world.

In 2010, another young man, who had already founded a multimillion-dollar company, broke into a utility closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He hooked up a laptop to the campus network and downloaded 4 million academic journal articles, most of them in the public domain, from a paid archive to which he had a subscription.

He was arrested, indicted twice on multiple counts of fraud and, at a trial that was to have begun in April, faced 50 years in federal prison and a $1 million fine.

Very sadly Aaron Swartz has committed suicide on January 11, 2013 in New York City in age of 26.



Aaron was a computer geek and hacker, Who always rise his voice for freedome of internet. Aaron created RSS Web feed system when he was only 14 years old.

He believed in freedom of internet and free information. Knowledge must be shared. He was one of leading person in fight against SOPA. He warned "“SOPA will have yet 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. Next time they might just win. Let’s not let that happen.”

Aaron was mentally torched at the time of his death. He was punished for 35 years in federal prison for hacking the MIT system to gain access to millions of scholarly articles from JSTOR to make public and free for all.


On Saturday, Swartz’s family released a statement
"Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US 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."

Hackers for all around the world started the #OpAaronSwartz to shut down the MIT and department of Justice Websites using DDOS.

No comments:

Post a Comment