If I remember correctly, it wasn’t even illegal since these scientific articles should have been public to begin with because they used public funds.
That may be so, but IIRC he was charged with breaking into MIT’s networking room and illegally tapping into their network to get the articles:
I hacked my highschool servers when I was young and shared the upcoming exams, so everyone could prepare for them. Someone told the authorities, all I got was some extra exercise. Sure it wasn’t MIT, but still 35 years is ridiculous, even a year of prison would have been ridiculous.
Well that’s definitely burying the lede from the OP.
It wasn’t the sharing part they had a problem with, it was the B&E and hacking.
Most of these guys they just offer jobs to. This was needless. No wonder China is kicking our ass on the cyber front
still… 35 years? obviously there is more missing information.
It wasn’t 35 years, it was 6 months with a plea deal
That’s still a hell of a sentence for a B&E
Mm. Breaking and entering to share publicly funded research is different than B&E with the threat of violence…
That also may be so, but 35 years is fucked up for that. pretty sure child porn first time offenders is like 15 to 30 so hacking MIT for stuff that should have been free gets you more jail time then a first CP offence. OK thats fucked up
Paradoxically, that’s not how science jourals work. There are no difference between public or prívate funds in this regard.
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Articles paid for by the public through grants btw
Look, the kid was a hero, but this is also patently false.
He was not sentenced to 35 years. The trial hadn’t started. 35 years was the maximum possible sentence. He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected.
We don’t need to spin lies to make his story more tragic than it already is.
35 years max, plea for 1/2 that was rejected. He was going to get the book thrown at him to make an example. 5 years minimum but I wouldn’t doubt 10-20.
The rapist traitor that headed a insurrection on Jan 6 2021 has never spent a day in jail and is still the frontrunner for president to be legally elected in 2024.
still the frontrunner for president to be legally elected in 2024.
The front runner? Really?
I’m not being sarcastic. Im genuinely interested, but can’t be arsed to start going through polls because it’d mean going through the biases of the pollers.
Just remember polls gave Hillary almost a guaranteed win. For all intents and purposes, Trump is the front runner regardless of what any polling says
And the result were statistically within what they predicted. She did get the popular vote but lost in key states where the margins were small.
No, they did not. That’s not what happened.
Polling probably has taken a dive in accuracy since then, though. Uptake in cell phone use in younger generations has been lingering over the industry for a long time, and it’s finally caught up with them.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
72% chance from here. Probably high enough that swing state voters opted to stay home. This was the vibe practically all October. The FBI felt confident enough in her win to announce they were investigating her to appear unbiased.
Polling being inaccurate for whatever reason doesn’t change the article after article assuring everyone Hillary had it in the bag.
72% chance means Trump needed to flip two coins and have them both come up heads. It’s not that ridiculous.
From the nearly all the polls I see, yes. But like you said, bias of pollers. I’ve seen a few that go more in depth to try and figure out the “responds to polls” bias, but I still only see biden ahead by a margin. With those small numbers of concentrated effort vs the wide reach general polls, trump is. It does not instill any level of confidence in me that the “general” polls don’t reflect the “general” voting bias. Even without all of this analysis, just a few million voting for trump is unbelievably concerning to not just the future of the US, but the world that this single country dominates. These fascists are campaigning on the cut your nose to spite your face philosophy.
Bro he’s been the front runner the entire time.
This is why people’s sycophantica for Biden are so problematic. !data_vizualisations@lemmy.world
Trump also seems to understand poll at about 8%
Which means Biden needs to be leading by that amount to win.
plea for 1/2 that was rejected
The rejected plea was for 6 months.
6 months is 1/2 of a year.
While that is true.
“1/2 that” would imply 1/2 of 35 years or 17.5 years.
For bulk downloading science journals he had access to.
for breaking and entering*
and DoS
also he worked with wikileaks… i think he was named as a source posthumously…
he also wrote an open source system of servers that function exactly like wikileaks submission system (actually i think it is, given clues as to how it operates… like the manning chat logs)
dead drop is now called “open drop” and powers every major newspaper’s leak submission system…he was murdered.
not only the did it make no sense, given the 6 month plea bargain option, but he was an outspoken activist and would’ve at least left a note… in the form of some post online…
donald trump gets 10 warnings for intimidating witnesses and indefinite trial postponement for hoarding and most likely leaking classified documents. Sweet sweet justice.
