Internet Pioneer Aaron Swartz, 26, Commits Suicide

The Highland Park native helped create the RSS feed when he was 14. He was facing federal charges at the time of his death. His funeral is Tuesday at Central Avenue Synagogue.

Aaron Swartz, a Highland Park native and activist for free content on the Internet, was found dead Friday in his Brooklyn apartment in an apparent suicide, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. He was 26. Swartz helped create the RSS feed, which allows people to subscribe to information online, when he was just 14, according to an article in the New York Times. He also helped found Reddit, a social news website. He went on to become an activist for free online content, which landed him in trouble with the federal government in 2011 when he was indicted for gaining illegal access to a subscription-based service that distributes literary and scientific journals and then downloading nearly its entire library CNN quoted a statement from Swartz's…

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Steve Handwerker

4:21 pm on Sunday, January 13, 2013

What a shame to lose somebody so creative, smart, selfless, forward-thinking, and young. May his memory be a blessing to us all and a reminder to stand for what we believe in.   more ›

Warrior Watch

The Perks (And Drawbacks) of Being Connected

Technology is changing, but it's also changing us.

In last week's article-- focused on the new importance of concerts in today's music landscape-- I spent a paragraph lamenting the music industry's decline since having gone online. In full cranky-grandpa-mode, the flowery happiness of old record stores was contrasted with the allegedly bleak isolation that is today's reality: sitting alone in one's room, illegally pirating track by track off some shady corner of the Internet. Back in my day, we used to pay good money for our records. At least these young whippersnappers are only stealing whatever rap-crap the radio stations play.  All jokes aside, my point is that I never meant to sound like a grump. Though I’d guess most record label execs wish Al Gore had never invented the Internet, I’…

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