(Photo: Daily Tech)

Quinn Norton speaks out on what life inside the Aaron Swartz investigation was like. "This will not be the final word on Aaron's story, nor is it intended to be. Two years later, these are the events as I remember them, and the feelings as I knew them." [The Atlantic]

Former dotcom millionaire Jennifer Sultan plead guilty to selling prescription drugs and conspiring to sell a firearm in exchange for four years in prison on Friday. Ms. Sultan, who sold her company Live Online during the first boom, burned through her fortune after becoming addicted to prescription pain killers. Let this be a cautionary tale for bubble 2.0. [New York Times]

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz took to Rap Genius this weekend to decode Andrew Mason's goodbye letter. Swag? [TechCrunch]

If you got an email this weekend from Evernote that it had reset your password, that’s because the company suffered a major security breach. [The Verge]

SpaceX Dragon has successfully docked at the International Space Station, which is great because we don't really need any more griping from Elon Musk right now. [Ars Technica]

In a post today, blogger and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis wondered whether, in the aftermath of Mr. Sherman's death, and the recent suicide of Aaron Swartz—as well as the suicide in 2011 of Diaspora co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy—whether it's time to talk about the emotional strain of launching and operating a startup:

Perhaps we owe it to these three amazing humans to examine if the pressures of being a founder, the pressure of our community's relentless pursuit of greatness, in some way contributed to their deaths?

I've always believed that being a founder is an unhealthy pursuit at times, and few have disagreed -- certainly not those who have done it. Read any biography of a successful founder and you'll find collateral damage around -- and certainly in -- those individuals.

It's not the first time that Mr. Calcanis has written about depression. In a widely-read email, Mr. Calacanis discussed "confused, paralyzed and anxious" feelings in the startup community following the onset of the financial crisis in 2008.

Mr. Calacanis isn't the only one to advocate for more openess around the stresses faced by startup founders. Yesterday, 50Kings founder Francisco Dao ruminated on what he called "the show," the entrepreneur's tendency to display "all the charm and the energy and the friendliness that hides the knot in our stomach and the sadness in our heart."

And after the death of Mr. Zhitomirskiy, New York entrepreneurs and investors talked to Betabeat about maintaining equilibrium while riding the startup roller coaster.

What Dave Tisch, the former managing director of TechStars New York, told us at the time is probably just as true today. “I don’t think [these issues] are getting brushed under the rug, but,” Mr. Tisch told us. “It’s probably something we can all do better in exposing.”

On the other hand, supporters of the prosecutors' case have been few and far between. There was Tom Dolan, husband to Ms. Ortiz, who tweeted a "mind-boggling" defense of the prosecutors, before thinking better of it and deleting his Twitter account.

And ... has there been anyone else?

In a five-paragraph editorial dedicated mostly to the case of Ahmed Al-Khabaz, the Canadian student recently expelled for hacking his college, Toronto's Globe and Mail, boldly goes where few others have:

Swartz, who had a history of depression, was facing a slew of charges for allegedly downloading publicly funded academic journals from a large database that charged a fee for access. His family and supporters blame overzealous prosecutors for his death; the prosecutors insist—again, quite rightly—that "stealing is stealing."

To which "looney screed" the paper's editors have every right. If they want to stick their mitts in the beehive of the Internet, who are we to argue?

(Screencap: MIT.edu)

Hackers have defaced the MIT.edu website in response to the death of Internet activist Aaron Swartz, who was being prosecuted with the cooperation of M.I.T for illegally downloading JSTOR files over the university's network and uploading them for free use by the public. Mr. Swartz hung himself in his Brooklyn apartment 10 days ago, and a memorial was held for him at Cooper Union in New York on Saturday.

The MIT website has been defaced to display a black screen with the text of a blog post from Mr. Swartz's blog superimposed overtop. "R.I.P. Aaron Swartz," reads bolded white text in the middle of the site. "Hacked by grand wizard of Lulzsec, Sabu. God Bless America. Down with Anonymous." (Please also note that it says "Reddit sucks k" in the righthand corner. Lulz.)

