The Story of Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz was born in Highland Park where he grew up. He came from family of three extraordinary brothers, but Aaron was the gifted one. He really enjoyed learning and teaching other people. When he was about three years old, his dad demonstrated him a computer and everything compared with this machine. He learned very quickly how to program in Basic (a programming language) and started writing simple programs and games. From that moment, computers were a premanent part of his world. When he was about 12 years old, he started creating a website called "theinfo.com", a similar site to Wikipedia, which is very known and popular nowadays. After that he was studying at the Stanford University. Also, at that time he worked on RSS technology. To be clear - this system allows users to gather news from different websites at the same time. Finally, he became one of the co-founders of RSS 1.0. This was caused by his high inteligence. However, he was sometimes an arrogant young man, for instance he disliked going to school. Aaron often complained about lecturers. He was sure that they weren't educated well to teach him anything. He preffered reading books over going to school. Aaron also worked on CC license with Lawrence Lessig – a Harvard Law Professor. After the first year, he dropped out of school and started to work in start-up -Y Combinator. They worked on a tool designed to build websites. By the way, he created Reddit – a place in the Internet, where there is a lot of humor, a lot of art, people can discuss about daily news, technlogy, politics and other issues. Finally, he sold Reddit for about a million dollars and went to California. He started to work for Conde Nast, but after a few weeks he realized that working in a corporation was a very bad idea. He decided to give it up and then he focused on his private life. After some time, Aaron stated a new project - openlibrary.com. Website, where each and every published book has it's own page with information. At the same time he became interested in government system called PACER. He helped to write the algorithm, which could automatically search and download files, that were published in the Internet.Swartz wanted to do the same thing with JSTORE – the site, which contained a lot of publications. He wanted to download and analyze all of them. To do this, he had to connect his computer to the school's server and copy all the data. Unfortunatelly, one time someone record him doing this and reported the fact to the police. Aaron Swartz was indicted on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer.While the case was in progress, he supported many activists organizations and organized protests against SOPA - act, which allowed governments to control the Internet. He convinced a lot of people and companies to join his resistance and finally, thanks to them, SOPA was rejected by the US Goverment.
In 2012 the number of charges increased from 4 to 13. It also increased maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines. His mental condition was getting worse and worse. Aaron lived in fear. Finally, he was found dead in his apartament. I strongly belive that our world lost one of the most valuable person of our times. He was a very intelligent, creative and inventive person, who had the power to change the world into a better place for all of us. I think that judges treated him very savagely and wrongfully. He was just a victim of the defective system.
Zakładki