[dmix]

Some of the great minds in history have accepted this fact and viewed death as a very real possibility by adopting views deemed radical by society.

But they saw a strong enough morality in what they were doing to perceiver.

This dates as far back in human history lore such as in the bible. And probably well before that.

Human societies always seems to be well structured to suppress radical thought. I'm curious if the internet is changing that.

[thelonius_monk]

A very radical thought in our context would be suggesting that Aaron Swartz is not actually dead, but instead staged his suicide. I realize for a man who is probably dead, that is a very terrible thought to think. But given the fact that the last words on Aaron's last blog post are "STAGED SUICIDE" don't we owe it to somebody like Aaron to think outside the box?

Other stupid points include: 0. Footer "I'm not dead yet!" on http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/continuity not updated as per instructions 1. Batman last blog post also seems out of place in anonymous warhead video (tribute by anon to Swartz?) 2. Supreme court justices always a point of fascination for Swartz ("warhead names"). (tribute?) 3. Aarons ArkAngel name of poster of the youtube anonymous warhead video (tribute?) 4. Friend says discussed w/ swartz what public reaction to his suicide might be (bizarre!) at first eulogy 5. Weird green times font on black bg in ussc.gov hack uniquely reminiscent of style of Swartz's blog and possibly due to his near sightedness. 6. "A 24 Puzzle" blog post by Aaron very closely describes the situation he is in now having to send out sensitive documents to reliable sites while under pressure (but way back in March 4, 2009) 7. Takes about 6 months to a year to prepare and execute the hack of ussc.gov and related sites, why did preparation coincide with suicide? (random chance?) 8. Anon message on ussc.gov has very similar cadences to swartz's extremely unique writing style "succinct".

So I took the liberty while procrastinating of running stylometric software: http://www.philocomp.net/?pageref=humanities&page=signat... on a downloaded corpora of Aaron Swartz's and Paul Graham's Blog posts and the ussc.gov anon message: https://mega.co.nz/#!9gc13bhK!DtetrAmSyTrEChK7vViMNnBbS-doTH... As you can see it easily distinguishes between randomly chosen books by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and it also tells who wrote the 54th federalist paper (Madison not Hamilton): http://imageshack.us/a/img838/927/austenvsdickensfederali.pn...

The results show that Aaron Swartz is more likely to have written the ussc.gov message than Paul Graham: http://img585.imageshack.us/img585/843/swartzvsgrahamresults...

I don't have time to review how the statistics work or how "keywords work". So it is very likely I'm doing this all wrong. Here is the seminal paper by Mosteller and Wallace on their identification of the author of the federalist papers (Ironically from JSTOR): http://www.scribd.com/doc/122904915/INFERENCE-IN-AN-AUTHORSH...

Presumably now you need to download corpora online from other authors like Kevin Poulsen and see if Aaron is always a likelier candidate than all of them, but I don't have anymore time right now and I'm only doing this half heartedly. Maybe someone else who's bored can try it?

[fusiongyro]

I have, and will, rationally debate you point-by-point but first I have to attack this nonsense:

"don't we owe it to somebody like Aaron to think outside the box?"

Let's suppose both possibilities. Suppose you're right and he didn't kill himself. How do you think he benefits from you "decoding" the message like this? It seems more likely to me that if he did stage his suicide for some greater purpose you would be implicitly defeating that purpose by publicizing that it is fake. In this scenario what you're doing is undermining his plan for no particular reason.

In the far more likely possibility (heck, let's call it "reality" for short) he did kill himself, and all you're doing with this nonsense is twisting the knife, hurting his friends and family with your lunatic rantings because to you a big pile of digital crap cobbled together constitutes evidence, and the person whose physical body was found and buried or cremated or whatever, is a detail that somehow seems to you less real and easier to fake than all that digital nonsense.

In other words, this bullshit is detrimental whether you are right or wrong. But you are oh-so-wrong.

Point zero. A website footer. I would have led with something a little more potent. Settling estates takes longer than a couple weeks.

Point one is better explained by the null hypothesis.

Point four is better explained by the fact that suicidal people think and talk about suicide.

Point five is adequately explained as an homage. You can't dust the bits for fingerprints.

Point seven is completely speculation by you. You're missing the statistical point that while anonymous might have needed a lot of time to crack a particular government website, they can find a vulnerable one today on any particular day. Why didn't they hack the DOJ website or the Attorney General's site? Because this one was easier.

Point eight. Again, you can't dust bits for fingerprints. Your results aren't meaningful because the only two possible authors aren't Aaron Swartz and Paul Graham. If you pick two random people out of the whole country and a note written by a third person, run them through this program, it will come back saying the note was written by one of the two it knows about. Even if you had the entire internet as your corpus with every person's contribution perfectly tagged, it could still have been his writing stitched together by other people and come back identified as him. Especially since the "control" is Paul Graham, who has his own "unique style."

The points I didn't discuss are either trivial and lend no significant weight to your hypothesis or incoherent to me.

Quite apart from all that you still need to explain some things. Like, how someone could fake a death in this country at all. Having known plenty of people who've passed away, I can tell you the government is pretty interested in seeing the body and there is a pretty impressive paper trail involved. You can't really conjure up an empty casket. If the next step in your crazy adventure is finding a way to make the government complicit in a staged suicide, I will not feel much remorse for writing you off as some kind of internet schizophrenic. In fact, I probably draw the line much further than you'd find comfortable, right around the presumption that a 26-year-old could convince Mom and Dad and the rest of the family to cry it up for the camera while he chillaxes at home hacking ussc.gov. Call up your folks and ask them if they'd do that for you so you can avoid 6 months of jail, I'll wait. (They said "no.")

Indeed, I'd like to know who else you think has faked their death. The other names that come to mind (Andy Kaufman, Jim Morrison) have been slowly accepted as having actually died as the years wore on and nobody found either of them in Tahiti sipping cocktails.

Here is what would constitute proof that he didn't kill himself: Aaron, alive, in the flesh.

Here is what should constitute proof that he killed himself: he is dead and his family identified the body.

Here is what does not constitute proof of anything: that his style of writing is more like that of whoever writes crap for Anonymous than Paul Graham, that he talked about killing himself before he did it, that his estate isn't settled, that he and his friends had in-jokes, that text comes in many colors and shapes including green on black, that he liked puzzles, that he planned his suicide before committing it, that anonymous found a government website relating to the justice program (seems like that would be a substantial portion of them), or that you managed to run software without first understanding what it did.

I hope you live near enough to Aaron's family to go tell them your theory, and I hope you'll give it a shot, because nobody would forgive me for punching you in the face, but they'd probably forgive his parents for it.

[jacquesm]

Could you please stop this?

You do realize he was found dead by his uncle?

Are you seriously suggesting his uncle and the NYC medical examiner are part of some conspiracy?

There is enough madness in this world to intentionally add to it.