People keep trying to convince me it’s not evidence of two justice systems.
But it is.
It’s the subtle difference between a JUSTICE system and a LEGAL system.
One aims to maintain law and order in society in a fair and equal way regardless of one’s status or situation.
The other is a system gamed to benefit the richest and wealthiest individuals to get away with everything.
I think this is a consequence of any (unregulated) capitalistic system in general. The system is founded on money, more money will give anyone more influence and power over the system
It’s a consequence of our “growth at all costs” take on capitalism. Capitalism is only livable for the average person when it’s kept in check by a strong government and corruption is vigorously prosecuted. We’ve decided that corruption just happens and there’s nothing we can do about it, and so there are no disincentives to corrupting government.
This has nothing to do with an economic system. This same shit is worse even in communist systems, and I’m not even going to try and point fingers at that system and say it is.
The real reason is because of power, and a class system that protects its own.
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Only struggle is the class struggle
Correct, no clue why I pointed this out and got downvoted but you say the same thing and get people agreeing with you…guess I should have kept with the “capitalism bad” circle jerk.
because the class system is built into capitalism.
you can’t have unchecked capitalism without an exploited underclass.
and you said it has nothing to do with the economic system, which is false, hence the downvotes…
The ability to move upward in capitalism is much greater than in any other current economic system. Acting like capitalism is the sole reason for the current divide is silly
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I mean… you’re correct lol
It’s evidence that we live in corporatocracies masquerading as “democracies”. The 0.1%, shielded by the liability protections of the corporations they own, and their armies of lobbyists — they finance our politics, choose who ends up on the ballot, and shadow write most of our legislation, policies, and regulations.
Trump is free because he is a part of that < 0.1%.
The Boeing execs who oversaw systemic fraud, lied to the FAA, and murdered 166 people still ARE FREE AND RICH. Why? Because they are the 0.1%.
The IPCC hosts fossil fuelled climate summits in fossil fuel exporting countries, inviting fossil fuel corporations and lobbyists to attend — at a scientific conference about how to solve the crisis they created and profited from! why? Because we live in corporatocracies.
If any country’s government spied on its own people as much as big business does in America, people would flip out. But in America, big business really is the government.
We are so fucked…
But no one would really “flip out” because none one could really do anything about it.
The US is a kleptocracy, we’re ruled by the people who have looted the public
Good thing guillotines don’t care about wealth, only the size of your neck.
We’ll just have to make the hole slightly larger to fit fatter necks.
At risk of sounding cringe, it’s evidence of one injustice system.
donald tr*mp gets 10 warnings for intimidating witnesses and indefinite trial postponement for hoarding and most likely leaking classified documents. Sweet sweet justice.
Why are you censoring Donald Trump’s name? Is it a swear word now in your country?
We’re big girls here, we can take a little rude language, don’t worry :)
I don’t know why but i just didn’t want to type that slur. It’s edited now.
For the record, Aaron Swartz never actually went to trial, nor was he “sentenced” to anything.
Federal prosecutors came after him with overzealous charges in an effort to make him accept a plea deal (they do that a lot), which he rejected. It would have gone to court where the feds would have had to justify the charges they were bringing.
But that never happened because he killed himself.
We don’t actually know how this all would have played out.
The comment in OPs post is misleading but he did nevertheless kill himself because of the justice system trying to prosecute him for accessing science most likely funded by public money in the first place.
And will never know, selfishly speaking, the possible extent of his further contributions to society. Died at 26 after an incredible life already.
Besides his life, what else did they steal from us?
RIP Aaron
I highly recommend watching the documentary on him, Internet’s own boy.
Oil CEOs pay fines for bringing about a global climate catastrophe. Fascist politicians are given slaps on the wrist for an attempted coup d’etat. Government officials openly commit gross violations of privacy and suffer no consequences.
But a guy hacks a university network and downloads a hoard of scientific articles that should have been freely accessible to begin with and he gets 35 years in prison. I’ll admit I wasn’t familiar with this case before I saw this picture. Which is kind of insane in and of itself.
