Moe Lane

The formal indictment of PCCC/Reddit** co-founder (and Demand Progress Executive Director) Aaron Swartz is available [link fixed], and you will find it compelling reading, if only because it shows the level of stubborn disregard for other people’s property and needs that can be exhibited by a telecommie geek who is simultaneously convinced of the rightness of his cause, and not especially overburdened with a sense of conventional ethics.  Essentially, if this indictment is correct, then Swartz physically broke into MIT’s computer network, inserted a virgin laptop into that system, deliberately spoofed the network into believing that the laptop represented a legitimate (guest***) user of MIT’s JSTOR online journal database account, immediately began massive downloads of JSTOR data in flagrant violation of JSTOR and MIT policies, spent several months playing steadily-increasing games of digital cat-and-mouse with MIT’s anti-piracy forces, then attempted to retrieve the physical evidence for all of this while trying to disguise his identity.  The indictment lists several occasions where Swartz’s behavior hindered the ability of legitimate MIT users to access JSTOR, and at least one where MIT users were outright prohibited from accessing JSTOR at all.

Lastly, please note this passage from a Boston Globe article on the crime.

Swartz allies claim the prosecution was launched over the objections of JSTOR.

“That is not the case,’’ said Heide McGregor, vice president of marketing and communications for JSTOR. “We were interested always in making sure the data was secure and the data was not disseminated. So we were happy we got to that result.”

(more…)

…by running for office.  Specifically, he’s running for Supervisor of Elections for Lake County, Florida – which is, of course, one of the kinds of jobs that we always need candidates for, and we always will.  No election or donation site yet, but BG5 is of course a long-time reader both here and at RedState, so I’m sure that he’ll let us know when that changes.

Obviously, I wish him luck and success, and I look forward to hearing from him (and anybody else doing the same thing) about what it’s like to run for office on the county level.

Moe Lane

PS: Seriously, the GOP and conservatism in general needs more like this; people who will run for offices.  We can’t win if we can’t show up.  I’m not saying that people are bad people for not doing that – after all, I’m not running for anything right now, either – but if you have the time and the inclination, tossing your hat in the ring would be a mitzvah.

Why Don’t You Do Right? (vocal: Peggy Lee), Benny Goodman

Reality, for once, has not let us down:

This apparently happened. The dog’s doing the talkshow circuit now and everything (via Hot Air Headlines).

Moe Lane

PS: Honestly, that video looks too good to be true.  But I figure that if the LA Fishwrap can let itself be fooled, then I can go along for the ride.

PCCC stands for “Progressive Change Campaign Committee,” which was a group that rose to fame last year for its stellar record in taking progressive campaign cash and turning it into mocking, pathetically broken dreams; Reddit is of course the popular news source that none of you use because the liberals on it will downvote you to death if you try; Aaron Swartz is a co-founder of both, as well as the Executive Director of Demand Progress*; and ‘mail fraud’ is a shorter way of saying “A Harvard University fellow studying ethics has been accused of using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles.” Specifically, Swartz is being charged with hacking into and stealing from JSTOR – which is pretty much the source for online academic journal articles.

The AP says that said articles were physically hacked, apparently involving wiring closets being broken into and so forth. How much of that is the AP just wishing that life was more like Mission: Impossible is unclear; but what is clear is that Aaron Swartz – who has one of those resumes that may not be amenable to a standard unpersoning – has been indicted for allegedly ripping off JSTOR and allegedly planning to redistribute them to filesharers. Or, as Demand Progress is currently calling it, “allegedly downloading too many scholarly journal articles from the Web.”

How funny is this? It’s so funny that I’m going to break a rule and link to all of these sites – and Huffington Post, for reasons that are about to be obvious. You see, Reddit is already pushing back on the New York Time’s reporting that Aaron Swartz is a cofounder of their website… which is interesting, because they didn’t seem to care when Swartz claimed that status on both HuffPo and Demand Progress. Oh, and look. Here’s the Wayback Machine, faithfully reproducing an article from 2006 where Alexis Ohanian embraces Swartz as a cofounder! But that was before the mail fraud, of course. (more…)

It seems to have two parts:

1. A Boba Fett movie would be awesome.
2. George Lucas must be kept as far away from it as possible.

Tasers may be regrettably necessary in order to enforce #2.

Moe Lane

*Thus far… AoSHQ, PJ Lifestyle, and me.

And how did the aforementioned Goofball get a pie through?  At Parliament?

No, seriously.  The British Parliament has been bombed in living memory; London itself gets targeted by terrorist attacks at a level that Americans in particular may not really recognize.  I know that the last time I visited England I was surprised for a while at the lack of public garbage cans… until I thought about it for a minute, and realized why.  It was so the IRA couldn’t put bombs in them.

There’s going to be firings over this.  And if somebody helped the Goofball, he or she might end up in jail.

In all of his, ahem, glory.

So… this guy breaks the rules and shows his contempt for a centuries-old institution for the ever-so-majestic goal of trying to humiliate an old man; for his pains, the Goofball gets slapped around by the man’s wife, wrestled off, arrested… and led off to jail with literal pie on his face.  The pie that he brought himself.

Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is the iconic image of the Modern Activist Left.  All that’s missing is a fat campaign contribution check to Barack Obama.

Moe Lane

…because (like, I suspect, Glenn Reynolds) I consider this to be the perfect intersection between the normally competing impulses of desire for public service, and sheer greed: Kindle Textbooks.  Buy ‘em for the Kindle, or rent ‘em; the former has its points as a later reference, but the latter is often a lot cheaper.  And you don’t actually need a Kindle; there are, as they say, apps for that.

Incidentally, if you don’t have kids about to go to college then you should go look up textbook prices on Amazon generally: it’ll give you an idea of just how bad things have gotten when it comes to niche printing.  When you go through the medical section in particular… damn.  For that kind of money, I could hire a scribe to copy out and illuminate some of those books – the prices are comparable, and the end result would be prettier, too.

From Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt, which you really should be subscribed to (Jim has excellent instincts, which means ‘he links to me a lot in that’):

Dear candidates: When you send out a press release headlined URGENT, it had better be that your candidate is literally on fire. Announcing that you’ve signed some group’s pledge is not, and never will be URGENT.

Sing it, brother.

In the Mood, Glenn Miller

Did this one this year already, but, dammit… CAPTAIN AMERICA MOVIE IN FOUR DAYS.

The end has come for the big-box book vendor:

There will be no storybook ending for Borders Group Inc. The 40-year-old bookseller could start liquidating its 399 remaining stores as early as Friday.

The chain, which helped pioneer the big-box bookseller concept, is seeking court approval to liquidate its stores after it failed to receive any bids that would keep it in business. The move adds Borders to the list of retailers that failed to adapt to changing consumers’ shopping habits and survive the recession, including Circuit City Stores Inc., Mervyns and Linens ‘n Things.

It was useful to have the stores handy to my various jobs, over the years; and before online shopping became ubiquitous they really were the best option for people looking for a wide and reliable selection.  Certainly they were more reliable than the small bookstores, which big-box chains largely barreled over with about as much consideration as flailing big-box chains are getting from online vendors now.  I should also note, gently, that many of those online vendors can be traced back to individuals and companies that had their original business model destroyed by big-box retailers in the first place.

And so it goes.

Moe Lane

Full disclosure: I am an Amazon.com Affiliate.