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Aaron left instructions for his digital estate.
Additionally, it appears Archive Team is on the case: https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/290097792838406145
"I'm not dead yet!"
Damn, that feels weird to read right now.
People live on in their ideas.
Too true.
I've emailed both Linode and Name.com asking if I can pay for his domain and hosting to continue on for eternity.
http://d.pr/i/2ysc (and they're looking into it)
Hi fraiserman, I would be honored to have the privilege of splitting the costs with you in perpetuity.
Aaron had an uncanny physical resemblance to my younger brother, and because of that, I couldn't help but feel a stronger connection to Aaron beyond his courageous activism, original thoughts, and entrepreneurship.
I can be reached on twitter at @hkmurakami. Thanks for considering.
You need root access to his linode. Eventually something on his instance will break and take everything down with it.
Even if you keep the bills paid forever, the only long-term solution is to focusing on archiving static copies of everything you can.
I second this
Followup: Got a response from Name.com... it looks like the only thing they can do in this situation is transfer the domain to next of kin (rather then letting someone else be the billing contact)
Hopefully the Swartz estate understands how much his works mean to people and decide to keep the domain and hosting running.
Thank you all for your offers to donate, hopefully his estate will let us donate directly to them.
Let us know if you want contributions to help offset it. Count me in.
It might be a good idea to collect, archive and publish (on-line) his collected works. I have a feeling that there is still much we can learn from him.
An Aaron Swartz memorial online library.
This might theoretically be copyright infringement. Since Aaron didn't specify any license (like CC) for his blog, reproducing his content without his estate's permission is technically illegal.
If IRC chat logs are legally admissible, I can provide documentation going back to at least 2001 of Aaron being in favour of putting all of his work into the Public Domain.
Please, please save those IRC logs.
The Wayback Machine will most probably take care of the archiving. But if you want to host a backup, better ask for forgiveness than permission... I'd be surprised if a DMCA account were to be sent.
Since his mother appears to have registered an HN account today, we could ask her directly.
I don't think he would have opposed "technically illegal" copyright infringement aimed at making more content publicly available.
Considering Aaron's legacy of "full-time, uncompromising, reckless and delightful shit-disturb[ing]" as so eloquently put by Cory Doctorow, he probably wouldn't have wanted us to deal with the trivialities of copyright law at the expense of a good cause.
Aaron knew about copyright's implications - hell right around the time of RSS, he helped launch Creative Commons. And he didn't put a license on his site. So maybe by not stating a license he was making a statement about copyright. But now we'll never be able to know for sure.
> he probably wouldn't have wanted us to deal with the trivialities of copyright law at the expense of a good cause.
Unfortunately, the same might be said of Martin Luther King and his "I Have a Dream" speech, which still can't be reprinted or rebroadcast in full until 2038, thanks to the greed of his estate.
It's a shame that legal technicalities can end up being so important, but the fact is that it's true.
Might not be true for all TLDs, but I think you can actually pay to renew one's domain even if you don't own it.
"but I think you can actually pay to renew one's domain even if you don't own it."
In general it depends on the policy of the registrar (we are a registrar).
But even though renewing the domain gets by the defacto problem of payment there is still the contract between the registrant and the registrar. If the registrant dies then something happens to that contract. As a registrar for example we don't care who pays for the domain name and this happens quite frequently (designer pays etc.). But paying for the domain doesn't get you access to login and gain access to the account. In order to do that there would have to be some legal document (court document) which allows the new person to take control of the account. (And we've received this).
Now on a "wink wink nod nod" basis of course a registrar can do what they want to do whether legal, allowed or not.
But in the case of this domain, if we were the registrar, we wouldn't because the entire thing is to high visibility.
It would actually be quite easy for someone to (for whatever reason) blow the whistle on name.com doing something like this. ICANN may look into it and do something (they are auditing 1/3 of the registrars right now) or not.
Yeah, but hosting services expire too, not only domains. Anyway, archive.org already crawled the entire website: http://web.archive.org/web/20121028095100/http://www.aaronsw...
And that has the advantage of not breaking existing links. Same goes for hosting.
I would like to save his entire site on my Hard disk. I did not know he had written some gems on his site.
Luckily his site works very well without javascript, so `wget --max-redirect 0 -mk http://www.aaronsw.com/` would give you something like this:
Thanks a ton!
$ man wgetI see. < script src = "ad-1.js" rel = "http://www.w3.org/TR/emotionml/" >< /script >
I like the idea.
I don't know a lot about his personal life - does he have a family or anything?
I'd happily donate them some money to help with things - I know that it's not easy tying up someone's personal life - funeral costs, lawyers, etc.
I'm sure his site has enough google juice that people will fight you for it in the auction after the redemption period, unless his family takes care of it before it enters the aftermarket...
Does anyone have source to theinfo.org or any of its previous versions? I have a full archive of the short-lived mailing lists and would like to ensure this site isn't lost.