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 f

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.