Aaron Swartz

Aaron Hillel Swartz (English: Aaron Hillel Swartz, November 8, 1986 - January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, author and Internet hacker activist. He participated in the development of the RSS feed publishing format, the Markdown text publishing format, the Creative Commons organization, the web.py website development framework, and was the co-founder of the social media Reddit - when his Infogami merged with Alexis Vanian and Steven Hoffman's company to form Not a Bug, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham gave him the title of founder. [a] His work also focuses on civic awareness and action: in 2009, he helped found the Progressive Social Change Campaign Committee to understand effective Internet movements. In 2010, he became a scholar at the Edmund Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, conducting research under the leadership of Lawrence Lessig. He founded the online group Seeking Advancement - known for its campaign against a bill to ban online piracy. On January 6, 2011, he was arrested by the MIT Police Department on charges of trespassing in violation of state law: He connected a computer to the MIT campus network and placed it in an unmarked, unlocked cabinet; through a guest account given by the college, he systematically downloaded academic journals on JSTOR on a large scale. Federal prosecutors subsequently filed two counts of Internet fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act against him - Aaron Swartz faces a total of up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine, confiscation of property, return of stolen items, and residential surveillance. Two days later, he was found dead in his apartment in Brooklyn, New York, having hanged himself after rejecting a plea deal from federal prosecutors that offered him six months in federal prison. In 2013, Aaron Swartz was posthumously inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.