Aaron Swartz has committed suicide
Bryan Bishop
- BryanComputer activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide in New York City yesterday, Jan. 11, according to his uncle, Michael Wolf, in a comment to The Tech. Swartz was 26.
“The tragic and heartbreaking information you received is, regrettably, true,” confirmed Swartz’ attorney, Elliot R. Peters of Kecker and Van Nest, in an email to The Tech.
Swartz was indicted in July 2011 by a federal grand jury for allegedly mass downloading documents from the JSTOR online journal archive with the intent to distribute them. He subsequently moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he then worked for Avaaz Foundation, a nonprofit “global web movement to bring people-powered politics to decision-making everywhere.” Swartz appeared in court on Sept. 24, 2012 and pleaded not guilty.
The accomplished Swartz co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, was one of the three co-owners of the popular social news site Reddit, and completed a fellowship at Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. In 2010, he founded DemandProgress.org, a “campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.”
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Bryan Bishop
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.
“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy
Jonathan Cline
This is very sad news.
He was operating in a grey area, legal issues to prove it, however plenty of hackers do such projects - even Woz built hacker devices to work around and expose an unfair monopoly in his day (telecommunications pricing, using a blue box). Digital pay walls of information already paid for by taxpayers are a scam and the walls need to be torn down. With a little more patience and guidance I believe he could have avoided the legal issues.. others have, and profited in the meantime (youtube for example, began as an intellectual property theft site with thousands of unlicensed music videos and songs, and later bought by google, which has still skirted legal/property theft issues). There are ways to work underneath the system to change the system, it requires more patience and willingness to create better marketing (otherwise known as doublespeak: ala Bill Gates' "Of course I'm not copying the Mac's operating system, Steve, I'd never do that, I'm just building good applications"; or Zuckerberg's "Of course your privacy is safe, you're just linking to people you already know, and there are site preferences to maintain each user's privacy").
Anyways, people in general are just scared of and threatened by really smart kids. By operating in the public eye and hyping up his hacks he really was generating a lot of psychological pressure & stress.
## Jonathan Cline
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Cathal Garvey
I found the case fishy from the get-go; why were the secret service trying to catch Aaron? That's not their job, that's the FBI or the police's job. This plays into my pet theory that governments worldwide are happy to support totalitarian copyright because it creates a crime that anyone, watched for long enough, will commit (and most do routinely); a great way to erase political opponents.
And Aaron *was* a political opponent to the powers that be. Those unfamiliar with him may get a sense of why he's missed when informed that he was a big player in the war against SOPA and PIPA, that he helped found net-mediated real-world activism outfits like Demand Progress and Avaaz (which helped to kill ACTA in the EU), and that he had previously made an enemy of the FBI for helping to liberate loads of case history from PACER into the public domain.
Aaron was an amazing guy. I'd have loved to meet him in person someday, and won't get that chance now.
Of note to those on this list; in response to his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto and his passing, there's a twitter hashtag doing the rounds: #pdftribute. Loads of academics releasing their prior work into the public domain to liberate knowledge in Aaron's memory.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/diybio/-/RJZtaxhDB7gJ.
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Bryan Bishop
> Of note to those on this list; in response to his Guerilla Open Access
> Manifesto and his passing, there's a twitter hashtag doing the rounds:
> #pdftribute. Loads of academics releasing their prior work into the public
> domain to liberate knowledge in Aaron's memory.
https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front
Instead of working privately on academic scrapers, what if we avoided
mistakes by talking about best practices for collecting metadata and
pdfs.
Giovanni
I know those types of people! I don't have to consider myself smart to know myself if I choose not to be smart! I wish I could emphasize this issue more. Smart people aren't antisocial. Normal people are terrified of social people doing activist things! Normal, I'd like you to meet my friend Smart! He's open to meeting people. I'm sorry if you have trouble understanding him, Normal, Smart is a fast talker. But that's ok, I have a tape recorder that can slow down the speed, just like sports replay cams! Remember to review the lecture notes it before going to class tomorrow. Oh, wait, smart people are professors??? Wait, why are many professors, who we all know are smart, against open access? I know! professors are afraid of anti-elitists exposing what isn't REALLY exclusive. I see. It keeps the mystique fueled. That's what this is really about. Some people have the time to stop and think; others prefer to keep the mystique moving, because it prevents the dust from settling and exposing the emperor's clothes.
