Reddit co-founder, Aaron Swartz, commits suicide

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Wolf Dreamer

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Swartz's mother has posted a statement on the site YCombinator:

'Thank you all for your kind words and thoughts. Aaron has been depressed about his case/upcoming trial, but we had no idea what he was going through was this painful.

'Aaron was a terrific young man. He contributed a lot to the world in his short life and I regret the loss of all the things he had yet to accomplish. As you can imagine, we all miss him dearly. The grief is unfathomable."
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...Reddit-dead-New-York-battling-depression.html
 
Smart kid. Very sad. :(
 
From the above link
"In September 2012, Swartz was charged with 13 counts of felony hacking stemming from his July 2011 arrest and subsequent indictment by the Department of Justice for allegedly swiping MIT papers from the JSTOR online journal archive.
Two years earlier, Swartz allegedly connected a laptop to MIT's systems through a basement network wiring cupboard.
He registered as a guest under the fictitious name, Gary Host - a hacking in-joke in which the first initial and last name spell 'ghost.'
He then used a software program to 'rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR,' according to the indictment."

'Cos this was really bad wasn't it? Worth making someone a criminal for? Threatening them with a conviction, even jail? Meanwhile the wealthy and connected do far worse and benefit from it. Look at the fraud committing British MPs.
Poor guy, I am so sad for him and his loved ones. This world is completely fecked up, as the Irish would say
 
Sad to hear about this. :( Reddit is one of my favorite sites.
 
Horrible...... so young and so gifted...
 
Aaron Swartz, 26, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment weeks before he was to go on trial on accusations that he stole millions of journal articles from an electronic archive in an attempt to make them freely available. If convicted, he faced decades in prison and a fortune in fines.
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From the family:

"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy," Swartz's family said in a statement Saturday. "It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death."
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"Aaron's insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter," the family statement said. "We're grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world."
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http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/01/12/swartz-internet-obit.html

Very sad. So young and brilliant! I do wonder, however, if the trial was the result of his depression or if he was already diagnosed with mental illness.
 
When Swartz was 14 years old, he helped create RSS software, revolutionizing the way people subscribed to and consumed information online.

As an adult, he co-founded Reddit, a social news website, and rallied against Internet censorship through the political action group Demand Progress.

Technology bloggers paid tribute to the the man who “had more work to do, and who made the world a better place when he did it.”
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http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2013/01/online-activist-aaron-swartz-26-found-dead/
 
badhorsie said:
'Cos this was really bad wasn't it? Worth making someone a criminal for? Threatening them with a conviction, even jail? Meanwhile the wealthy and connected do far worse and benefit from it. Look at the fraud committing British MPs.
Poor guy, I am so sad for him and his loved ones. This world is completely fecked up, as the Irish would say
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More proof that we are on our way to a police state, that is if we aren't there already.
 
From the DailyMail article:

"In a 2007 speech, the internet advocate described himself as being 'miserable' after moving to San Francisco when his company was purchased by the publishing giant Conde Nast.
'I couldn't stand San Francisco. I couldn't stand office life,' he said at the time. 'I took a long Christmas vacation. I got sick. I thought of suicide. I ran from the police. And when I got back on Monday morning, I was asked to resign.'

In a blog post from later that year, Swartz went into further detail regarding his bout with depression.
'Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless. You wonder whether it's worth going on,' he wrote. 'Everything you think about seems bleak - the things you've done, the things you hope to do, the people around you.
'You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn't come for any reason and it doesn't go for any either. Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don't feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.'"


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ragic-Reddit-founders-life.html#ixzz2IAnXtjmG
 
Too bad the Prosecutors don"t over charge the real criminals and refuse pleas deals for those that hurt,abuse children,murder our citizen!Seems they just go after the Genius's who can change our world for the better and have no real victims under their belt!

Basically he went against terms of service!As far as the school feeling horrible ,they did not give a rats behind until his death and they now see how this may hurt their bottom line!
 
It is sad that this young man killed himself. It is sad when anyone does.

I'm not clear on why he was hacking into this system to get articles. I understand he was an activist for internet free speech, but I don't understand what was going on here.

I do think it does stand as a Federal offense. I wonder if he would have known that if he would have hacked in anyway. Given this was not exactly hacking in from afar, he wanted it to be known he was the one doing it.

Any hacking into a private system is punishable by local and Federal laws. While the laws have not exactly caught up with the rapid pace of internet life, the ones that are there are there for a reason. If he was hacking into a bank and getting thousands of peoples personal information I think everyone would understand that part. Granted this was not a bank, and I have no idea what the info was, but it was still protected info. Our right to privacy, as little as there is left.

I see that he was struggling with becoming an adult in the work world and depression. Did he ever seek help for that? It seems teaming up with a group that was not fully informed did not help, but may have been the only driving force he felt he had and it backfired. Just sad.
 
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