Aaron Swartz Commits Suicide

About: open data activist aaron swartz dies aged 26:

Web reactions to Aaaron's death on Reddit, the website he helped create.

Depression is a terrible room in which to dwell. The door out is labeled "Have faith, this too will pass". It is sad that Aaron didn't discover it.

Lawrence Lesing, his friend and "lawyer" seems to think that it was because the government prosecution. I'm not so very sure, but then i was not as close to Aaron as Lawrence was.

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Seth says

discovered by Joshua's post on Facebook here

Seth says

From memorandum front page on January 12 ...

Lessig Blog, v2:

Prosecutor as bully — (Some will say this is not the time. I disagree. This is the time when every mixed emotion needs to find voice.) — Since his arrest in January, 2011, I have known more about the events that began this spiral than I have wanted to know. Aaron consulted me as a friend and lawyer.

Discussion:Wonkblog, Hit & Run, Making Light, Guardian, Hullabaloo, The Reality-Based Community and Brad DeLong

John Schwartz / New York Times:

Aaron Swartz, Precocious Programmer and Internet Activist, Dies at 26 — Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped to develop a computer code that provided a format for delivering regularly changing Web content and in later life became an unwavering crusader …

Discussion:Firedoglake, The Nation, Guardian, Balloon Juice and Althouse, more at Mediagazer »

Cory Doctorow / Boing Boing:

RIP, Aaron Swartz — To the extent possible under law, Cory Doctorow has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to “RIP, Aaron Swartz.” — Update: Go read Lessig: “He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think?

Discussion:Unhandled Exception, The Atlantic Online, Guardian, BuzzMachine, ABCNEWS, TechCrunch, The Agonist, The Lede and Althouse, more at Mediagazer »

Zach Carter / The Huffington Post:20 minutes ago

Aaron Swartz, Internet Pioneer, Found Dead Amid Prosecutor ‘Bullying’ in Unconventional Case … REACT: — FOLLOW: — Conde Nast, Economy, Hackers, Internet, Barack Obama , PIPA, Politics, Video, Aaron Swartz, Larry Lessig, RSS 1.0, Aaron Swartz Suicide, Demand Progress, Doj, FBI …

Discussion:The Moderate Voice and The Verge

Remember Aaron Swartz:25 minutes ago

Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz — Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing. — Aaron's insatiable curiosity, creativity …

Discussion:The Moderate Voice

Michael Martinez / CNN:

Online activist Aaron Swartz commits suicide, relative says — Los Angeles (CNN) — Aaron Swartz, an Internet savant who at a young age shaped the online era by co-developing RSS and Reddit and later became a digital activist, has committed suicide, a relative told CNN Saturday. — He was 26 years old.

Discussion:The Reality-Based Community, The Moderate Voice and Guardian

AlterNet:

Aaron Swartz, Online Activist and Reddit Cofounder, Dead at 26 — This article has been updated. — When he was all of 14, Aaron Swartz co-authored the first specification of RSS, the code now ubiquitous across the internet that allows for the syndication of content.

Discussion:The Raw Story

Anne Cai / MIT's Student Newspaper:
Aaron Swartz commits suicide

Discussion:Guardian, The Other McCain, VentureBeat, American Power, The Daily Caller, Mashable!, Le·gal In·sur·rec· tion, Gawker, The Verge, Towleroad News #gay and Gothamist, more at Mediagazer »

Henry / Crooked Timber:
Remembering Aaron Swartz

Discussion:Quinn Said, Mark Bernstein and Lessig Blog, v2

Brewster / Internet Archive Blogs:
Aaron Swartz, hero of the open world, dies

Discussion:Wired

Mark de LA says

Probably true. I never heard of this guy so it's hard for me to know or care about him. He sounds a bit like the felon Julian Assange with perhaps a better motive & more charm & probably mental problems .

Seth says

MR 2013-01-14 10:56:46 16381

Maybe this is the endgame. http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/276965-justice-department-drops-charges-against-internet-activist-swartz

The Justice Department dropped its charges against Internet activist Aaron Swartz on Monday, citing his death.

Swartz, who was facing computer hacking charges, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment on Friday. He was 26.

The filing is standard when the defendant in a case has died.

Federal prosecutors indicted Swartz in 2011, accusing him of breaking into a computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloading 4.8 million documents from JSTOR, a subscription service of academic articles.

He faced up to 35 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million. His trial was scheduled to begin in April.

...

Yes, that certainly would motivate faking his death. Of course, now that the charges seem to have been dropped, he can't quite just resurrect himself. I say, stay tuned, the saga continues.

Seth says

MR 2013-01-14 10:02:19 16381

seth 2013-01-14 08:06:19 16381

MR 2013-01-13 07:45:21 16381

seth 2013-01-13 02:45:44 16381

MR 2013-01-13 00:23:50 16381

Lots of other random ideas on Slashdot on his suicide here. IMHO, in the end he apparently couldn't program his own brain sufficiently to get around what he imagined his future to be & pushed the ctrl-alt-delete button hoping for a better outcome. Like some viruses it just didn't reboot.

... then too, knowing a bit about Aarron's scripting abilities, perhaps he faked his death. So far i have not seen any convincing evidence except news reports.

They rarely show dead bodies on TV except for the S. Hussein's sons. Maybe they faked Bin Laden's death too! He good be in G'tmo being debriefed.

Well i will give it more credence when i see believable footage from his funeral. So far, the reports i have tracked down are devoid of tangible details and could be just rumor.

Yeah, so what's the endgame? Was he an orphan? Super-rich? Didn't have a chick? Who knows? Who cares?

There are answers to all of your questions online. Except of course the last two, which are not about Aaron at all ... rather they are just expressions of how you feel about him and/or thiese kind of news stories.

Mark de LA says

I would feel better about this stuff if Swartz was not stealing stuff.

source: ... This screenshot shows the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission after it was hijacked by the hacker-activist group Anonymous, early Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013, to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide. The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago "a line was crossed."

... just think what might have happened if he had remained alive & fought for what he thought was right about the info.
Pressure could have been brought on govt to release him.

Mark de LA says

This article which claims that

source: ... Despite the enormous reach of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as it currently stands – it was the same law used by prosecutors to torment late Internet activist Aaron Swartz prior to his suicide on Jan. 11 -- the House Judiciary Committee has actually proposed a number of expansions to the law in a new draft, which Tech Dirt says will be “rushed” to Congress during its “cyber week” in the middle of April.
...
Here’s an example of the extreme nature of these recommended punishments: Aaron Swartz, who illegally tapped into and downloaded millions of scholarly papers from the digital journal archive JSTOR while visiting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, faced four charges under section (a)(4) of the CFAA, with a maximum sentences of five years per charge, for a possible total of 20 years in prison. While many lawyers and experts have recommended reducing these penalties or removing them entirely, the new draft actually increases the maximum for each charge under (a)(4) to 20 years, which means Swartz could have gotten 80 years. NYU law professor James Grimmelman on Monday called this notion “simply obscene.”

... can imprision anyone that uses the Internet??? (Headline on DRUDGE)

Aaron Swartz Commits Suicide

About: open data activist aaron swartz dies aged 26:

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