Call to action kicks off second Aaron Swartz hackathon

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Aaron Swartz’s statue on the Web Archive was unveiled at the memorial presentation on his twenty-seventh birthday. SAN FRANCISCO — On the party of what would’ve been Aaron Swartz’s twenty-seventh birthday, the hacker who used to be driven to suicide earlier this year by way of executive prosecution was memorialized with a clay statue of his likeness on the Internet Archive.

The half of-sized illustration of Swartz bears his scruffy, unshaven likeness and neck-size hair, but additionally an electronic Frontier basis (EFF) T-shirt and a laptop with an inscription on its lid: “10,000,000,000,000,000 Internet Archive 2012 bytes archived.” The web Archive crossed ten pet bytes of information archived at no cost in October 2012.

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The staff of the non-profit, headquartered on Funston Avenue within the continuously foggy Richmond District, is honored with statues after they’ve worked for the Archive for at least three years. Joining the 100 or so clay residents of the Great Room on Friday night had been around one hundred fifty pals and hackers impressed through Swartz, who gathered to keep in mind his life and inaugurate the second worldwide hackathon due to his demise.

But there was once no fog in the air because the Internet Archive’s founder and director, Brewster Kahlo, defined the purpose of the hackathon: to further coding tasks that aligned with Swartz’s values, “an open and protected internet.” “We’re making the internet a safer position,” Kahlo mentioned of the Web Archive’s work by resisting nationwide security Letters and defending readers’ privateers by cloaking and obfuscating their IP addresses.

He said that the web Archive can make the web extra open. Browser extensions supported by way of the archive lend a hand people add public security codes to the archive’s database, an important task as a result of although the principles are general, companies have created what Kahlo described as a “multi-billion buck business” in forcing people to pay to receive printed copies of them. Turning to doable initiatives for the gathered hackers to work on, he mentioned that only fifty-four of the highest 1,000 web pages had been secure through HTTPS, making it harder for snoopers to learn your internet site visitors.