6 years ago, On the cosy afternoon of January 12, 2013, at the campus of DAIICT, when I logged into IRC channel hundreds of messages flashed. That messages still feel the heart with pain and most tragic news about internet received ever.

6 years ago, On January 11, 2013, @aaronsw hanged himself in his Brooklyn, NY apartment. He was 26 years old.

In 2013, Swartz was inducted posthumously into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Wanted to share some of the life events of beloved boy Who Could Change the World. Conti.

In his too-short life, Aaron Swartz reshaped the Internet, questioned our assumptions about intellectual property, and touched all of us in ways that we may not even realize. Aaron is an iconic pioneer of Politics of the internet.

Aaron taught himself to read when he was three. At twelve, he created a user-generated encyclopedia, which he later likened to an early version of Wikipedia. He then turned his computer genius to political organizing, information sharing, and online freedom.

Aaron was on to making a better world for us all; a free world. He was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS and the Markdown publishing format, the organization Creative Commons, and was a co-founder of the social news site Reddit.

In 2006, Aaron downloaded the Library of Congress’s complete bibliographic dataset. However, as a government document, it was not copyright-protected within the USA. By posting the data on http://OpenLibrary.org , Aaron made it freely available.

In 2008, Aaron downloaded and released 2.7 million federal court documents stored in the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.

The move drew the attention of the FBI. Swartz learned the details of the investigation as a result of filing an FOIA request with the FBI and described their response as the

"usual mess of confusions that shows the FBI's lack of sense of humor."

In 2010, he became a research fellow at Harvard University's Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption conducting studies on political corruption., directed by Lawrence Lessig, founded online group Demand Progress, known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act

In late 2010, Aaron Swartz downloaded a large number of academic journal articles through MIT’s computer network. At the time, Aaron was a research fellow at Harvard University, which provided him with an authorized account.

Aaron’s motivation for downloading the articles was never fully determined. However, friends and colleagues reported that Aaron’s intention was either to publicly share them on the Internet or uncover corruption in the funding of climate change research.

Faced with prosecutors being overzealous & a dysfunctional US criminal justice system, Aaron was charged with a maximum penalty of $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison, leading to a 2-year legal battle with the US federal government that ended when Aaron took his own life.

His actions were more about breaking rules of an online storage database than a malicious act to inflict harm on anyone. It was, in his mind, a means of protest.

To US authorities it was wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer, violations that carry a stiff prison term.

Besides being a technical genius and a passionate activist, he was also an insightful, compelling, and cutting essayist. With a technical understanding of the Internet and of intellectual property law surpassing that of many seasoned professionals.

He wrote thoughtfully and humorously about intellectual property, copyright, & the architecture of the Internet. 5 months before his death, Aaron completed Raw Nerve, a series of articles reflecting on life, depicting an honest, painful & yet beautiful picture of the tragedy.

between 2007 and 2011 Aaron read 614 books; one book every 3 days. Early on, Aaron made a point to write about his findings and reflection. From the “Hello World” post published on January 13, 2002, to the last known article written on November 1, 2012.

Aaron published 1,478 articles on his personal blog; one article every three days.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ 

You can access his Github Repo here at https://github.com/aaronsw 

Twitter handle with the last tweet on Jan 9, 2013, is tagged in the first tweet as a gesture of tribute. The Internet will never ever forget his contribution bringing decade long technology in just a small stint of 26 years of life. Amen