Jisha Surya / TNN
January 13, 2014
Thiruvananthapuram: While Anonymous hacked a website belonging to MIT to mark the death anniversary of internet activist Aaron Swartz, cyber activists in the state remembered him by organizing Hacknight in support of cyber freedom which the young technologist championed for during his lifetime.
Twenty-six-year-old Swartz had killed himself on January 11 last year while fighting charges by US government that he had hacked an online archive of academic papers. He had allegedly logged into MIT’s network to gain access to the JSTOR database.
Mozilla Kerala and Swatantra Malayalam Computing (SMC) celebrated his life and mourned his death by organizing Hacknight, which witnessed active participation by over 60 developers of various web projects from 8.30pm on Saturday to Sunday morning. It also saw creation of a petition platform wepeople.in.
“We created a petition platform wepeople.in drawing inspiration from Swartz’s similar initiative Demand Progress. The existing petition platforms in the country are corporate-funded where privacy is compromised. Also, as they accept all kinds of petitions, the purpose of campaign is often diluted. This will be a people-powered campaign platform,” said Anivar Aravind of SMC.
Demand Progress, founded by Swartz, is known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act.
The developers also translated Swartz’s open access manifesto into Malayalam, which is nearing completion.
Technogeeks – a Facebook community of technology enthusiasts – too organized an online candlelight vigil, where over 230 people lit the virtual candle. The campaign, which began on Saturday, is continuing with more and more people joining it in support of cyber freedom.
“Each candle will remain lit for 48 hours, though its gets smaller as time passes. Now over 230 people have lit the candles,” said Deepu S Nath, a member of Technogeeks.
One of the major works of Swartz was liberating the public-funded Library of Congress catalogue to make a major bibliography repository on internet.
The cyber activists used Saturday night for creating user interface for Grandham.org, a Malayalam bibliography database. SMC member Harikesh K B introduced the projects in the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel of SMC, where all cyber activists joined by 8.30pm.
January 13, 2014
Thiruvananthapuram: While Anonymous hacked a website belonging to MIT to mark the death anniversary of internet activist Aaron Swartz, cyber activists in the state remembered him by organizing Hacknight in support of cyber freedom which the young technologist championed for during his lifetime.
Twenty-six-year-old Swartz had killed himself on January 11 last year while fighting charges by US government that he had hacked an online archive of academic papers. He had allegedly logged into MIT’s network to gain access to the JSTOR database.
Mozilla Kerala and Swatantra Malayalam Computing (SMC) celebrated his life and mourned his death by organizing Hacknight, which witnessed active participation by over 60 developers of various web projects from 8.30pm on Saturday to Sunday morning. It also saw creation of a petition platform wepeople.in.
“We created a petition platform wepeople.in drawing inspiration from Swartz’s similar initiative Demand Progress. The existing petition platforms in the country are corporate-funded where privacy is compromised. Also, as they accept all kinds of petitions, the purpose of campaign is often diluted. This will be a people-powered campaign platform,” said Anivar Aravind of SMC.
Demand Progress, founded by Swartz, is known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act.
The developers also translated Swartz’s open access manifesto into Malayalam, which is nearing completion.
Technogeeks – a Facebook community of technology enthusiasts – too organized an online candlelight vigil, where over 230 people lit the virtual candle. The campaign, which began on Saturday, is continuing with more and more people joining it in support of cyber freedom.
“Each candle will remain lit for 48 hours, though its gets smaller as time passes. Now over 230 people have lit the candles,” said Deepu S Nath, a member of Technogeeks.
One of the major works of Swartz was liberating the public-funded Library of Congress catalogue to make a major bibliography repository on internet.
The cyber activists used Saturday night for creating user interface for Grandham.org, a Malayalam bibliography database. SMC member Harikesh K B introduced the projects in the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel of SMC, where all cyber activists joined by 8.30pm.
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