Eugen Leitl
> exposing what isn't REALLY exclusive. I see. It keeps the mystique fueled.
> That's what this is really about. Some people have the time to stop and
1) Publish, or perish
2) High impact factor journals are guarded by gatekeeper trolls,
who demand toll
Iterate the above, and you only have PIs surviving who wouldn't
want to rock the boat.
You want to change things -- you sneak in by the trolls, and
share the hoard they're jealously guarding. (Risking to be slayed,
like Aaron and others).
At the same time, try to change culture to embrace preprint
archives a la http://xxx.lanl.gov/
It has taken decades so far, with little result outside
of a couple fields. But a man can dream.
Giovanni
"The New School for Social Research was founded by a group of university professors and intellectuals in 1919 as a modern, progressive free school where adult students could "seek an unbiased understanding of the existing order, its genesis, growth and present working."[8] Founders included economist and literary scholar Alvin Johnson, historian Charles A. Beard, economists Thorstein Veblen and James Harvey Robinson, and philosophers Horace M. Kallen and John Dewey. Several founders were former professors at Columbia University.
The school was conceived and founded during a period of fevered nationalism, deep suspicion of foreigners, and increased censorship and suppression during and after the involvement of the United States in World War I.
In October 1917, after Columbia University passed a resolution that imposed a loyalty oath to the United States government upon the entire faculty and student body,[9] the board of trustees fired Professor of Psychology and Head of the Department James McKeen Cattell for having sent a petition to three US congressmen, asking them not to support legislation for military conscription.[10] Other firings included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana (grandson of the poet) and Leon Fraser. Charles A. Beard, Professor of Political Science, resigned his professorship at Columbia in protest. James Harvey Robinson, an associate of Beard's at Columbia and Professor of History, commented on the resignation: "It is not that any of us are pro-German or disloyal. It is simply that we fear that a condition of repression may arise in this country similar to that which we laughed at in Germany."[11] Robinson would resign in 1919 to join the faculty at the New School.
Founder Charles A. Beard had, in 1899, collaborated with Walter Vrooman at Oxford to start Ruskin Hall, a progressive institution of higher learning for workingmen. The New School would offer the rigorousness of postgraduate education without degree matriculation or degree prerequisites. It was theoretically open to anyone, as the adult division today called The New School for Public Engagement remains.[12] The first classes at the New School took the form of lectures followed by discussions, for larger groups, or as smaller conferences, for "those equipped for specific research." In the first semester, 100 courses, mostly in economics and politics, were offered by an ad hoc faculty that included Thomas Sewall Adams, Charles A. Beard, Horace M. Kallen, Harold Laski, Wesley Clair Mitchell, Thorstein Veblen, James Harvey Robinson, Graham Wallas, Charles B. Davenport, Elsie Clews Parsons, and Roscoe Pound.[13] John Cage later pioneered the subject of Experimental Composition at the school."
Aspiring scientists need training, and founding a new institution that has a mission statement supporting the viewpoint of open research standards is the most efficient place to get it. The best precedents have already been set. All that's left to do is reproduce it, like a good scientist. Opening up a new university (perhaps in New York City, where it would make sense to like-minded intellectuals) for people interested in science and taught by top-recruited professors that have no publishing requirements can set an new institutional standard. The most tacit fear of non-tenured professors is the non-acquisition of tenure. So, why not fund a university that focuses on teaching rather than research? Research should always be a collective effort of countless contributors rather than a principle investigator much like community-driven software development, so a professor should not have to be burdened with that responsibility if science research funding is an issue that should be decided and conducted by the public anyways. The Patriot Act post-9/11 is the third wave of the Red Scare in the late 1910s, the 2nd being McCarthyism in the 50s.
All universities today have a PR department. Here's another idea. A suggestion is that this new university purchase the Popular Science magazine and its trademarks. The university's could name science department The new New School for Popular Science.
