Sometimes it seems as if just everything in the world is getting hacked, eh?
A Harvard University fellow who was studying ethics (!) was charged with hacking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles, the AP reports.
This 25-year-old Bit-torrent kiddie isn't just some sort of over-achiever who likes to read lots of articles.
He's a guerilla in the war on paid content and information architecture -- anything that uses registration or subscriptions to cover the costs of information procurement and storage.
He's from a group called "Demand Progress" that wants, um, information to be free. It's a typical moveon.org-type "progressive" cadre-run organization with a heavy ideological agenda -- three people whose names are given decide all the issues and 300,000 subscribe and click and sign petitions and "yes" and "like" -- but have no place to debate these cadres. You just mindlessly click, and you can't be sure that many other people are clicking, because you have to trust the site-owners -- there are no counters on the petitions.
But the prosecutor disagrees about the charges, fortunately:
"Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars," U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said in a statement. "It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away."
Aaron Swartz, 25, claims he co-founded Redditt and is co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification. Paging Dave Winer! (And the NYT says the co-found bit is disputed.) He is a product of Y Combinator, Standford University -- Silicon Valley's infatuation with young programmers who don't finish college. So you can absolutely sure that the most powerful men in Silicon Valley will get behind the most high-powered defense of this young felon -- and that absolutely nobody in the Metaverse will compare him whatsoever to Rupert Murdoch's journalists who hacked and stole information. Oh, no, never.
A $100,000 unsecured bail bond was secured for the script-kiddie, so that means Daddy -- or somebody big in Silly Valley like the EFF gang -- had at least 10 percent of that to fork out to get this white-collar criminal out of jail.
As usual with these hacker scare stories where the journalists often have a sneaking admiration for the hackers, we are told he faces "35 years in jail". VERY unlikely. He will get this plead down to a misdemeanor, especially if he gives all the files back and will likely get community service, not jail time.
Even so, I agree with the prosecutor: this is a crime. It's theft. Nothing makes it right. There should be an adequate punishment. 35 years is extreme, but one year may not be. Especially because this isn't somebody just, um, "over-achieving," as I noted, but someone with a malicious, deliberate, extreme perspective they are willing to put into action with guerilla attacks -- like a terrorist, although, of course "I get it" that taking boring scholarly articles out of JSTOR is not like blowing little children and their moms into thousands of bloody pieces. Are you able to think by analogy and concept? Perhaps not, if you are unwilling to see the parallels.
I often see this argument in Second Life by the "critical educators" ("critical"=Marxist). There's one particular edu-punk named Tony who puts out a Critical Education newsletter (self-acknowledged Australian Marxist) for SL who recently lamented that he may have to cease his freebie website with thousands of downloadable articles because people were "taking too much" or "demanding too much" and no one ever tips, whine, whine. Well, charge for the articles? Or make a subcription or something? He was especially annoyed at people who came and demanded that he make it easy for them and give them a huge zip file of everything on the site instead of making them browse and pick and chose and at least give him some traffic and Google juice. See, that's the problem with free and the open source stone soup -- everybody wants the soup, the whole pot, even. Not everyone has a turnip to bring; some only have stones.
Sure, I find it annoying to get to a paywall/registration wall when I'm trying to read an article, and I get the JSTOR message. But...scholars need to get paid, editors and publication people need to get paid, it's ok. I just think these services should find ways to make payment easier, and especially micropayments -- perhaps a company called Media Wallet could get started where I pay $20 a month and go around easily leaving Media Bucks in virtual microcurrency points to bloggers or journalists I like, or I pay for articles in archives, and they pay me. And it cashes out to real dollars. Getting an article from a JSTOR or the New Yorker then is completely easy and clickable and registration isn't needed because you've already registered with Media Wallet. So, eventually, this will happen and we'll all do this, or at least, many of us who appreciate the hard work of writers.
But what's not an option is to endlessly "liberate" their content.
Arguing about this the other day on Google+ with Fleep Tuque, naturally she dismissed the claims of scholarly journals that say they need to charge money. She's an open source booster and open sims educational cheerleader to cut costs and keep budgets low. Those of us on the consuming side of the educational equation can never understand why it costs so much and where that $40,000 goes, given how the faculties are filled with Marxists and "critical educators" cutting costs on sims and demanding copybot ability like AJ. Who gets paid?
Fleep makes the point that professors take up the job of writing articles and editing and review articles for scholarly journals as part of their already-paid jobs. So why are these journals so costly? If they eliminate paper and postage, need they remain costly?
These are legitimate questions to ask, but that's not how the crit-edu types ask them. For them, its an "information wants to be free" all or nothing. And I keep pointing out that copy editors, managers, services, secretaries etc. still cost money. I'm not seeing that scholarly journals are revenue centers for universities, but they need costs covered.
JSTOR, as the representative rightly points out who is quoted in the AP story, are stewards of material entrusted to them. And it's a system that does require registration, usage fees, limitations of usage. And that's ok. That guerills assaulting this system out of extreme ideological belief think it's ok doesn't make it ok, and let's not whitewash what they are.
Meanwhile, the script kiddies are doing their usual tap dance:
Demand Progress's executive director David Segal said on the website that the charges against Swartz don't make sense.
"It's like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library," he said.
Er, no, David Segal. It's like stealing. Because it *is* stealing. When you check a book out, you return it, or pay a fine if it is late. When you steal from electronic files, you keep a copy forever without compensation. Saying there is therefore no loss to the owner because he has his original copy is your usual Fisking bullshit -- the owner has costs ranging from server storage to management to editors, and it's ok to cover them. Most people *don't* have a problem with upholding this system. Like music, where contrary to the "Demand Progress" types, many people go on paying for i-tunes and even CDs.
The annual subscription fee of $50,000 sounds horrible and scary doesn't it? Like I said, the AP journo could be a 20-something peer of these kiddies who downloads stuff for free himself.
But, given the tens of thousands of students in a university accessing and using this material in their education, it's not some astronomical fee. In fact, it's kinda like the fee that news companies pay AP to access their stories and publish them immediately.
"In November and December, Swartz allegedly made 2 million downloads from JSTOR, 100 times the number made during the same period by all legitimate JSTOR users at MIT." See the difference?
BTW, he's a repeat offender -- having done this same sort of deliberate hack of an open documents repository with the same cunning Haskelling -- it's open, therefore I get to take a zillion of them beyond the regulated number and put automatic scripts out to suck endlessly from the dbases. Liberation!
When you look at the smirking face of Aaron Swartz, when you think of the extremist and false premises involved in his group's guerilla assaults on information storage, ask yourself if you want people like them in charge of your country.
Because if you are not for prosecuting their crimes, you have already empowered letting them take charge by force and anarchy. That's how to understand it.
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