6 ms·

It is. I feel that people are too ready to deify Aaron Swartz and act like he held no responsibility in what happened.

kelnos 5y ago
I think that's true of some people, but it's important to remember that all he did was violate the terms of service of a corporation that was (IMO) already behaving unethically and being poor stewards of the data given to it. (I am fundamentally opposed to allowing the result of scientific research -- especially when much of that research benefited from public funding -- to be locked behind paywalls.) Swartz did not deserve to be driven to suicide for this. He did not deserve jail time, or to be arrested. At worst he deserved to be the defendant in a fairly low-stakes civil suit, and maybe even lose. But that's it.
prepend 5y ago
I’m not sure how you think Swartz is diefied. He’s certainly responsible for his actions, but they were not wrong, I think. And he was obviously unjustly persecuted for his actions. I think it’s accurate for us to celebrate SCOTUS ruling that the way the feds prosecuted Swartz was wrong and recognize that it will help prevent future Swartz.
- sigzero 5y ago
  They were absolutely wrong actually.
- boublepop 5y ago
  You could argue what you want about the legality of his right to have a local copy of the entirety of JSTOR, but he hid equipment in a wire ring closet that was left unlocked on MITs network to carry out his scraping and that’s definitely not something that is “not wrong”. It doesn’t matter what the action of the equipment or the morality of it. It’s not like it would be bad for a student or professor to put up crypto miners, but then good if they donate them to charity. And that is not to even mention the fact that his actions caused effectively a denial of service attack on jstor from MIT.
  - prepend 5y ago
    I suppose we can argue since sticking a laptop in a closet isn’t nefarious but just an efficient way to get on the network. I’ve attended and visited quite a few universities and they all had liberal network access policies. So the idea of anyone caring about someone plugging a laptop into a lanport and downloading millions of text files is not remarkable and happens all the time, I expect. There was no “denial of service” on jstor as it was still available during the whole time. And if jstor can’t handle a single laptop scraping every article, then that seems to be more of a problem with jstor. Students scrape jstor and other journal sites frequently and seems like a pretty decent use case that I want to support at my university, if I had one. Crypto miners are a different story as they consume resources and if Swartz had set up a hundred laptops or a bunch of gpus and used university resources, I’d have a different story. But the idea that a single laptop running in a closet for a weekend had any material impact on MIT or jstor is so laughable that I don’t understand how anyone honestly presents it as an argument.
benatkin 5y ago
He was literally a saint. Sorry, but there aren't many people who were as consistently good as him and who also did so much to fight for justice. You're entitled to your opinion, but I disagree very strongly.

I think that's true of some people, but it's important to remember that all he did was violate the terms of service of a corporation that was (IMO) already behaving unethically and being poor stewards of the data given to it. (I am fundamentally opposed to allowing the result of scientific research -- especially when much of that research benefited from public funding -- to be locked behind paywalls.) Swartz did not deserve to be driven to suicide for this. He did not deserve jail time, or to be arrested. At worst he deserved to be the defendant in a fairly low-stakes civil suit, and maybe even lose. But that's it.

prepend 5y ago

I’m not sure how you think Swartz is diefied. He’s certainly responsible for his actions, but they were not wrong, I think. And he was obviously unjustly persecuted for his actions. I think it’s accurate for us to celebrate SCOTUS ruling that the way the feds prosecuted Swartz was wrong and recognize that it will help prevent future Swartz.

sigzero 5y ago
They were absolutely wrong actually.
boublepop 5y ago
You could argue what you want about the legality of his right to have a local copy of the entirety of JSTOR, but he hid equipment in a wire ring closet that was left unlocked on MITs network to carry out his scraping and that’s definitely not something that is “not wrong”. It doesn’t matter what the action of the equipment or the morality of it. It’s not like it would be bad for a student or professor to put up crypto miners, but then good if they donate them to charity. And that is not to even mention the fact that his actions caused effectively a denial of service attack on jstor from MIT.
- prepend 5y ago
  I suppose we can argue since sticking a laptop in a closet isn’t nefarious but just an efficient way to get on the network. I’ve attended and visited quite a few universities and they all had liberal network access policies. So the idea of anyone caring about someone plugging a laptop into a lanport and downloading millions of text files is not remarkable and happens all the time, I expect. There was no “denial of service” on jstor as it was still available during the whole time. And if jstor can’t handle a single laptop scraping every article, then that seems to be more of a problem with jstor. Students scrape jstor and other journal sites frequently and seems like a pretty decent use case that I want to support at my university, if I had one. Crypto miners are a different story as they consume resources and if Swartz had set up a hundred laptops or a bunch of gpus and used university resources, I’d have a different story. But the idea that a single laptop running in a closet for a weekend had any material impact on MIT or jstor is so laughable that I don’t understand how anyone honestly presents it as an argument.

benatkin 5y ago

He was literally a saint. Sorry, but there aren't many people who were as consistently good as him and who also did so much to fight for justice. You're entitled to your opinion, but I disagree very strongly.