The Legacy of Aaron Swartz

Hi, Viewers, this post is not for you unless

  • you understand your privacy.
  • you understand your rights and you feel uncomfortable sharing with it.
  • you love the art of coding.

Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

Henry David Thoreau

Who is Aaron Swartz?

Aaron Swartz

I will not bore you by telling that Aaron Hillel Swartz was the co-founder of Reddit, a social news and entertainment website. He was a very bright student at a very young age. For him, coding was like magic using which you can make anything work for you. He did not believe in business and making money instead he raised the issue of the freedom of the internet and freedom of speech as he wanted to make this world a better place.

In today’s world, everyone gets the license to speak but the point is who gets heard.

Aaron Swartz

After selling Reddit, Aaron started working for the corporate company. He was a person who loved solving real-world problems. Soon he hated working for cooperation as he was annoyed by the culture of redoing the same work again and again, as a result, he stopped going to the job getting himself fired.

Whatever he did, he did for the people, this is what infuriated the for-profit company.

The PACER policy and the FBI Scanner.

PACER website

He worked for giving the public access to the public domain in PACER(Public Access to Court electronic Record) document. These documents were the legal documents which contained the court proceedings which could benefit lawyers and students but they were not reader-friendly also these were not freely accessible. Interestingly, PACER’s per year profit was 120 million dollars which were nothing around their maintenance fees. Swartz joined hands with the thumb drive corps and build the code which automated the downloads of around 20 million documents. By this Swartz came under the scanner of the FBI. Later the charges were dropped as this unveiled the lots of privacy violations in the court documents.

JSTOR – Swartz The Cat and Mouse game.

JSTOR

JSTOR website contained the entire human knowledge online related journals, research paper and document published by scholars, scientists, etc. These were most of the time funded from the taxpayer’s money or sometimes by government grants but the user has to pay again for downloading them. Swartz questioned this locked knowledge culture is like developing the wheel which has already been invented.

MIT has the access to JSTOR’s website of which Aaron took the opportunity. He registered his new Acer laptop as Ghost laptop and started downloading the academic journals and as they block his IP address he used to switch to another IP address and continued downloading journals.

The Conspiracy

Aaron recorded in Surveillance camera

JSTOR charged accessing fees for the research papers and journals which Aaron thinks must be free so that it is beneficial to the public at large. While unlikely his laptop was spotted by the authorities and instead of trying to stop him they made the recording by setting up the spy cameras to make a case against him.

Aaron was arrested by the local Cambridge police and soon it was dragged to the United States Secret Service. He was unaware of the conspiracy that Secret Service wants to make an example of him though later on JSTOR pulled off from the case and everyone thought the case would be dismissed but Stephen Heymann (Asst. U.S Attorney, lawyer) made some 13 felonies ( serious charges equivalent to murder and rape) against him. Though no evidence to prove the government trying to suppress Aaron’s family and his close friends to get something out of them.

Aaron became Internet’s Own Boy.

The charges which were framed against Aaron were much greater. Aaron believed in social justice and freedom of public websites. Instead of making mountains of cash he tried making this world a farrier place by promoting freedom to connect.

Aaron’s pathway

We should never let Aaron’s efforts go down he always questioned the unjust law that exists in our society. He always encouraged people to not just listen to what is being taught to us by our teacher, parent or society, we should learn to question everything. This is how we can solve real-life problems in today’s world.

Aaron Swartz was really an Internet’s own boy. After his demise, Aaron was included in the Internet’s Hall of Fame, 2013 for his tremendous contribution to the internet society.

Negative Experience,Positive Impact

Hey Visitor, Today I want to share with you my experience of losing my phone. On 23rd June,2019, I slept late around 1 A.M. and got up around 8 A.M. As a habit my hand first goes in the search of mobile. It was not there. My heart was filled with distress. I waked up my roommate to make a call to my phone. Unconsciously he searched for his phone. In utter distress his phone was also missing. It took us no time to understand that our mobile has been stolen when we were asleep.

We went to the manager to get the CCTV footage of the mischief happenings. From the footage it was proved that one 15-16 year girl in her purple colour ghagra and with her two 7-8 year boys were there. Within no time we started the search in the direction on whatever information we could get from the locals.

After one hour long searching we decided to lodge a complaint against them. So few of my friends went to the nearest police station which was Samastipur. After my friends described the situation, the policeman didn’t seem active to solve the matter instead he gave his excuse that there are lots of other pending cases which is to be solved, you submit the FIR (First Information Report) then we will decide to see on it. We were tired and tensed about the loss and this comment from the policeman really frustrated us, we lost our patience and left the station cursing the law and order.

Meanwhile I was trying to search my phone’s last seen activity using “FIND MY DEVICE”. It was showing somewhere around Basawani Park. We visited there but all our effort were in vain. By this time news of theft had spread in the entire locality. All were discussing the same thing and pushing there judgement that fault were on our side.

Well the locality got a spicy topic to discuss these all the day while somewhere in the room we were endorsing ourselves on our loss.

Every cloud has a silver lining

John Milton

These negative occurrence had a positive impact on us. We started sleeping on time though somewhere we had tough feeling for our phones. We can now give more time on our studies and reading blog’s. The main benefit was that we stated the talk among ourselves when we had to kill time where in past we were busy with our mobiles. My friend had a PUBG addiction due to which his concentration in studies was decreasing.

So overall I can say I feel more positive now and also I became more careful regarding my belongings. This was a mixed experience where I suffered a 11k financial loss to realize that I was addicted to mobile youtube, continuous habit of checking Whatsapp status.

At last I would hope this experience is to be taken as a lesson and we should move forward in our lives spending more time with our friends and parents. Also to make time for Yoga to improve the concentration power.

The Python

Today Python has proved lots of programmers its vast usage in the field of Machine Leaning and Artificial Intelligence. Developed by Guido van Rossum in 1991 somewhere when Java was also in the phase of development initially didn’t get much attention. But its vast bundle of useful packages, user friendly syntax and easy to learn became the reason why Python is extending its support in these fields.

Python came as rescue to the programmers who were troubled by the closing of curly braces and lengthy lines of codes.

For Example:

C++ Program to find sum of 2 numbers

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

int main(void)
{
int a = 5;
int b = 10;
cout<<“Sum of a and b = “<<a+b;
}

Python Program to print sum

a = 5
b = 10
print(“Sum of a and b = “,a+b)

These two comparisons are enough to indicate the simplicity of code and readability involved in the Python code.

Moreover like other programming languages ,our Python has disadvantages too.

  • Python programs runs slow.
  • Requires more testing time.
  • Generally anyone would find difficult when switching from Python to other languages. 🙂

Introduce Yourself (Example Post)

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

  • Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
  • Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

  • Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
  • What topics do you think you’ll write about?
  • Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
  • If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started