Betabeat has been unable to confirm whether or not the hack was indeed the responsibility of the hacker crew Lulzsec, though we have to guess it wasn't done by Sabu, since the former LulzSec operative was outed as an FBI informant last year.

Upon refresh, it appears the website has been taken offline, serving the message "This website is offline. No cached version is available."

Update: Aaaaand we're back.

Ms. Stinebrickner-Kauffman. (screencap: Democracy Now)

The hard thing to reconcile at Saturday’s memorial to the Internet activist Aaron Swartz was that the young man remembered for his idealistic soul and brilliant mind was the same young man who, one week before, had hung himself.

For more than two hours, friends and former colleagues remembered Mr. Swartz’s intellect and caring nature, his quirks of personality and generosity of spirit; How at the age of 14, he'd helped build technology underlying RSS feeds and collaborated to found the Creative Commons; How he’d bypassed the road to fame and fortune to devote himself to causes like defeating the Stop Online Piracy Act.

And so it seemed no accident that the photographs projected on the walls of Cooper Union’s Great Hall showed Mr. Swartz in a saintly light, a young man perpetually on the brink of discovery; not a tortured soul who’d taken his own life, but a martyr who’d been driven to his death by the powerful entities that he had challenged.

Saturday’s memorial service, then, was not just a moment for sadness: It was permeated with anger, driven by a community determined to not let their loss be in vain, to apply lessons from Mr. Swartz's life and death to their own lives.

“This was not suicide,” said Thoughtworks founder Roy Singham told the audience. “This was murder by intimidation, bullying and torment.”

Anyone who has read about Mr. Swartz in the aftermath of his death will be familiar with the legal troubles widely believed to have led him to take his own life. In the summer of 2011, Mr. Swartz was indicted by federal prosecutors for illegally downloading more than 4 million academic papers from the JSTOR database, an alleged crime that Mr. Swartz’s supporters saw as a victimless bit of mischief, but which the Department of Justice deemed deserving of as much as 35 years in prison.

As the crowd had filed into the auditorium, and organizers played Pete Seeger playing protest songs, it was not lost Betabeat that Mr. Swartz’s death has extended the reach of his cause; Mr. Seeger himself couldn’t attend the memorial, but sent his grandson to deliver a brief message. Mr. Swartz loved the writer Tom Chiarella, so Mr. Chiarella turned up to perform a reading. In Washington, legislators on either side of the aisle promised action in the wake of Mr. Swartz's passing.

Mr. Swartz was many things to many people. In the words of the friends who addressed the crowd at Cooper Union, he was a communitarian and an internationalist, a rhetorician, a philosopher, an amateur historian and sociologist. He was a person not in the habit of doing things he didn’t want to, whether that meant eating adventurously or reading poetry or doing the dishes.

He was the epitome of curiosity—“He didn’t believe he was smarter than anyone else, he just thought he asked better questions,” his partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman said—equipped with the kind of flexible mind that might begin a conversation on the will power of Victorian Britons and end it on the question of whether GDP statistics are robust enough to tell us whether technological progress is slowing.

“Aaron’s unique quality was that he was marvelously and vigorously different,” said Edward Tufte, a Yale professor and statistician who had mentored Mr. Swartz.

He was committed to using his prodigious talent to make the world a better place.

“Aaron’s dream of a world was nothing less than a world without suffering or injustice of any kind,” said Holden Karnofsky, cofounder of GiveWell, a friend of Mr. Swartz.

In the closing remarks to the memorial, Ms. Stinebrickner-Kauffman took aim at the prosecutors with "no sense of proportion or justice," who was "hellbent on destroying" Mr. Swartz's life. But Ms. Stinebrickner-Kauffman didn't end on a note of anger or grief. Instead, she exhorted the audience to use Mr. Swartz's death as an opportunity to examine their own lives.

“If you’re in the tech sector, why are you there?” she asked. “Do you believe that technology is making the world a better place, why do you believe that?”

"The best possible legacy for him," she said, "is for all of us to go out today and do everything we can to make the world a better place."

Only two WBC protestors showed up, and were cordoned off in a six-by-six foot pen near the corner of 45th Street and Broadway, where they preached, we think, a message of God's hatred, or something along those lines.

