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Report: hacker activist Aaron Swartz commits suicide

Saturday, January 12, 2013

 
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Aaron Swartz in 2009
Image: Sage Ross.

The programmer, activist, and early Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz reportedly committed suicide yesterday in New York City. He was 26. Swartz's death is reported confirmed by both Swartz's uncle and his attorney to The Tech, the campus newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 2011, Swartz was arrested and charged for downloading two-thirds of the material on JSTOR, a repository of academic journal articles. Last year, on September 24, he pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. He had previously attracted the attention of the FBI for downloading 20% of PACER, a database of documents related to US federal court cases.

Swartz was active in the world of free culture and open source software. When he was 14, he worked on the RSS 1.0 specification, a standard for syndicating news articles in XML. He also worked on a Y Combinator-backed startup called Infogami which was merged with the popular news sharing site Reddit. Swartz also founded Demand Progress, a progressive activist group dealing with civil liberties issues.


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  This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.
Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.
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