Aaron Swartz, the notable internet luminary and the co-founder of Reddit, committed suicide last year on Jan 11, 2014. In his memory, Anonymous recently hacked and defaced MIT‘s site since the university was involved in litigation against Swartz.
MIT had pushed for legal action against Swartz after he obtained access to the protected MIT JSTOR database and got his hands on four million academic documents. In return, MIT decided to punish him by launching a legal case against him and colluding with the US government over it.
An unusually avenging prosecutor helped whip the case in such a shape that over such seemingly benign hack, Swartz may have ended up in jail for years. So Swartz, hounded by the federal government, eventually committed suicide, much to the shock of the entire world and especially the online community which held, and holds, him in high esteem.
Swartz’s family and friends were equivocal in blaming MIT and the notorious prosecutor of the case for having pushed the young genius to his death. So it was no coincidence that Anonymous chose to deface an MIT sub-domain on Jan 11 this year. The hack was pulled off simply to highlight the fact that MIT was directly involved in what happened to Swartz and soiled its repute of being a top university by hounding after someone whose intents were not profit-driven or malicious in any way.
Titling the defaced MIT sub-domain as ‘The Day We Fight Back‘, Anonymous posted the following message, “Remember The Day We Fight Back, Remember. We Never Forget, We Never Surrender, Expect Us.”
Courtesy: The Hacker News
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