Members of the Anonymous faction Motherfuckery were among the counter-protestors, gathering in a cordon of their own and chanting phrases such as "Walrus, walrus" and "suck my dick" at the WBC protestors.

Other demonstrators included a troupe of actors from the burlesque musical Let My People Come, and a larger group of more earnest protestors, who insisted in song that God loves us all.

(Photo: Slash Gear)

In a press release published to Pastebin last night, the hacktivist collective Anonymous announced its plans for the second phase of #OpAngel, an operation executed in reaction to the suicide of famed hacker Aaron Swartz.

Mr. Swartz, a champion of the open Internet, was integral to the creation of RSS and defeating SOPA/PIPA. Over the last week, Anonymous has sought to defend his memory by hacking into MIT’s website and launching an operation against the Westboro Baptist Church when they planned to protest Mr. Swartz's funeral. (WBC backed down after Anonymous threatened to hack them.)

Now, Anonymous has revealed its plans for the second phase of #OpAngel. During this phase, some Anonymous members plan to "publicly endorse" changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act proposed by California representative Zoe Lofgren. The changes to this Act are called "Aaron's Law," as Mr. Swartz was prosecuted under certain statutes in it.

Several Anonymous members also plan to participate in online protests leading up to live protests on January 25th. The release says that "multiple Anonymous groups" have vowed to deface or hack into websites belong to MIT and the Department of Justice, with focus on the websites of the prosecutors involved in Mr. Swartz's case.

On January 25th, Anons will congregate in Boston and Washington D.C. for live protests in an effort to combat wide-reaching laws that allow the "unfair" punishment of hackers. "It is our conclusion that dubious laws such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act serve only to provide prosecutors with the means to selectively target and unfairly punish online activists," reads the statement.

Mr. Swartz. (Photo: Raw Story)

Following intense outcry and mounting pressure for her resignation in the wake of the suicide of hacker activist Aaron Swartz, Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz has penned a statement, issued by the U.S. Attorney's Office, defending her actions in Mr. Swartz's prosecution.

"I know that there is little I can say to abate the anger felt by those who believe that this office’s prosecution of Mr. Swartz was unwarranted and somehow led to the tragic result of him taking his own life," the statement reads. "I must, however, make clear that this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case."

Ms. Ortiz's family also jumped into the fray this week. On Tuesday her husband Tom Dolan, an executive at IBM, took to Twitter to defend her actions in a number of tweets that one former prosecutor called "mind-bogglingly offensive." He has since deleted his Twitter account.

The official statement comes days after Mr. Swartz's funeral, where his father reportedly blamed the government for his son's suicide. Mr. Swartz's lawyer has also gone on record saying that the prosecution was more focused on building a "juicy" case than a fair one.

California Rep. Zoe Lofgren is attempting to honor Mr. Swartz by proposing amendments to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the law that allowed the government to threaten Mr. Swartz which such a harsh punishment.

Below is the full statement from the U.S. Attorney's office.

STATEMENT OF UNITED STATES ATTORNEY CARMEN M. ORTIZ REGARDING THE DEATH OF AARON SWARTZ

As a parent and a sister, I can only imagine the pain felt by the family and friends of Aaron Swartz, and I want to extend my heartfelt sympathy to everyone who knew and loved this young man. I know that there is little I can say to abate the anger felt by those who believe that this office’s prosecution of Mr. Swartz was unwarranted and somehow led to the tragic result of him taking his own life.

I must, however, make clear that this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case. The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably. The prosecutors recognized that there was no evidence against Mr. Swartz indicating that he committed his acts for personal financial gain, and they recognized that his conduct – while a violation of the law – did not warrant the severe punishments authorized by Congress and called for by the Sentencing Guidelines in appropriate cases. That is why in the discussions with his counsel about a resolution of the case this office sought an appropriate sentence that matched the alleged conduct – a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting. While at the same time, his defense counsel would have been free to recommend a sentence of probation. Ultimately, any sentence imposed would have been up to the judge. At no time did this office ever seek – or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek – maximum penalties under the law.

As federal prosecutors, our mission includes protecting the use of computers and the Internet by enforcing the law as fairly and responsibly as possible. We strive to do our best to fulfill this mission every day.

