Frankly, I don’t think that was enough to make Aaron commit suicide. However, having close relations like Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian completely turn sour and blame him probably did, and I’m akin to believe they know what they did given how hard they doubled down on “well, Aaron really wasn’t that great of a guy” narrative.
Please don’t spread misinformation.
Edit: Why is anyone downvoting this? The text is inaccurate and should not be posted.
What about this is misinformation?
It is not true that he was sentenced to 35 years in prison by US authorities for transferring and sharing scientific articles from JSTOR. It is true that he killed himself.
After googling it it seems he was charged and those were the estimate of years if convicted so
So?
Looks likely he would have been convicted, especially considering the whole suicide thing??
Basically the same thing, calling it misinformation implies its creating a perception of the incident that is unwarranted, where I would disagree that the distinction has any merit
I am genuinely disappointed that on an ostensibly science-related message board I see comments along the lines “this isn’t actually true, but it kinda-sorta is, therefore, inaccurate claims somehow aren’t misinformation”. If all kinds of counter-factual things were true, then all kinds of things would be true: what is the point of this hand-waving to defend something that is riddled with untruths? Also, with whom did he purportedly share these documents? In 22 words, this person got no fewer than two things wrong and you are carrying water for what reason?
Law is not science, it’s politics. This is a political distinction, not a matter of the laws of reality
Their comment wasn’t a dissertation, i didn’t expect extreme precision, I’m defending the spirit in which I believe that comment was posted, because I agree with it, simple as
You can’t make a claim like that without elaborating why you think it’s misinormation [SIC].
It didn’t get to trial if I remember right. He definitely wasn’t sentenced.
According to a quick read on Wikipedia, you are right. He was charged, But not sentenced.
On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT.[15][16] Federal prosecutors, led by Carmen Ortiz, later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[17] carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release.[18] Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison.[19] Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment.[20][21]
It makes two claims and he did commit suicide. Also, my keyboard is broken. :/
deleted by creator
Rocking up to a popular conversation, and saying this is wrong, but not providing what you consider correct. Is a great way to not be a contributing member of society.
Requiring people to have a 15 message subthread to figure out what you meant from your first comment is very unhelpful
I thought it was pretty obvious, since there is so little actual content in the post, but I guess you’re right. Thanks.
he didn’t even share the articles did he? it was an “intent” crime.
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
Think I’m gonna be taking the solidarity approach pretty soon. Humanity is truly a cancer.
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.
They got the wrong reddit founder .
(not that I wish that on spez even tho he is bad I don’t think he is that bad )
Eh mister “I will own slaves after the apocalypse” probably doesn’t deserve the grace
Well when you put it like that .
I never heard of this guy before today. What a goat RIP AARON SCHWARTZ
There’s a good behind the bastards episode on him (a good guy holiday episode; he’s not a bastard)
He was one of the inventors of Reddit.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Bro he’s been the front runner the entire time.
This is why people’s sycophantica for Biden are so problematic. [email protected]
Trump also seems to understand poll at about 8%
Which means Biden needs to be leading by that amount to win.
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.
Really it’s too close to call but he does appear to have a slight edge if you had to pick a favorite.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/
it’s not really.that close.whem you compare it to 2016/2020
Trump underpolls significantly,.by 5-8%, and did for both 2016 and 2020.
Bidens hasn’t led trump in polling in 500 days
Maybe. Maybe not. Pollsters typically adjust methodology between elections so this type of analysis is questionable.
He hasn’t led in the average but is currently within the margin of error. The available evidence suggests a toss up but we won’t know for sure until after the election, as always.
I mean…
No. It’s not margin of error right now. It’s a clear Trump W. Not once you account for Trump’s consistent over performance and Bidens consistent underperformance relative to polling aggregates. Everyone with eyes has been seeing it for better than a year.
Consistent in two elections? That’s not consistent. That’s not even data, let alone a trend.
As I said, pollsters adjust the demographic weighting based on election results. It is possible they will again underestimate Trump’s performance. It’s also possible they will overestimate it. Only time will tell.
But regardless of that issue, it is within the margin of error—that is a statistical reality irrelevant to your speculation about polling errors.
You’re wrong about a lot and you’re presenting your opinions as fact. Trump doesn’t underpoll by that amount now.
There was a phenomenon in 2016 where people were reluctant to tell pollsters they were voting for him, because they were embarrassed. Now Trump supporters are the loud minority of voters. And Biden is the boring safe choice. Biden voters are less likely to stay on the phone and answer questions.
