Aaron Swartz

Aaron was one of our community's best and brightest, and he acheived great things in his short life. He was a coder, a political activist, an entrepreneur, a contributor to major technological developments (like RSS), and an all-around Internet freedom rock star. As Wired noted, the world will miss out on decades of magnificent things Aaron would have accomplished had his time not been cut short. Read More »

The Internet is up for grabs. [...] We need an informed public debate to ensure lawmakers make the right choices that fully preserve the vital openness of the Internet and the privacy and civil liberties of its users. Reforming the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) should be a part of that debate. Read More »

A federal judge in Washington, D.C. on Friday ordered the government to promptly start releasing thousands of pages of Secret Service documents about the late activist and coder Aaron Swartz, following months of roadblocks and delays. Read More »

Aaron Swartz faced an imminent trial for having downloaded some four million articles from a not-for-profit scholarly archive, and a possible penalty of 35 years in prison and a $1-million fine, which some call disproportionate to his actions Read More »

[...] We academics rarely think about our work as a commodity, the mechanisms through which the public is denied access, and the profits corporations make by selling that access to mostly cash strapped public universities at exorbitant prices. But Swartz’s death is an indication that academic work is a high stakes game that can leave many of us with blood on our hands. Read More »