Aaron Swartz, a co-founder of the popular social news website Reddit, has committed suicide at his home on Friday. The computer prodigy left the world at a mere age of 26 years. Swartz decided to end his life just weeks before he was to be tried for felony fraud charges.
Since his adolescent days, Swartz worked on the creation of Rich Site Summary or better known as RSS. Later, he co-founded Reddit, a news-sharing site which allows users to submit content via a post or link.
The latest casualty of the world's IT wizards will always be remembered as an activist that supported the idea of having information available to the public for free. "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves." One of his most famous quotes goes like this.
The accusations which Swartz faced includes breaching the terms of sites, obtaining information from protected computers as well as sharing downloaded files via peer-to-peer networks.
He ever stole more than four million articles from JSTOR, an online archive and journal distribution service, using the computer networks of MIT but the latter opted not to press any charges against him after the articles were reclaimed.
Aaron Swartz's sudden death has shocked many especially those who surf Reddit like myself although i only do it occasionally. He may be gone but Swartz leaves behind a legacy as he joins Steve Jobs in the world's hall of fame of computer masters.
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