Aaron Swartz, Internet Whiz, activist commits suicide

The 26 year old, Aaron Swartz, Reddit co-founder, co-developed RSS, Internet activist, Programmer, a hacker committed suicide in his Brooklyn apartment, on Friday. He was accused of stealing nearly 500 million articles from an MIT archive and was set to be trialed in February.

Swartz, 26, left no note before his Friday morning death in the seventh-floor apartment at a luxury Sullivan Place building, NY. Swartz, who at the age of 14, co-wrote the RSS specification, a Harvard University fellow studying ethics, was charged with stealing nearly 5 million articles from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He faced 13 felony charges, including wire fraud, computer fraud and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Prosecutors said he intended to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites.He  pleaded not guilty,If convicted, he could have faced 35 Years in prison and steep fines.

Some legal experts believe the charges are unfounded since Swartz had been a university fellow, which gave him the right to access the articles.


He was admitted and dropped out after year from Stanford University, because, In his blog post, He wrote, "I didn't find it a very intellectual atmosphere, since most of the other kids seemed profoundly unconcerned with their studies."
He later help develop Reddit, then he engaged in Internet digital activism, co-founding Demand Progress.

On his blog, he wrote:
"Everything you think about seems bleak — the things you've done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn't come for any reason and it doesn't go for any either."
"At best, you tell yourself that your thinking is irrational, that it is simply a mood disorder, that you should get on with your life. But sometimes that is worse. You feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none. And this is one of the more moderate forms," he wrote.