skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"We need to add a new rule to the political rulebook that she's playing by. Ending her career is necessary to send a lesson to every other prosecutor who sees a guy like Aaron the way a housecat sees a cornered rat."

Yes it's vitally important that there be a completely different and much weaker standard of justice applied to wealthy software developers then those other people.
This article misses the main point. Even if he did break locks and crack authentication, what he did would still be morally right.
GPL does not "infect" a whole project either.

GPL only requires you distribute source if you distribute the binary.

It is designed so that users maintain the right to modify software that they use.

The only difference with the Aferro clause is that it considers network use of web software to be distribution and pertains to obfuscated software (i.e. server side source) even if it's not binary.
I particularly loved some of the jokes in the response.

"However, look carefully and you'll notice something already floating in the sky - that's no Moon, it's a Space Station!"

Nice to see the good humour. :)
Google monopoly charges dropped in USA
What sort of "standing up" for Aaron was MIT supposed to do?

No matter his ultimate intentions, from what I understand, there wasn't much doubt that he repeatedly broke into MIT facilities to access its network without authorization, and then evaded attempts to prevent him from accessing the network. I've not seen anything that indicated he was a student or alum of the school (only that he went to Harvard).

What would you expect any school or company to do when presented with an unauthorized intruder on their network, using resources to mass-download data? Just let them waltz in, break into a network closet, and leave a laptop plugged in?

MIT did the right thing in this case; it's the government that blew things out of proportion and was using this as a way to get back at Aaron after the PACER incident.
Nixon was pardoned and charges weren't even filed against him.

This is not without precedent.
Right, that makes most sense of all. From what I read I can see why he was a nice guy, but nothing made him 'bigger' than people like Steve Jobs or so. But this combined with that he was 'one of us' and might have known many people here, that makes sense. Thanks for your comment!
For those of you who don't know, Kopimism and Aaron Swartz's activism are well aligned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Church_of_Kopimism
Either the unvested shares won't vest immediately and things will go as you expected them to before acquisition, or they will all vest immediately, or they will vest immediately but be subject to a buyback. I've had all three in contracts.
If I were choosing to object to you on the grounds that you trespassed, then no.

If I were to drop the trespassing charges and choose to object on the grounds that I had to throw out my router because you used it, then I would indeed be manufacturing victomhood.

I'll repeat myself. They dropped the trespassing charges.
There are laws concerning how much money the government is allowed to print. The odd thing though is it is by material, so much paper, gold, copper, and silver money. There is a loophole in so far as it doesn't mention how much platinum money can be printed(not sure you would call it a loop hole since it also doesn't mention how much green cheese money can be made). So the proposal is to print their way out of the debt crisis. It isn't a serious proposal as it would cause insane amounts of inflation(other countries that have tried it have hit inflation rates above 100% a year). The white house has officially come out against it.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/01/white-house-den...
Amen, a thousand times amen.
Hold on, if I disrupt a power grid or steal your identity, I am already violating a slew of other laws. The prosecutor should, rightfully, be using those laws to charge me. If I kill you via your heart implant I get a murder charge. You can tack on a computer trespass charge if you like but it seems a little extraneous now doesn't it?

The problem is having a vague law(s) from the 1980s kinda sorting defining computer trespassing and the antiquated "wiretapping" means we probably violate this law hundreds if not thousands times a day. Ever guess your own password because you forgot it? Or run nmap on a netblock? Those are, arguably, technical violations of legislation. At least as much as waltzing into MIT and downloading a whole bunch of PDFs.

>It over-penalizes acts like Aaron's but underpenalizes heinous acts

Well, I'd rather have 1 year than 35, wouldn't you? This proposal is still loads better than the status quo.
Huh? You mean by vote?
Yeah, that's why I put it in quotes, I just assumed that if the AGPL library was included in the project, then the whole project had to abide by the AGPL.
Is anyone reminded of Alan Turing?
Actually a young man is dead because he killed himself.
Another maddening trend is about 3 years ago I bought a 19201200 display for $325. I thought I'd look to see if higher res was now available. Turns out, the only 19201200 displays are now all over $900. Everything else is 1920*1080.

I.e. display res has gotten 10% worse, not better.

I'd really like about 2000 horizontal lines. I'm tired of blurry text.
It's done, I didn't touch the file structure since Composer is smart enough to map classes even if the layout isn't PSR compliant.
I'm glad it works for you, but I find it sad that atheism and life having no purpose depresses you. That life has no purpose effectively means that there is freedom. It is very scary, but we have to choose the purpose for ourselves.

What we "lose" (it was never there actually) is the belief in an external, all-knowing guiding force that somehow makes everything we do ok. However, there are still guiding forces you can choose to follow. They are within us.

