Aaron Swartz would have turned 34 yesterday, November 8th. This brilliant young man was fighting to make information free, and his government drove him to his death for it. We— the people of the earth— were the beneficiaries of Aaron’s “crime” of sharing information. What follows is the complete text of Aaron’s
Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.
” The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences?
“You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
"There are those struggling to change this.
"The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.
"But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future.
"Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues?
"Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them?
"Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South?
"It’s outrageous and unacceptable. “I agree,” many say, “but what can we do?
"The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”
"But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back. Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves.
"You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
"Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by.
"You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
"But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative.
"Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed.
"The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less.
"And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
"There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
"We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world.
"We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive.
"We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web.
"We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.
"We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
"With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past.
"Will you join us?
—Aaron Swartz, July 2008, Eremo, Italy
P.S. : Everyone wildly celebrating Mr Biden as the president elect, please remember the injustice that killed Aaron happened on that hopeful President Obama’s watch.
I wonder if the divide between people who are fine with disclosing their first name online and people who are not is a generation thing or if it’s linked to name popularity, or both. Maybe all my unease stems from having a Level III name. Like Level I is having such a common first name it’s impossible to be nervous about disclosing it because what could happen, someone tries to doxx you by googling “Emma”? on Level II your name is not common but not exactly rare. You’ve met people who share it but not enough to make you fully comfortable divulging it, so you wait a little before offering it to internet acquaintances as a token of friendship. Level III is when your name is rare enough that you’ve never met anyone who shares it, and revealing it makes you feel alarmingly exposed. You know there are others with this name out there, you know Of them but everyone you know thinks only of you when they hear it, which makes you determined to keep it secret save for very special occasions like Rumpelstiltskin
“A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.”
Okay so imagine your Standard Medieval European Fantasy Setting™. Now imagine there’s no magic. Like there’s still a concept of it sure, with superstitions and all that. But you will never encounter an actual wizard or anything.
But you know what is in this otherwise-fantasy setting? Superpower mutations.
Sir Lawrence, the otherwise unremarkable knight who once outran his own horse and traveled four hours without rest to alert his lord of another lord’s treason and impending invasion.
The Sage of the North is shrouded in rumor and mystery; some say he is a holy man, blessed by God and able to work miracles. Others think he is closer to a witch than a priest, and still others believe he is simply a sage and healer whose skill has grown unrivaled in his old age. In comparison to these stories, the known fact that he lives beneath a freezing waterfall unbothered by the cold or lack of air barely raises any interest.
Scandinavian folklore is often Like That, there’s a whole subgenre of “hero collects men with really specific skills to win the hand of the princess” (like a guy who can run so fast you can’t see him move, a guy who can hear stuff on the other side of the world, and a guy who can shoot an arrow through an acorn from 10 miles away) and it’s not counted as sorcery but as just those guys can Do That.
HP never stopped innovating. From its origins in the 1930s as a leading electronics manufacturer to its role in the birth of PCs and performance servers, it has always demonstrated incredible ingenuity.
Today, that ingenuity is deployed in service of evil ink-based fuckery.
The printer-ink business model has always been a form of commercial sadism in which you are expected to put giant manufacturers’ interests ahead of your own with no expectation of any sort of reciprocity.
After all, when your profits depend on charging more for ink than vintage Veuve-Clicquot, you need to get up to some serious shenanigans to get your customers to drain their bank accounts to fill their printers.
By contemporary standards, the opening hostilities in the ink-wars look positively quaint:
Manufacturing special half-full cartridges to ship with new printers so their owners have to buy a new set just days after the open the box
Requiring frequent “calibration” printouts that use vast amounts of ink
Gimmicking cartridges’ sensors to declare them “empty” even when there’s still ink in them
Thing is, all of this just makes official printer ink less desirable and fuels demand for third party ink.
For this to work, you need to win a two-front war: one on your customers and the other on your competitors. HP is fighting both.
First they pioneered the use of DRM to detect and prevent third-party ink.
Then when ink makers started making their own chips, or harvesting chips out of discarded cartridges to use in news ones, HP got US customs to seize the product, calling it a patent infringement.
But the real ugliness started in March 2016, when HP pushed out a fake “security update” for inkjet printers. Owners who ran the update saw nothing, just a software version number that went up by one.
What they didn’t know was that they’ve been given an asymptomatic infection - a malicious update that only kicked in five months later, after everyone had had a good long time to update. That update’s real purpose was to detect and reject third party ink.
It went off right after school started, stranding cash-strapped parents with a year’s worth of ink for their kids’ school projects. People were outraged. HP issued a nonpology.
Every time HP got caught doing something evil, they had the same excuse: “that’s the deal we offered and you accepted it.”
For example, if the box says “Works best with HP ink,” then you are “agreeing” that it might not work with other ink. Nevermind that the only reason your printer doesn’t work with other ink is that HP tricked you into downgrading it so that the ink stopped working.
This is the grifter’s all-purpose excuse: “If you didn’t want me to rip you off, then why did you click ‘I agree’?”
HP was just getting started, though. In the ideal world, you wouldn’t even own your printer ink, you’d just RENT it.
This is “ink as a service.” You pre-commit to printing a certain number of pages/month and they mail you ink, which they own. You’re not buying the ink, you’re buying the right to use it.
If you don’t print your quota in a month, some of the pages roll over, but they don’t let you bank more than a few months’ worth - and to keep those pages, you have to keep paying for your sub. Meanwhile, if you blow through your limit, you get charged for every page.
This is a weird and unpalatable idea, so to sell it, HP rolled out a pay-one-price “Free Ink for Life” plan that gave you 15 pages every month for as long as you owned your printer.
But this is HP we’re talking about, so words have no meaning. Last month, HP notified its “free ink for life” customers that their life had ended, and they were being moved to a new afterlife where they had to pay $0.99/month, forever, or else.
This Darth Vader “Pray I don’t alter it further” shit is the most on-brand HP thing ever
Worse still are the many imitators HP inspires - all those companies that have decided that it’s your solemn duty to arrange your affairs to suit their shareholders’ needs.
The right-to-repair criminals like Apple, John Deere and Medtronic. Tesla and GM, Juicero and Keurig - companies that are not merely content with waging war on customers, but also on competitors who offer those customers shelter.
Since the turn of this century, HP has been shedding its productive business units that make useful products, and focusing its legal and engineering departments on innovations in shitty dystopian hack-futurism.
