Articles paid for by the public through grants btw
With authors often paying for open access publications literally out of their very own money, not just grants.
Not at the time this happened. Aaron’s case was one of the motivating factors that led to the Open Access publication movement gaining enough traction that authors could publish that way. JSTOR access is paid for and administered on college campuses by libraries and librarians as a whole field felt terrible both about the paid publication system and the way Aaron was treated. As a community of professionals, the Librarian and Information Science community pushed very hard for the adoption of Open Access publishing into the Academic community.
Good to know we had something very good out of this.
Now, let’s beat the living hell out of publishers so that those crazy open access publication prices would decimate.
Because right now, I literally cannot afford publishing further than Q3, which already eats up most of my personal grant earnings (which are so bad I can say I work purely for an idea).
Look, the kid was a hero, but this is also patently false.
He was not sentenced to 35 years. The trial hadn’t started. 35 years was the maximum possible sentence. He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected.
We don’t need to spin lies to make his story more tragic than it already is.
35 years max, plea for 1/2 that was rejected. He was going to get the book thrown at him to make an example. 5 years minimum but I wouldn’t doubt 10-20.
The rapist traitor that headed a insurrection on Jan 6 2021 has never spent a day in jail and is still the frontrunner for president to be legally elected in 2024.
still the frontrunner for president to be legally elected in 2024.
The front runner? Really?
I’m not being sarcastic. Im genuinely interested, but can’t be arsed to start going through polls because it’d mean going through the biases of the pollers.
Really it’s too close to call but he does appear to have a slight edge if you had to pick a favorite.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/
Just remember polls gave Hillary almost a guaranteed win. For all intents and purposes, Trump is the front runner regardless of what any polling says
And the result were statistically within what they predicted. She did get the popular vote but lost in key states where the margins were small.
No, they did not. That’s not what happened.
Polling probably has taken a dive in accuracy since then, though. Uptake in cell phone use in younger generations has been lingering over the industry for a long time, and it’s finally caught up with them.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
72% chance from here. Probably high enough that swing state voters opted to stay home. This was the vibe practically all October. The FBI felt confident enough in her win to announce they were investigating her to appear unbiased.
Polling being inaccurate for whatever reason doesn’t change the article after article assuring everyone Hillary had it in the bag.
72% chance means Trump needed to flip two coins and have them both come up heads. It’s not that ridiculous.
From the nearly all the polls I see, yes. But like you said, bias of pollers. I’ve seen a few that go more in depth to try and figure out the “responds to polls” bias, but I still only see biden ahead by a margin. With those small numbers of concentrated effort vs the wide reach general polls, trump is. It does not instill any level of confidence in me that the “general” polls don’t reflect the “general” voting bias. Even without all of this analysis, just a few million voting for trump is unbelievably concerning to not just the future of the US, but the world that this single country dominates. These fascists are campaigning on the cut your nose to spite your face philosophy.
plea for 1/2 that was rejected
The rejected plea was for 6 months.
6 months is 1/2 of a year.
While that is true.
“1/2 that” would imply 1/2 of 35 years or 17.5 years.
For bulk downloading science journals he had access to.
for breaking and entering*
and DoS
also he worked with wikileaks… i think he was named as a source posthumously…
he also wrote an open source system of servers that function exactly like wikileaks submission system (actually i think it is, given clues as to how it operates… like the manning chat logs)
dead drop is now called “open drop” and powers every major newspaper’s leak submission system…he was murdered.
not only the did it make no sense, given the 6 month plea bargain option, but he was an outspoken activist and would’ve at least left a note… in the form of some post online…
If I remember correctly, it wasn’t even illegal since these scientific articles should have been public to begin with because they used public funds.
That may be so, but IIRC he was charged with breaking into MIT’s networking room and illegally tapping into their network to get the articles:
That also may be so, but 35 years is fucked up for that. pretty sure child porn first time offenders is like 15 to 30 so hacking MIT for stuff that should have been free gets you more jail time then a first CP offence. OK thats fucked up
He was a defender of child porn though.
https://web.archive.org/web/20031229025933/http:/bits.are.notabug.com/
OK a reason to not like him but sending him to prison for his views that he didnt act on sounds like fasicm lol I dont agree with his views just saying
Child pornography is not necessarily abuse.
Yikes.
An image of an event is not the event. That’s the reasoning there. There’s some sense of logic there, though the knowledge their abuse is used by pedophiles can absolutely be a continuing trauma for the victims.
Well that’s definitely burying the lede from the OP.
It wasn’t the sharing part they had a problem with, it was the B&E and hacking.
still… 35 years? obviously there is more missing information.
It wasn’t 35 years, it was 6 months with a plea deal
It’s not that clear cut and I would recommend listening to the Behind The Bastards episode about him:
Behind the Bastards: Part One: Christmas Hero Episode: Aaron Swartz
https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-christmas-hero-episode-aaron-swartz
That’s still a hell of a sentence for a B&E
Mm. Breaking and entering to share publicly funded research is different than B&E with the threat of violence…
I hacked my highschool servers when I was young and shared the upcoming exams, so everyone could prepare for them. Someone told the authorities, all I got was some extra exercise. Sure it wasn’t MIT, but still 35 years is ridiculous, even a year of prison would have been ridiculous.
Paradoxically, that’s not how science jourals work. There are no difference between public or prívate funds in this regard.
