Anonymous Hackers Down MIT Website After Aaron Swartz Suicide

[Skorpinok Rover]

Hello, while surfing just got this stuff thought of sharing this.

http://www.thewrap.com/media/column-post/anonymous-hackers-down-mit-website-after-aaron-swartz-suicide-72871

Regards

Skorpinok

[whitehat]

WTF?? I didn't know anything about this. Piracy is wrong, but we all know it has a long history among almost all key players throughout decades of the computer revolution and it's been widely accepted as a societal problem, which we've been dealing with by creating better laws, more consumer friendly / non-monopolistic software pricing structures, better technical measures, and ISP-based bandwidth punishments.

It's been working with dramatically increasing effectiveness. Most digital pirates are students and most, like myself, gradually cessated from piracy over a period of years, as the social environment, laws, and alternatives change, and our means and maturity increases. It's an on-going process and America is leading the way in reduction of piracy. To ruin the life of a MIT researcher who has spent his entire life studying and living in student quasi-poverty to earn a respectable position in academia, when his only crime is a vice that nearly 100% of people under 35 are or have been engaged in as well is not only an unfair and arbitrary exercise of law enforcement, it's a socially outrageous abridgment of freedom.

This was over JSTOR articles??? You wanna talk JSTOR articles? OK, let me tell you something -- I've spent my entire life (minus 2 corporate years) in major research universities just like MIT. I'd say that about 80% of professors give out copies of JSTOR/other copyrighted empirical articles to their students. At big universities it's common that professors will pick out 5-10 articles to accompany a text book and may have a local printer bind them and sell them to the students.

In that case, they aren't just reproducing the articles, the printer and maybe even the professor are getting PAID for it! This is widespread. At UA, USC, UGA, FSU, OSU, UCLA, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UH Manoa, and others I know that this commonly occurs in classes with HUNDREDS of students in some cases (underclassman undergraduate classes). We've been CUTTING DOWN on it, increasing technical control, and adapting policy -- just like with software, movies, music, etc. It's a SOCIETAL problem that we are dealing with at the SOCIAL level and is not meant to result in INDIVIDUAL martyrdom, as it did in the early 00's to society's disgust.

Consider that society as a whole not only suffers when piracy occurs, but to some extent society also gains. In economic terms, you'd say that there is marginal utility derived from the consumption of pirated materials and that any consumers' utility adds to marginal social benefit. Given this, doesn't it make sense that if college students have benefited from decades of pirating society's music/games/movies/warez/etc and this is funded by society because the rest of society suffered from their piracy then isn't it only fair that former university students (i.e. professors) pay back society by providing the marginal benefit of unofficial/pirated access to JSTOR articles? It's socio-economic karma. It was supposed to happen.

THANK YOU ANONYMOUS, for showing the family of this individual that some of us aren't iron fisted Nazi's, like whoever decided to legally attack this young man. I want to see someone resign over this. Give me the Dean's resignation.

I don't even really like Anonymous, because I believe a lot of what they've done has hurt American interest, without considering the hideously oppressive regimes that this helps. Wikileaks in particular is a problem. *However*, when I see Anonymous do stuff like this or saving that gang rape victim from a football team/town covering up the rape, it really warms my heart.

My impression of Anonymous is that it's basically American youth + assorted international support + organized anti-American foreign organizations trying to manipulate American culture. I hope that this is a sign that the American youth and their non-evil supporters are going to use their powers for restrained, socially positive, minimally illegal protests like this. America HAS to be able to embrace this type of demonstration if we want to remain the socially and economically open nation that originally defined us and made us great.

So let's see some more of this, some less of the anti-government stuff, and perhaps some pro-American operations! Nice show, Anonymous.

Edited January 15, 2013 by whitehat

[Pwnd2Pwnr]

Changes are needed... f*ckin Boner (Bohener) got his silly ass a raise. 230,000 $ a year for "speaking"...