Also, national polls mean very little. You have to actually look at the swing state polls to find out who’s winning. And there’s not much data this far from the election.
Finally, we can tell there’s something wrong with current polling just because “Mr. Brainworms” RFK Jr polls around 10% right now. No one is going to vote for him, and definitely not 10% of the population. People are just fucking with the pollsters right now. Do you know anyone seriously considering voting for RFK Jr?
You can project whatever narrative you want into the data but what is I’m saying is fundamentally the case.
Trump outperforms his polling. He did so in 2016 by a wide margin, and he did so again in 2020. You can just go look at the week prior polling. This isn’t some grandiose fiction it’s a statement of fact, that you seem to be ignorant to.
Your interest in a particular narrative doesn’t change what is. What matters is that Biden needs around an 8% lead on Trump nationally to be secure, and has been trailing, basically the entire time.
If the election were tomorrow, and we believe the offsets observed in the two previous national elections, and we should because those were real events made from real data, then Biden would lose in a landslide today.
Because I can’t stand all of your group think naivete:
I went and pulled the 2020 data. The above is the relative error in polling from polls during the months of October and November 2020, calculated against the real votes cast in 2020. Biden underperforms his polling by about 4% and Trump overperforms his polling by about 8%. You can argue with why this is the case, but you can-not pretend that this isn’t the case. You should be adjusting how you see polls with this in mind. When you see Biden trailing Trump in national polling (and he has been for 400 days in a row), you should see that as a CLEAR Trump lead considering that Trump CONSISTENTLY overperforms on election day relative to his polling.
Sources: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/42MVDX
https://electionlab.mit.edu/data
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/data/president_polls_historical.csv
You didn’t answer the question:
Do you know anyone who is voting for RFK Jr? He is polling at 10% right now, so if it’s real then statistically you should know someone.
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.
He committed the idealist’s perennial sin: He thought that because the system is bullshit, it’s okay not to play ball with it.
“Hey this is a bunch of crap. I can be guilty or innocent, and the right move is always to plead guilty even if I didn’t do a damn thing wrong, because if I try to fight the case they’re gonna tack on a ton of new charges and they almost always win and I might go away for most of my life.”
“Preach.”
“I’m gonna plead not guilty because I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No no no no no that is not the way to reform the system no no no that is a bad mistake”
Aaron Swartz was a fuckin hero. Read his posthumous book, it is wonderful. But the same idealism and faith that led him to the good things he did in his painfully short time here, also led him not to understand how to engage with the US federal government and keep your skin.
Yeah. Don’t talk to cops. Get a sympathetic/movement lawyer. And this is fucking crucial, do what they say.
A lot of idealistic people understand that you can sell your soul piecemeal and are always in danger of it. But they don’t really understand what not giving up your values is vs not doing what’s smart. You take the plea deal unless you have to rat someone out. And also you don’t commit crimes you aren’t comfortable with the consequences of.
He’s probably rolling in his grave at the enshittification of reddit now too
i would say jstor are cunts, but actually it’s the US government that were being cunts here.
Law Enforcement and the Justice System have every responsibility to enforce laws as they were written, JSTOR pressed charges and the US Government offered Auron a plea deal to reduce his sentence to 6 months.
Definitely an argument about the inadequacy of US Healthcare to be made here, though. Auron clearly could have used some counseling.
and the US government was almost definitely trying to make an example out of him: literally anybody who read the case details whatsoever.
I thought there was a prosecutor who pursued this beyond all reasonable bounds, making Aaron’s life a living hell and driving him to suicide?
Well if a Psychologist had helped him through it maybe he could have turned around and sued that prosecutor into disbarment.
EDIT: People are downvoting this, but TBH I wouldn’t kill myself over a 35 year sentence much less the 6 months in the plea deal this guy got. Wouldn’t consider it for a single moment. He had agency in his own actions.
yeah and maybe that prosecutor is tangentially responsible for his suicide now.
Spilled milk, but yeah that dude was a shill and should probably be dealt with if they haven’t already.
The prosecutor went on to have a pretty successful career and I think had a role in Obama’s administration. She basically said “I’m sorry your son killed himself” but never admitted to having a part in his death.
I’ll take your word for it, never looked into it myself.
Only prosecuting district attorneys can chose to bring a crimial charge to court.*
*except in north carolina… for some reason they actually let victims prosecute.
deleted by creator
This is like the Oliver Stone science meme kind of fact.
bits are not bugs