Remember Kim Dotcom? He had a file sharing website and the police raided his house with guns like he was a dangerous criminal. There is a video of it on YouTube.
Honestly I had forgotten about the whole MegaUpload stuff.
Given, Kim Dotcom had a long history of being a trash person before the MegaUpload raid; Trading in stolen credit card info, embezzlement, black-hat hacking, etc… But he definitely didn’t deserve to get swatted just because he hosted a site that was popular with media pirates. The police used his prior convictions as justification for their heavy-handed tactics. But the reality is that they likely would have gone in with SWAT even if he had a squeaky clean record beforehand.
There’s a recent Radiolab episode about those that have taken up his mantle and the impact he’s had on scientific publishing.
The most infuriating thing was and still is the fact that some people justify the sentence and blame him for killing himself.
Well killing oneself is always one’s own choice, but it’s terrible that he was given such a ridiculous sentence for no more than a copyright issue. Not even sure if he made money on the material, but even if he did he should have gotten maybe a fine, and imprisonment is just insane.
He wasn’t sentenced, he died before he could go to trial or accept a plea deal, but there is record of a 6 month jail sentence being offered to him.
Judicially murdered by Carmen Ortiz.
The weirdest shit about this is that JSTOR apparently has a very expansive social media presence.
They have an official Tumblr account.
I had to follow it out of morbid curiosity.
He’s probably rolling in his grave at the enshittification of reddit now too
Reddit could’ve been so good with him at the helm…
Good thing we’ve got a second opportunity. ;)
He’s dead so no we dont
OP is referring to Lemmy
Lemmy is already cooked
It’s the federation part
If there was no interaction across instances then their respective populations would be smaller and thus the experience would be better
Start your own instance that isn’t, then.
That’s not the fix.
What is the fix? I don’t understand what you are objecting to.
I didn’t object to anything, if anything, I declared/observed.
Lemmy will suffer the same issues as reddit regarding content, modding, quality, etc. Just not yet
He likely wouldn’t’ve stayed. We’d be better off with him anyways. He was moving towards activism and politics. He’d probably either be a prisoner or a congressman by now. And like honestly, we could use a congressman like him.
i would say jstor are cunts, but actually it’s the US government that were being cunts here.
He didn’t even share them as far as I know, he just downloaded them. And the trial hadn’t started yet when he committed suicide.
He didn’t get the chance to share them because he was caught downloading them, and his download requests were getting blocked.
And to be clear, he wasn’t downloading from the Internet as one might download a car, he went into a restricted networking closet and connected directly to the switch, leaving a computer sitting there sending access requests. He had to keep going back to it to check on the progress, which is when they caught him.
And the trial hadn’t started yet when he committed suicide.
Yeah, I agree with the sentiment of the post, but this is just wildly misleading. He was not sentenced to anything, he committed suicide before the trial.
He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected, in an effort to make the feds justify the ludicrous charges they were pressing. Had it gone to trial, he certainly wouldn’t have been found not guilty, but it’s unlikely many of those charges would have stuck. It’s extremely unlikely he would actually have served 35 years.
That’s not exactly what happened.
Aaron committed suicide before his case went to trial, and so he was never convicted let alone sentenced. 35 years was never even likely; had it gone to trial there’s every reason to think he’d have been acquitted outright, or at worst given a slap on the wrist. Not that he should have even been charged, of course.
Well now I’ve got two competing claims, and I can’t believe either one until I see the authoritative history on it
There’s a documentary on YouTube called “The internet’s own boy”, if you want to learn more. Basically, he was offered a 6 month plea, but he would be a convicted felon, and basic logic/morality tells you that you shouldn’t plead guilty to a crime that you didn’t commit. However, the justice system is very imperfect, and often people plead guilty for reduced sentencing even if they’re not guilty. He stood on principle until his legs gave out. they were already in millions spent in attorney fees. Not a shred of justice can be found in how Aaron’s story ended.
Robert Evan’s did a Behind the Bastards episode on this back in December I believe.
Also JSTOR never wanted him prosecuted only to have the files deleted and call it a wash. It was MIT that supported prosecution and who called the fuzz in the first place.