One of the most charismatic hackers and political activists for digital rights, American Aaron Swartz, was found dead on Friday in New York at the age of just 26 years. His death is attributed to suicide.
Aaron Swartz was involved in programming from a young age.
At age 14 he became one of his authors RSS template (RDF Site Summary), a way to broadcast information from a web site, usually news or announcements of new blog posts, in a fast and easy way to other pages or applications (syndication).
Later he actively participated in the organization Creative Commons which was founded by Professor Larry Lessee and his community Reddit, of which he was a co-founder.
Aaron Swartz attended Stanford for a year but dropped out of school and then devoted himself to programming and political cyber-activism.
In 2009 it managed to download and then make available freely on the Internet about 20% of the documents from federal courts which were registered in the PACER database. Although typically supposed to be free, PACER charged for access, but Swartz managed to make it available to the general public.
Shortly afterwards, 2011, almost secretly attaching a laptop to MIT's network, downloaded from the JSTOR base, with the support of hundreds of scientific journals, four million publications, many of which should also be freely available common property.
The publications were released by him in the form of a torrent file on the Internet, exaggerating MIT and JSTOR. Sworts was arrested but released free of charge, but accused of fraud.
Both cases put Suurts in the spotlight of the US authorities who launched investigations against him.
Aaron Swartz was a prominent political activist in the field of digital rights and against state interference, and he had written and distributed quite freely programs.
According to the writer and activist Kori Dactou, Suvorts suffered for years from depression, problems he had written about in the past.