Popular Science Monthly was founded in May 1872 by Edward L. Youmans to disseminate scientific knowledge to the educated layman. Youmans had previously worked as an editor for the weekly Appleton's Journal and persuaded them to publish his new journal. Early issues were mostly reprints of English periodicals. The journal became an outlet for writings and ideas of Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, Louis Pasteur, Henry Ward Beecher, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Thomas Edison, John Dewey and James McKeen Cattell. William Jay Youmans, Edward's brother, helped found Popular Science Monthly in 1872 and was an editor as well. He became editor-in-chief on Edward's death in 1887.[2] The publisher, D. Appleton & Company, was forced for economic reasons to sell the journal in 1900.[3]
James McKeen Cattell became the editor in 1900 and the publisher in 1901. Cattell had a background in academics and continued publishing articles for educated readers. By 1915 the readership was declining and publishing a science journal was a financial challenge. In a September 1915 editorial, Cattell related these difficulties to his readers and announced that the "Popular Science Monthly" name had been "transferred" to a group that wanted the name for a general audience magazine, a publication which fit the name better. The existing journal would continue the academic tradition as Scientific Monthly. Existing subscribers would remain subscribed under the new name.[4] Scientific Monthly was published until 1958 when it was absorbed into Science.
The Modern Publishing Company acquired the Popular Science Monthly name. This company had purchased Electrician and Mechanic magazine in 1914 and over the next two years merged several magazines together into a science magazine for a general audience. The magazine had a series of name changes: Modern Electrics and Mechanics, Popular Electricity and Modern Mechanics, Modern Mechanics and finally World's Advance, before the publishers purchased the name Popular Science Monthly. The October 1915 issue was titled Popular Science Monthly and World's Advance. The volume number (Vol. 87, No. 4) was that of Popular Science but the content was that of World's Advance. The new editor was Waldemar Kaempffert, a former editor of Scientific American.[5][6]
The change in Popular Science Monthly was dramatic. The old version was a scholarly journal that had eight to ten articles in a 100 page issue. There would be ten to twenty photographs or illustrations. The new version had hundreds of short, easy to read articles with hundreds of illustrations. Editor Kaempffert was writing for "the home craftsman and hobbyist who wanted to know something about the world of science." The circulation doubled in the first year.[3]"
An institution with the space and resources of a university that doesn't have to follow the traditional university could accomplish a lot more results than one that has gatekeepers at every level of its administration. And a well rounded education is useful; Buckminster Fuller and Albert Einstein taught/guest lectured at Black Mountain College. What if The New School or similar institution could add a progressive science department?
John Griessen
> Anyone heard of The New School? I've got an old idea:
Eugen asks not to top post though. How would you attract the
tenured professors who are all used to "contributing to the body of knowledge"
as a necessary step to tenure? Just give 'em tenure early and let 'em loose?
Professors are weird. They tend to politics in the system of universities as is.
One of the Mexican revolutionaries of 1911-1916 was a professor.
Everyday professors, (not pol. revolutionaries), seem to crave tenure so they can
have an illusion of constancy in a fluid, dissolving, rebuilding, chaotic world.
And then how to pay them if they would come, and would they teach well?
Hmmm...
Giovanni
Well, it would be a private school funded entirely by those who wish to go there and alumni- tuition would be expensive, just like the other schools, which would cover the property and salaries. I think they'd teach well. Many do. Based on their reputation, and admission demand. There are many constancies even in an evolving world, which leads to niche opportunities for those quick enough to establish them.
Dan
Aaron Swartz prosecutor 'drove another hacker to suicide in 2008 after he named him in a cyber crime case'
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Nathan McCorkle
> On Tuesday, January 15, 2013 8:33:24 PM UTC-6, John Griessen wrote:
>>
>> On 01/15/2013 06:38 PM, Giovanni wrote:
>> > Anyone heard of The New School? I've got an old idea:
>>
>> Sounds good Giovanni,
>>
> there and alumni- tuition would be expensive, just like the other schools,
> which would cover the property and salaries. I think they'd teach well. Many
> do. Based on their reputation, and admission demand. There are many
> constancies even in an evolving world, which leads to niche opportunities
> for those quick enough to establish them.
>
moved to satellite 'training centers', i.e. genspace, biocurious
types, even industrial labs that offer rental space and/or equipment
time?
Simply starting a science 'University' or 'school' in the web ether
could aid the 'satellite' labs that already exist. For instance the
'school' might be able to get accounts with reagent and DNA providers
that don't provide to industry or individuals. (Sebastian's comment
about addGene being mostly academic got me thinking about this)
I think a new school system would be great, one without assignment
deadlines so you can take as long as you need to master an assignment.
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-Nathan
Sebastian Cocioba
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