Personally I think if there was such an external guiding force, it would make life meaningless.
Does anyone see the parallels between Aaron Swartz and Alan Turing?
No. Every post with a tumblr.com link gets automatically banned.

A week ago I posted something to a subreddit I've founded and it got banned. This spam filter isn't even allowing moderators to post these links. But I was allowed to unban it.

So, I wrote to the moderators of /r/technology a few minutes ago and instead of unbanning it they said that tumblr.com is banned reddit wide. No, he hasn't unbanned the link. :-(
I've been thinking about the family today, and what might have caused Aaron to make such a terrible decision. One thing that caught my attention, was Lessig's comment in his post:

" ... Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge."

So - MIT brings in the Feds, the Government threaten him with 30+ years of Prison, somehow there is no way for him to appeal to the public for support for his lawsuit (which would have been very popular, I'm certain).

Does he try and look to his family to liquidate everything they have to help support his defense? Does he plead out to something that he truly believed was not wrong?

I can't even imagine how horrible this situation must have been for him, and why he couldn't see how he was going to get out of it...
What would it even mean? What if the purpose of life is to build as many feeling entities as possible and kill them all at once in a slow and torturous way, so as to maximize the amount of pain that can be dealt in a single moment?

What I mean by that example: even if life had some purpose (for whom, set by what?), why should it be a purpose you agree with? Why would some external purpose override your own values?
> "You realize that about 40% of the money that comes into MIT comes from the federal government right?"

Based on this non sequitur, can we infer that you have tacitly accepted jlgreco's point?
So you're saying that 042-68-4425 belongs to Jean Paul Ludwig, and Harrison J Bounel, and Obama.

And despite how trivial it would be to verify all of this, he's been elected president twice?

I have to call bullshit.

He's obviously a reptilian.
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Pastırma, sucuk, çemen, mantı gibi ürünleri Kayseri’den almak isteyenlerin uğrak adresi kapıda ödeme sistemiyle Türkiye’nin her il ve ilçesine %100 güvenilir olarak satış yapılabilmektedir.

Resmi Sitesi : http://www.kaleonubegendik.com
wtf this is exactly what happened to me at exactly that time wtf
Oh, I thought with > 50% you would represent enough "clients" to "prove" the false transactions and earn the trust of the remaining network.
What we really need is a more efficient process for producing vaccine once a flu strain has been identified. No more guessing. Observe and react.
Your "about" says:

> about:	Non-techie (laywer) who left the practice of law to build a start-up. If you think I am crazy or its a long shot, all I have to say is...my goal is to disrupt Google/Bing search or YouTube, now who is crazy?

Sounds pretty crazy to me. That would explain why no investors are getting back to you.

My suggestion: meet some real (ideally somewhat successful - by which I mean running profitable businesses, not multi-millionaire startup lottery winners) entrepreneurs, get to know them, and ask them for advice.

Based on your post and bio I'd say you're at step 1 or 2 of a 1000-step journey, and yet somehow under the illusion that you're just about to get there. You will get there eventually, but it will take a lot longer than you think, and you should get help from people who are a few steps ahead of you.
Why Exomoons Are Way Cooler Than Exoplanets
> Swartz was guilty. ...

He may have been guilty of something. It sounds like the charges against him were at the very least trumped up far beyond what would have been reasonable for the actions he is known to have taken.
> Enforcement of the law, especiallly at the federal level, is apolitical.

Pull the other one now.
Ok... I did have to increase version in composer.json though due to literal array syntax (hopefully not a deal breaker).
Prosecutors will always include all possible charges; they have to because of double jeopardy (gross but generally accurate simplification: if they only charge you with one crime for an act and you immediately plead guilty, they cannot charge you with more crimes for that act).

* If I kill you via your heart implant I get a murder charge. You can tack on a computer trespass charge if you like but it seems a little extraneous now doesn't it?*

Special circumstances charges always play a role in determining sentencing. By adding in the computer hacking charge, that murder sentence could go from 25 years with the possibility of parole to life without.

For example: I once had a client who had a simple gun possession charge attached to an attempted murder/robbery charge. By itself, the gun possession charge would normally have only been a 1-3 year sentence (he was a convicted felon), but attached to a violent crime, even though the gun was not used in the crime it automatically added 15 years to the end of any sentence imposed by the judge, with no room for discretionary adjustment.

Well, I'd rather have 1 year than 35, wouldn't you? This proposal is still loads better than the status quo.

I would rather pay a small fine than go to prison at all for something like what Aaron did. As I said, it overpenalizes what he did but vastly underpenalizes far more serious crimes.

Hold on, if I disrupt a power grid or steal your identity, I am already violating a slew of other laws. The prosecutor should, rightfully, be using those laws to charge me If I kill you via your heart implant I get a murder charge. You can tack on a computer trespass charge if you like but it seems a little extraneous now doesn't it?

