[elp]

Aaron Swartz was targeted by some pretty overly zealous prosecution no objection, but lets not forget that what he really did.

He put a laptop in a wiring closet that was DOSing JSTOR and kept changing IPs to avoid being blocked. The admins had to put a camera on the closet to eventually catch him.

He might have had good intentions but the way he went about getting the data was throwing soup at paintings levels of dumb activism.

For all the noise the real punishment he was facing was 6 months in low security [1]. I'm pretty sure OpenAI would have also been slapped hard for the same crime.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosec...

Edit: added link

[omnimus]

“charges carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines plus 35 years in prison” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

I didnt think people on “hacker news” would be defending what happened to Aaron Swartz.

[cowsandmilk]

> charges carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines plus 35 years in prison

Any lawyer knows that is stupid math. The DOJ has sentencing guidelines that never add up the years in prison for charges to be served consecutively. The media likes to do that to get big numbers, but it isn’t an honest representation of the charges.

I don’t think charges against Schwartz should have been filed, but I also can’t stand bad legal math.

[omnimus]

Sure but… he could technically get that or not? If somebody wanted to really punish him they could push it to what? 3 years? 5 years? 10 years?

Because some people really wanted to punish him.

I am just reacting to the downplaying that he would get 6 months in jail. Like he was some weak person for commiting suicide because of that.

[tptacek]

Swartz own lawyer, writing after his death, said he didn't believe Swartz would have received a custodial sentence even if he had gone to trial and lost. The prosecutors were offering him months in custody, against a 6-7 year sentence they believed they could get (implausibly, if you run the guidelines calculation). Nobody has to take the "35 years" thing seriously; nobody involved directly in this case did. Swartz was exactly the kind of nerd who would have memorized the sentencing guidelines just to win arguments on a message board (that's a compliment) and he had extremely good lawyers.

(I'm ambivalent about everything in this case and certainly don't support the prosecutors, but much of what gets written about Swartz's case is misinformation.)

[izabera]

Just for context, there is a new post about OpenAI DDoS'ing half the internet every other day on hn

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42660377

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549624

[alphan0n]

Just for context, the author of the second link in your comment verifiably lied about blocking crawlers via robots.txt

CommonCrawl archives robots.txt

For convenience, you can view the extracted data here:

https://pastebin.com/VSHMTThJ

You are welcome to verify for yourself by searching for “wiki.diasporafoundation.org/robots.txt” in the CommonCrawl index here:

https://index.commoncrawl.org/

The index contains a file name that you can append to the CommonCrawl url to download the archive and view. More detailed information on downloading archives here:

https://commoncrawl.org/get-started

From September to December, the robots.txt at wiki.diasporafoundation.org contained this, and only this:

>User-agent: * >Disallow: /w/

[elp]

If you ask OpenAI to stop, using robots.txt, they actually will.

What Aaron was trying to achieve was great, how he want about it is what ruined his life.

[LunaSea]

It is a well known fact that OpenAI stole content by scraping sites with illegally uploaded content on it.

[omnimus]

Nobody really asked Aaron about anything they collected more evidence and wanted to put him to jail.

School should have unplugged his machine bring him for questioning and tell him not to do that.

[nathancahill]

Which individual suffered harm from Aaron's laptop in the closet?

[tptacek]

As I recall, the whole campus lost their automatic access to JSTOR for a time.

[lofaszvanitt]

Aaron had an unstable personality and they took advantage of that. A nudge here and there, and here comes the suicide. Look around people who Aaron frequented with to find the culprits...

[Earw0rm]

No paintings were harmed in the throwing of soup, and now we all know it happened and why.

Would that I were that kind of dumb.

[cassianoleal]

> the way he went about getting the data was throwing soup at paintings levels of dumb activism.

Throwing soup at paintings doesn’t make the paintings available to the public.

What he did had a direct and practical effect.

[cowsandmilk]

> What he did had a direct and practical effect

The main impact of Aaron Swartz’s actions were that it became much more difficult to walk onto MIT’s campus and access journal articles from a laptop without being a member of the MIT community. I did this for a decade beforehand and this became much more locked down in the years after his actions due to restrictions the publishers pushed at MIT. Aaron intentionally went to the more open academic community in Cambridge (Harvard, his employer, was much more restrictive) and in the process ruined that openness for everyone.