Anonymous hacks MIT Web sites to post Aaron Swartz tribute, call to arms
The computer hacker group Anonymous hacked into MIT's webpage Sunday after RSS co-founder's suicide. Hayley Tsukayama from Washington Post writes about the group's messages rallying for the repair of intellectual property laws.
Hackers from Anonymous on Sunday claimed credit for posting messages to Massachusetts Institute of Technology websites commemorating the life of RSS co-founder Aaron Swartz and calling for an overhaul of computer crime laws.
Swartz, 26, was an outspoken advocate of open information and had been embroiled in a legal battle over digital copyright for scraping articles off of the JSTOR academic article database. He hanged himself Saturday at his apartment in Brooklyn. In addition to co-authoring the technology behind RSS, which alerts users to real-time updates on websites, Swartz also played an early role at Reddit, and founded the advocacy group Demand Progress. He believed that the articles on JSTOR should be more widely available, particularly as many were funded by public money. He hacked into the databases systems and downloaded articles using a computer concealed in an MIT closet.