Shout out to Alexandra elbakyan. She continues part of aaron’s work by running sci-hub and libgen, but lives safely out of reach of the american criminal “justice” system 💔
He didn’t even share them as far as I know, he just downloaded them. And the trial hadn’t started yet when he committed suicide.
He didn’t get the chance to share them because he was caught downloading them, and his download requests were getting blocked.
And to be clear, he wasn’t downloading from the Internet as one might download a car, he went into a restricted networking closet and connected directly to the switch, leaving a computer sitting there sending access requests. He had to keep going back to it to check on the progress, which is when they caught him.
And the trial hadn’t started yet when he committed suicide.
Yeah, I agree with the sentiment of the post, but this is just wildly misleading. He was not sentenced to anything, he committed suicide before the trial.
He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected, in an effort to make the feds justify the ludicrous charges they were pressing. Had it gone to trial, he certainly wouldn’t have been found not guilty, but it’s unlikely many of those charges would have stuck. It’s extremely unlikely he would actually have served 35 years.
Downloading isn’t a crime, is it?
No, but he obviously felt that JSTOR could persuade a court to make it one. Poor kid.
You wouldn’t download a car would you??
Oh I absolutely would.
https://www.printables.com/search/models?q=Car
Come on, you know you want to.
Oil CEOs pay fines for bringing about a global climate catastrophe. Fascist politicians are given slaps on the wrist for an attempted coup d’etat. Government officials openly commit gross violations of privacy and suffer no consequences.
But a guy hacks a university network and downloads a hoard of scientific articles that should have been freely accessible to begin with and he gets 35 years in prison. I’ll admit I wasn’t familiar with this case before I saw this picture. Which is kind of insane in and of itself.
Remember Kim Dotcom? He had a file sharing website and the police raided his house with guns like he was a dangerous criminal. There is a video of it on YouTube.
Honestly I had forgotten about the whole MegaUpload stuff.
Given, Kim Dotcom had a long history of being a trash person before the MegaUpload raid; Trading in stolen credit card info, embezzlement, black-hat hacking, etc… But he definitely didn’t deserve to get swatted just because he hosted a site that was popular with media pirates. The police used his prior convictions as justification for their heavy-handed tactics. But the reality is that they likely would have gone in with SWAT even if he had a squeaky clean record beforehand.
There’s a recent Radiolab episode about those that have taken up his mantle and the impact he’s had on scientific publishing.
That’s not exactly what happened.
Aaron committed suicide before his case went to trial, and so he was never convicted let alone sentenced. 35 years was never even likely; had it gone to trial there’s every reason to think he’d have been acquitted outright, or at worst given a slap on the wrist. Not that he should have even been charged, of course.
Also JSTOR never wanted him prosecuted only to have the files deleted and call it a wash. It was MIT that supported prosecution and who called the fuzz in the first place.
i would say jstor are removed, but actually it’s the US government that were being removed here.
Law Enforcement and the Justice System have every responsibility to enforce laws as they were written, JSTOR pressed charges and the US Government offered Auron a plea deal to reduce his sentence to 6 months.
Definitely an argument about the inadequacy of US Healthcare to be made here, though. Auron clearly could have used some counseling.
I thought there was a prosecutor who pursued this beyond all reasonable bounds, making Aaron’s life a living hell and driving him to suicide?
Well if a Psychologist had helped him through it maybe he could have turned around and sued that prosecutor into disbarment.
EDIT: People are downvoting this, but TBH I wouldn’t kill myself over a 35 year sentence much less the 6 months in the plea deal this guy got. Wouldn’t consider it for a single moment. He had agency in his own actions.
yeah and maybe that prosecutor is tangentially responsible for his suicide now.
Spilled milk, but yeah that dude was a shill and should probably be dealt with if they haven’t already.
The prosecutor went on to have a pretty successful career and I think had a role in Obama’s administration. She basically said “I’m sorry your son killed himself” but never admitted to having a part in his death.
I’ll take your word for it, never looked into it myself.
and the US government was almost definitely trying to make an example out of him: literally anybody who read the case details whatsoever.
Only prosecuting district attorneys can chose to bring a crimial charge to court.*
*except in north carolina… for some reason they actually let victims prosecute.
He didn’t transfer or share he only downloaded.
It’s also likely that he was never intending to share them. One of the things he was looking to do is aquire a large dataset to analyze trends.
In other words, he was charged for entirely legit use.
I recon he was looking for a specific trend the us government really didn’t want him to prove they had been forcing.
He also was not sentenced. This post is misinformation.
I highly recommend watching the documentary on him, Internet’s own boy.
Behind the Bastards dedicated their last Christmas episode to Aaron as well: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-christmas-hero-episode-aaron-136561888/
Just for context for those who haven’t heard the podcast: the Christmas episodes often center around non-bastards. This is one of those. :P
Reddit could’ve been so good with him at the helm…
He likely wouldn’t’ve stayed. We’d be better off with him anyways. He was moving towards activism and politics. He’d probably either be a prisoner or a congressman by now. And like honestly, we could use a congressman like him.
Good thing we’ve got a second opportunity. ;)
He’s probably rolling in his grave at the enshittification of reddit now too
Judicially murdered by Carmen Ortiz.
The most infuriating thing was and still is the fact that some people justify the sentence and blame him for killing himself.
They got the wrong reddit founder .
(not that I wish that on spez even tho he is bad I don’t think he is that bad )
Eh mister “I will own slaves after the apocalypse” probably doesn’t deserve the grace
Well when you put it like that .
