Former Reddit Director & Harvard Fellow Charged With Hacking MIT Computer | Hacker News Reader

Former Reddit Director & Harvard Fellow Charged With Hacking MIT Computer

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63 pointsjerrelp27 comments

It seems like he was accessing the MIT network simply to get an MIT IP address that would authorize him in the JSTOR application. He then was running a scraper, which was probably just a python script with a bit of metering to avoid slamming them too hard. Does anyone know if that's correct, that if your organization has a site license you can access the service without additional credentials?

If that's all true then the description of the events and charges seem to reflect quite a polarized view. It's somewhat understandable, though, that JSTOR would want to "throw the book at him" given his previous public comments - it seems very likely he intended to distribute the large cache of documents widely. Whether or not that's ethical, it's clearly not in the firm's best interests - I doubt a similar situation without any intent to distribute would be referred to law enforcement at all.

I'm not specifically familiar with JSTOR or MIT's network, but I am familiar with other services that allow free access from anyone coming via a school's network block, and I'm also familiar with networks that will allow guest access for a short period of time so as to not inconvenience true guests.

Lots of services do this because it's far less hassle than distributing traditional credentials and typically it's less likely to be abused because unlike name/password pairs, you can't post an IP address to usenet and have somebody else use it. The abuser also has to be physically present, which makes them much easier to find.

The actual indictment with details of the hack: http://web.mit.edu/bitbucket/Swartz,%20Aaron%20Indictment.pd...

Also JSTOR's statement: http://about.jstor.org/news-events/news/jstor-statement-misu...

35 years in jail sounds insanely outside all proportions of the damage done by downloading scholarly articles!

thanks for the JSTOR statement. 35 years sounds crazy high too

depends... what's the total value of what he stole? say, for arguments sake, it was in the 7 figure range. If I steal a million bucks from you, how long would you like me to spend in prison?

I think it was 4 million articles in the JSTOR database that he downloaded.

35 years is crazy; if they wanted could MIT do something about that? I mean; it seems far more reasonable to give me a fine.

Demand progress makes it sound like MIT asked the gov't not to pursue the case. But the gov't went forward anyway

http://demandprogress.org/aaron

This is not the first time he has done something like this if memory serves me. In late 2008 Mr. Swartz and Carl Malamud went to select libraries, ones with free PACER access, and proceeded to download ~700 GB of information that was behind a paywall. After which they made all of it available on Mr. Malamud's website.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/case-against...

He wasn't a co-founder. Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian founded Reddit. They acquired Aaron's company half a year later.

He frequently claims to be a cofounder, though.

He gave a talk at my university advocating people to release journal articles they have access to as students to the Internet.

The whole thing was very strange, as he was claiming to be a cofounder of a well known company he was not a cofounder of and he was openly advocating illegal activity.

Wow, that's very weird. What school did he speak at, did anyone record it?

University Of Illinois

Video at: http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/Conferenceware/Schedule/Videos

that's unreal. Min 29 on seems to be where the direct discussion of "rule" breaking begins. Rule breaking by Swartz being getting the JSTOR files from students and placing them online.

his website mentions him as a co-founder "...He also cofounded the online news site Reddit, where he released as free software the web framework he developed, web.py..."

People who feel they have to talk about themselves in the third person tend to be rather untrustworthy.

Writing bios in the third person is common practice, it makes it convenient for people who need a quick bio of you to copy and paste.

from pg

> Aaron's not wrong to call himself one of the founders. The company behind Reddit was a merger of two startups, one that made Reddit and one that made Infogami, and in that situation the founders of both startups are considered founders of the combined company.

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_cof...

And further: 'founder'/'cofounder' are not technically-rigorous terms, but a matter of common agreement. Followers of the iterative/lean approach should recognize that 'founding' is not a point event, at a single moment (of inspiration, document-signing, code-commit, whatever), but rather a process that continues.

Any team that adds a new key person early could reasonably consider that person another 'founder'/'co-founder'/'founding employee'. Consider all the 'looking for co-founder' posts, from people who've already made some progress.

alexis doesn't seem to agree

https://twitter.com/#!/kn0thing/status/93374221685755904

one talks about a merger and the other of an acquisition

They seem to still be pretty pissed at him.

What's the backstory there?

He went to europe while they were in the middle of crunch time, then promptly took a week of sick time upon his return. They fired him shortly thereafter. Steve talks about it here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/d2njs/til_the...

In Aaron's words: "Yeah. I was unhappy working in an office and didn’t hide it. So I’d come in late and set up lots of off-site meetings and stuff. And my boss wasn’t really thrilled about that. Also, I think he was upset about me disappearing for so long on vacation. One of the places I went to in Europe was the Chaos Computer Conference. And while I was there I hung out with my friend Quinn Norton, who was reporting on the event for Wired. She took my photo for one of her articles and it was featured on wired.com’s front page. “Heh,” I joked. “I bet the first time my boss finds out where I am is when he sees my photo on the front page of his own website.”"

So yeah, he earned his firing and the emnity of his coworkers the old-fashioned way.

Edit: Also, there's some speculation on the thread I linked to that Aaron was a cofounder who received a payout in the CN deal. He wrote web.py, sure, but if he walked away with $1MM+ without showing up to work, that could explain why they still hate his guts.

This link from one of the Reddit threads suggests that at least at one time, and perhaps begrudgingly, Alexis would call Aaron a 'co-founder':

http://web.archive.org/web/20070823200504/http://startupstor...

I know nothing of the internal arrangements and disputes. But knowing how these things often go, it's easy to imagine that Aaron was tangentially involved, and the Reddit team needed more help, but Aaron still had another project, where his 'founding' stake/claim was larger.

Offering a founder-ish stake and founder-ish title for bringing that other project in-house (even if the combined team pursues something else) is a common resolution to such a situation.

A statement from demand progress, which Swartz is the former exec director of: http://demandprogress.org/aaron

Does Demand Progress realize how creepy that logo is?

Main discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2781615

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