The Truth About Aaron Swartz's "Crime"

Re:The Truth About Aaron Swartz's "Crime" by rgbrenner on Sunday January 13, 2013 @05:02PM (#5052059)

That is not correct. He launched what amounted to a DoS against JSTOR:

" the strain it put on JSTOR’s servers was enough to have impaired other research institutions attempting to access the materials."

"Together, Grace and Gary Host downloaded JSTOR articles at such an astounding pace that several of JSTOR’s servers crashed."

http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N30/swartz.html

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Re:The Truth About Aaron Swartz's "Crime" by ghshephard on Sunday January 13, 2013 @06:18PM (#5052310)

Every journal database I have done bulk downloads from (sometimes constantly) over a week requires a cookie and sends you a polite message (via http no less) asking you to put in a few seconds pause between each request.

It would not have occurred to me that they haven't configured their servers to handle the load. Once again - Aaron did nothing that I, and tens of thousands of people like me, haven't done many times.

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Re:The Truth About Aaron Swartz's "Crime" by rgbrenner on Sunday January 13, 2013 @06:40PM (#5052391)

You've downloaded millions of articles from JSTOR? Or how MIT put it: "more than 100 times the number of legitimate JSTOR downloads at MIT during that time period"

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