donald trump gets 10 warnings for intimidating witnesses and indefinite trial postponement for hoarding and most likely leaking classified documents. Sweet sweet justice.
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
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.
Articles paid for by the public through grants btw
With authors often paying for open access publications literally out of their very own money, not just grants.
Not at the time this happened. Aaron’s case was one of the motivating factors that led to the Open Access publication movement gaining enough traction that authors could publish that way. JSTOR access is paid for and administered on college campuses by libraries and librarians as a whole field felt terrible both about the paid publication system and the way Aaron was treated. As a community of professionals, the Librarian and Information Science community pushed very hard for the adoption of Open Access publishing into the Academic community.
Good to know we had something very good out of this.
Now, let’s beat the living hell out of publishers so that those crazy open access publication prices would decimate.
Because right now, I literally cannot afford publishing further than Q3, which already eats up most of my personal grant earnings (which are so bad I can say I work purely for an idea).
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.
plea for 1/2 that was rejected
The rejected plea was for 6 months.
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.
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
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.
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…
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.
Shout out to Alexandra elbakyan. She continues part of aaron’s work by running sci-hub and libgen, but lives safely out of reach of the american criminal “justice” system 💔
There’s a reason the EU doesn’t extradite their citizens to the US: the justice system is considered inhumane.
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:
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.
Mm. Breaking and entering to share publicly funded research is different than B&E with the threat of violence…
It’s not that clear cut and I would recommend listening to the Behind The Bastards episode about him:
Behind the Bastards: Part One: Christmas Hero Episode: Aaron Swartz
https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-christmas-hero-episode-aaron-swartz
still… 35 years? obviously there is more missing information.
It wasn’t 35 years, it was 6 months with a plea deal
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
He was a defender of child porn though.
https://web.archive.org/web/20031229025933/http:/bits.are.notabug.com/
This is propaganda he got sucicided. And he didnt transfer or share scientific articles he simply downloaded them thats all. This poat is extremely damaging as its almost correct juat slightly shifting the commonly accepted reality of history. This is not the first time I’ve seen posts about him here doing a simmillar thing this raises the question who’s trying to rewrite history and what for?
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.
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.
There’s a recent Radiolab episode about those that have taken up his mantle and the impact he’s had on scientific publishing.
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.
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.
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.
and the US government was almost definitely trying to make an example out of him: literally anybody who read the case details whatsoever.
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.
He didn’t transfer or share he only downloaded.
It’s also likely that he was never intending to share them. One of the things he was looking to do is aquire a large dataset to analyze trends.
In other words, he was charged for entirely legit use.
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.
Reddit could’ve been so good with him at the helm…
Good thing we’ve got a second opportunity. ;)
Lemmy is already cooked
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
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
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.
Judicially murdered by Carmen Ortiz.
