Strongbox and Aaron Swartz | Hacker News Reader

Strongbox and Aaron Swartz

newyorker.com

239 pointsLibertatea22 comments

> Nine days after Aaron’s death, his familiar Skype avatar popped up on my computer screen. Somewhere, somebody—probably a family member—had booted up his computer. I fought the irrational urge to click on the icon and resume our conversation. Then he vanished from my screen again.

Holy shit, that ending. Chilling.

Ghost in the machine.

Edit: http://xkcd.com/686/

I love xkcd, and this one is the spookiest of them all. The logic of that comic leads to a challenging existential proposition.

I'd sincerely like to hear what people think about the contrast between Poulsen's behavior and sentiment toward Swartz and (separately) Adrian Lamo vs. his behavior and sentiment toward, say, Bradley Manning: http://www.salon.com/2010/06/18/wikileaks_3/

Maybe what impresses him most is a person's hacking chops and not so much the scale and morality of the actions that got a person into trouble.

It makes sense to me. What Manning did was fairly awful from a dispassionate standpoint. Of course, few people are dispassionate about it, especially around here. :)

If Manning had war crimes on file he could have revealed those and only those. What he did instead is at best reckless, and at worst could be said to be the instigator for the onset of the Arab Spring, and the follow-on violence that continues to this day, not to mention the Afghani and Pakistani families affected by the data leaks.

On the other hand Swartz can be said pretty universally to be pursuing a noble goal (even those who disagree with some of his specific actions would tend to agree with that), and at worst gained unauthorized network access and downloaded a bunch of files...

It is chilling—but is it true?

My immediate reaction when reading that paragraph was that someone as security-minded as Aaron would probably not leave his password saved in a Skype client.

Isn't that safer than typing it every time? A key logger could get it then. Has anyone ever extracted a password stored in a client like that?

I don't know anything about Skype but yes, people have definitely extracted passwords saved in IM clients like that.

There's no way he would have set things up to go from boot to skype without at least one password.

There's the possibility that the person knew the password to log into his computer and Skype was a startup program.

There's a difference between being security-minded and being a crypto-nut. If you're proud of the work you're doing and it's not secretive, why bother encrypting the hard-drive? Similarly, he wouldn't have been caught in the first place if he had been security-nutty about the process, but he didn't think he was doing anything immoral.

The link to Swartz' 2006 essay for Wired is broken. Here's the correct link:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2006/11/ringside_at_cop

Found the same, didn't feel like creating a newyorker/facebook/twitter account to post it as a comment to the original piece either :P

"His suicide also raised new questions: Who owned the code now? (Answer: he willed all his intellectual property to Sean Palmer, who gives the project his blessing.)"

Isn't his deaddrop code GPL licensed?

That doesn't answer the question of who owns the code. The code must have an owner to enforce the GPL or re-license or whatever.

Yes, but the quote still implies some confusion about things.

If the code is licensed GPL, you do not need the blessing of the owner, you already have a license. If the code is licensed GPL, and you want to use it, why do you even care who owns the copyright? There are reasons you might care, but they are not obvious, and the OP does not say why he was interested -- the implication of that sentence to the casual non-geek reader, is that the new yorker needed the copyright owners permission to launch. The OP doesn't even mention the GPL.

If the code really is licensed GPL, that passage is misleading, is it not? Probably because the author himself is confused.

>If the code is licensed GPL, and you want to use it, why do you even care who owns the copyright?

GPL protects the users' investments in that as a purchaser (there has to be a better word than purchaser here) of a derivative of GPL will have freedoms 0 through 3[1].

-- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. -- [1]

Right, that's why you care that it was released as GPL. Other than to verify that it was legally released as GPL, why would you be concerned with the identity of the copyright owner?

licensees don't own the code they license.

I think the question was less,

  Isn't this in the public domain (b/c it's GPL'd)?

and more along the lines of,

  Why does the owner matter since it's GPL licensed
  (and can therefore be forked, and used even if
  the new owner changes the license)?

That's correct, I should have worded it more explicitly.

The GPL depends on the body of copyright law for enforcement. An entity that violates the GPL by, for example, making a derivative work and not releasing the source, legally would be held to account by the owner of that particular project's copyright. This works because copyright prohibits copying software except by express permission of the copyright holder. The GPL grants anybody the right to copy the software as long as they abide by the license. Once you violate the license, then your right to copy or distribute the software is revoked.

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