Yes, they should, but they would still need to actually convict you in court (or get you to plead). There may not be sufficient evidence of those other crimes to convict on those other charges, but that would not ameleriorate the seriousness of, say, hacking the power grid.
"Not that it is any of your business"

If you don't want people to read and comment on something, maybe don't bring it up to them, hm? It's not trolling to continue a conversation about your will that you began.

Also, shaming someone for asking a reasonable question with "I will try and make your contribution positive" seemed deliberately offensive. It's not clear to me why you lashed out at that person as though they were prying into a private matter, when you opened the discussion on it.
I have to disagree, when people realize the risk is personal they'll take care to make sure what they're doing is right. Just following orders is never a valid excuse. Of course we should stop with the prosecutor we should continue on to try and fix the machine, but at the very least if prosecutors know they're responsible for their actions it'll add an additional check to the system.
I'm saying 042-68-4425 belonged to Jean Paul Ludwig, but when he died it was illegally forged under Obama's alias "Harrison J Bounel".

Harrison J Bounel and Obama are the same person. He has been elected twice because the current power structure supports this sort of criminal behavior. All these elected officials have skeletons in the closet so nobody is going to go against one of their own.

Believe whatever you want, I am not really interested in debating with hacker news readers. The truth will come out anyways. And Barry Obama has committed plenty of other felonies such as ordering the murder of a 16 year old American citizen overseas through drone strike http://www.businessinsider.com/alwaki-son-yemen-16-drone-201...
unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge

This is such a disgusting violation of power it makes me want to vomit blood. Why on earth do judges have the right to prevent people from appealing to the court of public opinion? That's immoral, abusive, and absurd. If people can't disclose what is happening to them, then abuses of power become frequent.
Without any disrepect to Aaron's memory (very sad news), no.

Interested to hear what reminded you, but Turing committed suicide based on an unjust persecution of a minority by society as a whole. While Aaron's situation also involved injustice, I hadn't (and probably wouldn't) link the two.
hey amy, this thing is more powerful than coke http://www.dhamma.org/ please give it a shot!

quick read about it -> http://www.urbandharma.org/pdf/mindfulness_in_plain_english....

email me whenever you want to chat
Petitions are participation theater. Call your representative and demand action instead. http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml
> Aaron appears to have committed suicide as a result of a mental illness (i.e., clinical depression) which was exacerbated by the criminal case against him. It wasn't the criminal case that killed him; it was his mental illness.

His family and partner, perhaps the people who have been closest to him in recent times, seem to disagree with you [1][2].

> The fact that he has a mentally ill mother is strong evidence of this

Is that indeed a fact, or did you just happen to incorrectly infer that from my sentence? I was talking about Appelbaum's mother, not Swartz's. My point in citing Appelbaum was to denote that Swartz is not an isolated case; the US justice system has been systematically acting as an instrument of oppression against dissidents (and increasingly more frequently, against those active in the production and critique of technology) whom it perceives as adversaries of its federal and corporate sponsors.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5049225

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5047398
Sure thing, didn't notice before.
She went vastly beyond what was required of her in charging him with a whole litany of offenses, several of which Congress most likely didn't intend to apply to situations like this (CFAA to TOS violations).

This was because Aaron was a bit of a gadfly, and had gotten out of the PACER situation earlier, so he was already on their enemies list.

Congress was also at fault for passing a bunch of stupid laws, but that doesn't excuse Ortiz. It also doesn't excuse Aaron for killing himself and not getting help. There's plenty of blame to go around.
Wikipedia entry for Aaron Swartz-founded PAC was deleted the day he died
So you don't understand humans. But what are your emotions, where does your pain come from? What do you miss?
This is awesome. I just tried to submit it. Is it a new site, that we both tried within 15 hours?
I just wrote an email to admissions@mit.edu indicating that I will dissuade my children from attending, and that I will bring up this matter repeatedly throughout my life to dissuade others as well. Being an "innocent bystander" is not true innocence.
> and didn't totally understand the technical aspects of what Swartz was accused of doing.

She had the resources to hire the types of experts who are what I call "executive whisperers." She doesn't need to know what a perl script is to understand what happened at JSTOR.

On top of it, when the "victim" JSTOR is saying "what the hell, why are you prosecuting this guy?" Then its pretty obvious we're looking at political motivations here. Sorry, but you have way too much faith in people if you think what just happened was one big 'honest mistake.'
I'm sure his site has enough google juice that people will fight you for it in the auction after the redemption period, unless his family takes care of it before it enters the aftermarket...
None of this has any bearing on the pre-trial tactics that are being used with increasing abandon by the DOJ. Specifically, they seek to prevent defendants from having their day in court by making any defence ruinously expensive. An even nastier version of this tactic involves freezing a defendent's assets, making the retention of competent representation a fiscal impossibility. Having effectivly stripped a target of their Constitutionally guaranteed right to a fair and open trial, they credibly threaten their victims with insanely onerous penalties that can be avoided only by accepting plea bargains that involve consent to charges that may well be baseless. In other words, they've successfully undermined one of the nation's key checks on abuse of government power.

