Visitors to the MIT website last night were greeted with a message from Anonymous about Aaron Swartz, calling the government's prosecution of the late open access activist a "grotesque miscarriage of justice."
It was run-of-the-mill website vandalism rather than a serious attack impacting MIT's back-end security. CNET caught a screenshot of the defacement while it was still online:
The "YourAnonNews" Twitter account reported "#MIT Owned by #Anonymous," and used Pastebin to provide the full text of the message that was temporarily on the MIT website. "Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the government's prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for—freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it—enabling the collective betterment of the world through the facilitation of sharing—an ideal that we should all support," the message stated.
Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments