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Pardon my laziness: is there anything to be seen from these documents/media that we didn't know before? Anything surprising/interesting? If so, a quick summary

by Elrac 12y ago

Pardon my laziness: is there anything to be seen from these documents/media that we didn't know before? Anything surprising/interesting? If so, a quick summary and/or a link would be appreciated.

bane 12y ago
Not really, the JSTOR document gives you some behind the scenes emails on the service degradation Aaron was causing and their interactions with MIT. If you were running a service scaled to handle a few hundred requests per minute and somebody starting downloading hundreds of thousands of things as quickly as possible, resulting servers crashing, etc....well it's the kind of email conversations you'd expect as they tried to deal with it, IP address locating, log file dumps, statistics, questions if it's like another previous case they dealt with, cutting off service to MIT, MIT asking why they did that, discussions back and forth over the license and service agreement, making the usage agreement more present for users, etc. There's surveillance photos of the setup Aaron was using, the room it was all in and him entering and leaving the room. There's a copy of the Swartz-JSTOR settlement agreement. Lawyer's emails back and forth, etc. To be honest, if you've ever been part of any kind of contractual or legal proceeding it's pretty banal stuff and appears pretty cut and dry: Aaron went where he wasn't supposed to go and did something he wasn't supposed to do, it involved 2 aggrieved parties and the local criminal code. There's not really anything terribly unusual about any of it. If Aaron hadn't taken his own life and hadn't been as well known, it wouldn't be notable in any particular way whatsoever.
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  So the felony network intrusion charges and overzealous prosecution are entirely lost on you? Suicide is the only thing that made the case notable?
  - bane 12y ago
    Felony network intrusion happens probably multiple times per day. There's absolutely nothing interesting about it. To be perfectly honest, I'd probably have tried to bulk download JSTOR if I had access to a network port somewhere on a campus that allowed for unfettered access. Why not? Would I have hidden a computer in a campus telecom room to do it for me? Probably not. Were the aggrieved parties over-the-top in the actions they took? Probably. Suicide also doesn't make this particularly notable. People in custody and under criminal charges are going to have a bad time. Unfortunately some of them do kill themselves as a response to that stress. In the end, Aaron, and the community around him is what makes this notable.

by Elrac 12y ago

Pardon my laziness: is there anything to be seen from these documents/media that we didn't know before? Anything surprising/interesting? If so, a quick summary and/or a link would be appreciated.

bane 12y ago

Not really, the JSTOR document gives you some behind the scenes emails on the service degradation Aaron was causing and their interactions with MIT. If you were running a service scaled to handle a few hundred requests per minute and somebody starting downloading hundreds of thousands of things as quickly as possible, resulting servers crashing, etc....well it's the kind of email conversations you'd expect as they tried to deal with it, IP address locating, log file dumps, statistics, questions if it's like another previous case they dealt with, cutting off service to MIT, MIT asking why they did that, discussions back and forth over the license and service agreement, making the usage agreement more present for users, etc. There's surveillance photos of the setup Aaron was using, the room it was all in and him entering and leaving the room. There's a copy of the Swartz-JSTOR settlement agreement. Lawyer's emails back and forth, etc. To be honest, if you've ever been part of any kind of contractual or legal proceeding it's pretty banal stuff and appears pretty cut and dry: Aaron went where he wasn't supposed to go and did something he wasn't supposed to do, it involved 2 aggrieved parties and the local criminal code. There's not really anything terribly unusual about any of it. If Aaron hadn't taken his own life and hadn't been as well known, it wouldn't be notable in any particular way whatsoever.

spacemanmatt 12y ago
So the felony network intrusion charges and overzealous prosecution are entirely lost on you? Suicide is the only thing that made the case notable?
- bane 12y ago
  Felony network intrusion happens probably multiple times per day. There's absolutely nothing interesting about it. To be perfectly honest, I'd probably have tried to bulk download JSTOR if I had access to a network port somewhere on a campus that allowed for unfettered access. Why not? Would I have hidden a computer in a campus telecom room to do it for me? Probably not. Were the aggrieved parties over-the-top in the actions they took? Probably. Suicide also doesn't make this particularly notable. People in custody and under criminal charges are going to have a bad time. Unfortunately some of them do kill themselves as a response to that stress. In the end, Aaron, and the community around him is what makes this notable.