MIT Research Site Hacked in Memory of Information Freedom Legend
Education
Anonymous targeted an entity that it partly blames for the suicide exactly one year ago of Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit, Creative Commons and Demand Progress.
The hackers apparently overtook the server for MIT’s Cogeneration project.
“The website has been defaced for one hour. The page is now titled THE DAY WE FIGHT BACK. (Update Saturday, January 11, 1:02pm PST: MIT's Cogen websites has been down for nearly an hour,” ZDNet reported.
Swartz took his life in New York City on Friday, Jan. 11, 2013.
Last weekend, a Boston Magazine story, Losing Aaron, put responsibility for “the young hacker's death squarely at the feet of MIT, which as an institution stated it would play a neutral role -- yet wilfully helped” prosecutors build a case for thirteen counts of felony hacking after Swartz allegedly scraped 4 million MIT papers from the JSTOR online journal archive, according to ZDNet.
JSTOR's academic paper database was recently made publicly available.
Many observers believe Swartz’s suicide was a result of overzealous prosecution by the Justice Department and what the family deemed a "bullying" use of outdated computer crime laws.
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