The world of tech has lost a great mind today. Aaron Swartz was a coder, geek and an internet activist. At the age of 14 he helped co-authored RSS 1.0 specification. He also founded a company which was later acquired by Reddit.
Aaron Swartz committed suicide today. He was only 26 years old.
Aaron Swartz was recently more in the news for his internet activism. He was a indicted in the US for allegedly downloading millions of files by breaking into JSTOR which was a subscription based service.
I spend hours online and a lot of it is dedicated to reading my feeds on Google Reader. I am sure a lot of you reading this post are doing so because you subscribed to our RSS feed. To think that a 14 year old was a major contributor to this technology, which is literally the backbone of online publishing is mind boggling.
To think that the the same person felt his life was not worth living anymore is very tragic.
(via Tech.MIT)
2 Comments
Tragic, I spend most of the time in reading through Google reader. He should have known his worth.
R.I.P