Aaron Swartz, a 24-year old hacker, was recently indicted on data theft charges for downloading over 4 million documents from JSTOR, a US-based online system for archiving academic journals. Mainstream media ( Reuters, Guardian, NYT, Time, …) reported this with a mix of facts and fiction. I guess that the recent attacks of hacking groups on well-known websites and the release of data they stole on the internet gave to this story some spice. ...
I don’t know how I stumble upon this report of a conference ( English translation) from Avi Alkalay but I liked 2 schemes he showed. In this first scheme (left), I like the way it reminds you that “Open” is not only about software, source code. But now that more and more people are aware of the benefits of Open Source software, it’s interesting to also stress the other sides of openness: open standards (like OpenDocument), open hardware, open architecture. In the second scheme (below) is about the trend from private control / closed access to public control / open access (apparently from Rebecca Henderson; it could be interesting to find this whole presentation from 2004). ...