Aaron H. Swartz: One of Three Reddit Co-Founders Committed Suicide

January 12th, 2013

Via: MIT – The Tech:

Computer activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide in New York City yesterday, Jan. 11, according to his uncle, Michael Wolf, in a comment to The Tech. Swartz was 26.

“The tragic and heartbreaking information you received is, regrettably, true,” confirmed Swartz’ attorney, Elliot R. Peters of Kecker and Van Nest, in an email to The Tech.

Swartz was indicted in July 2011 by a federal grand jury for allegedly mass downloading documents from the JSTOR online journal archive with the intent to distribute them. He subsequently moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he then worked for Avaaz Foundation, a nonprofit “global web movement to bring people-powered politics to decision-making everywhere.” Swartz appeared in court on Sept. 24, 2012 and pleaded not guilty.

The accomplished Swartz co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, was one of the three co-owners of the popular social news site Reddit, and completed a fellowship at Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. In 2010, he founded DemandProgress.org, a “campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.”

One Response to “Aaron H. Swartz: One of Three Reddit Co-Founders Committed Suicide”

  1. j.biddy says:

    Reminds me of the alleged suicide of Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the cofounders of the open source, free and privacy minded diy alternative to Facebook.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.