From what's emerged today, it's clear that the case against Aaron was weak at best, and highly unlikely to lead to conviction in open court against capable defenders. "Bullying" is an understatement. What's going on is an outright assault on the very core of restrained government. Whether this power is being used for good or ill is besides the point. Like extrajudicial killings, the power itself has been placed outside prosecutor's reach for a reason. They have taken it anyway, and they've done so because no impedement has been there to stop them. At the same time, they've depended in security through obscurity. A general lack of awareness as to how abusive and out of control they've become has enabled the rot we're seeing now.

In this case, we see the importance of open access to jury trials in that they prevent the government from harming its own legitimacy. Given how unrestrained the DOJ has become, it was only a matter of time before they suffered a high-profile screwup. And while Ortiz may simply have been the one unlucky enough to own it, she is very much a part of the problem. Unlike Aaron, she is not an unfortunate innocent caught in the wrong time at the wrong place. To the contrary, she is the fox sneaking into the henhouse on the night that a new watchdog is sleeping beneath it.
He's not suggesting equivalency but he did make a comparison, one which is a bit tasteless, is it not?
Did you not feel like his death was the result of authority pushing a him into a corner? Wasn't Turing persecuted by authority as well? Two brilliant tech minds lost before their time.
Alas, people who suggest fighting terrorism with Anything other than terrorism do not have the slightest understanding of terrorism. You can try and be the bigger man, but please just understand that you will not stop anyone. If this wasn't true, we would not have armies in just about every country on earth, because, well, you need tanks to fight someone with guns, and guns to fight someone with knives. A government that requires you to have a minimum of $1.5 million to start to defend your liberty is anything other than a democracy.

Sadly, my friends, the way in which we want to fight this condition is not through firing (1) person, or signing petitions. That will only allow people to talk about it for a little while until Lil Wayne drops another album, then it is off to other news.

They have proved to us they can use "their" laws to force a young man into taking his own Life. While the answer is not to take another life, it is to hit them where they can feel it without hurting them physically.

I suggest Anonymous.
http://rememberaaronsw.tumblr.com/
>The RIAA/MPAA would love to have her.

She's way too toxic for business. She's got her federal pension and probably a long future in politics. Unless Obama throws her out, she's more or less set for life. Prosecutors don't get burned on stuff like this. Now if she cheated on her husband or said something bad about Jesus.

This is also further proof that you can attack leftist political activists with impunity. At his core Aaron was for liberalization of information and open government. If he was a Tea Party guy downloading PDFs from MIT to show "liberal bias" he'd be alive and have his own Fox New show and a book deal.

No one protects the left.
I would agree with your comment except that seiji used the derogatory term, "brainwash," to refer to an activity that shawn-butler clearly chose to participate in. This frames the conversation in a very negative light (it was quite unnecessary), and it's not surprising that shawn-butler's response was not entirely positive. I thought the reply showed appropriate restraint.
If anyone should go down first its Steve Heymann who also led up the ridiculous 40 year sentence against soupnazi.

from wired:

'The FBI investigated that hack, but in the end no charges were filed. Aaron wasn’t so lucky with the JSTOR matter. The case was picked up by Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann in Boston, the cybercrime prosecutor who won a record 20-year prison stretch for TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez. Heymann indicted Aaron on 13 counts of wire fraud, computer intrusion and reckless damage. The case has been wending through pre-trial motions for 18 months, and was set for jury trial on April 1.'

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/aaron-swartz/

And re: soupnazi, throwing a hacker (even a hacker who was actually criminal) in with violent offenders because he pissed off the wrong people is fucked:

"After his sentencing, Gonzalez was transferred from Wyatt to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn (before ultimately ending up in a prison in Michigan). Situated between a loud stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Gowanus Bay, M.D.C. is brutal, even for a prison. Populated by hardened offenders, it is among the last places a nonviolent government informant would want to be. “The place is terrible,” Agent Michael said. “But you know what? When you burn both ends of the candle, that’s what you get.” Even Gonzalez was impressed by the government’s indifference to his comfort. He says he always knew it would stick it to him somehow, “but I never thought it would be this badly.”"

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/magazine/14Hacker-t.html?p...
Two brilliant tech minds lost before their time, because authority pushed them to their limits.
According to http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/01/micros... they will drop XMPP support.