At least, that’s the feeling that we’re left with in the wake of news last week that the 26-year-old Internet activist Aaron Swartz had hung himself at home in Brooklyn.

Mr. Swartz, as you likely know by now, was facing data theft charges that could have landed him up to 35 years in a federal penitentiary.  In the days since his tragic death, the web has been awash with recriminations. The most strident complaints have been aimed at the federal prosecutors bent on imprisoning Mr. Swartz for actions one security expert deemed not “wrong,” but merely “inconsiderate,” and at MIT, widely blamed for enabling the government lawyers.

MIT has launched an investigation into its own role in Mr. Swartz's suicide. For its part, the U.S. attorney’s office has removed itself from the fray, dropping charges against Mr. Swartz, as is customary following the death of a defendant, and keeping its own counsel on the matter. Not everyone has remained quiet. Yesterday, the husband of U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz, who oversaw Mr. Swartz’s prosecution, took to Twitter, bashing the family of Mr. Swartz for laying blame with prosecutors.

It was the height of bad taste. "The impropriety and lack of judgment of criticizing the family of a young kid who just killed himself is so mind-boggling offensive to me," one former federal prosecutor told Betabeat, adding that the tweets were so bad that he didn't want to discuss them on the record.

It wasn't just Mr. Dolan's nerve in confronting mourning family members that offended the former prosecutor. It was the notion that the U.S. Attorney's spouse would discuss plea negotiations—best kept private in under any circumstances—that was particularly galling.

"When you're a U.S. attorney, your opinion about your cases shouldn’t be shared with a hell of a lot of people," the former prosecutor said. "Do spouses share information about their day at work? Of course. But for the US attorney’s spouse to get out there, in a way that can only be viewed as acting as her agent, is a complete and utter lack of judgment."

(Betabeat called Ms. Ortiz's office for comment, and we'll update if we get one. Mr. Dolan, meanwhile, has deleted his Twitter account since.)

Meanwhile, we can't help reading a certain recklessness in Mr. Dolan's ill-considered comments, perhaps borne out of the same self-righteousness that may have lead prosecutors to press the case against Mr. Swartz in the first place.

As Mr. Swartz’s lawyer Elliot Peters told the Boston Globe:

“There was such rigidity with the people we were dealing with,” Peters said. “I couldn’t find anyone in that office to talk about proportionality and humanity. It was driven by a desire to turn this into a significant case, so that some prosecutor could put it in his portfolio.”

Nor do we fail to note that that Mr. Swartz’s alleged crimes were comprised of actions that others commit each day. As cyber-security expert Robert Graham put it, "Aaron Swartz was charged with wirefraud for concealing/changing his "true identity". It sent chills down my back, because I do everything on that list (and more)." Mr. Graham continued:

As Arthur C Clarke puts it, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Here is my corollary: "Any sufficiently technical expert is indistinguishable from a witch". People fear magic they don't understand, and distrust those who wield that magic.

Perhaps it goes too far to equate the former stubbornness to the latter. But in Mr. Dolan's reckless comments, we see a prosecutor's office that was desperate and confused, driven to tame to the wilds of an Internet it didn't completely understand, eager, in the name of order, to seek a punishment that didn't fit the crime.

Even after Mr. Swartz’s lawyers told prosecutors they believed their client to be a suicide risk, prosecutors continued to press for a draconian punishment. Perhaps it goes too far to equate Mr. Dolan's stubbornness with the government's insistence that Mr. Swartz serve time. But in his impromptu defense of his wife, Mr. Dolan may have shown the prosecutor's office in the truest light: desperate and confused, driven to tame to the wilds of an Internet it didn’t completely understand, eager, in the name of order, to seek a punishment that didn’t fit the crime.

Miss u (Photo: 1039 RXP)

Remember that Crazy Blind Date app from OKCupid that purports to set you up with someone who hopefully won't kill and/or maim you for a night on the town? Turns out it accidentally exposed users' email addresses and birthdays. Sucks for everyone who lied about their age! [Wall Street Journal]

Google is holding a developer event for Glass. If you paid that $1,500 to get a test pair of Glass, you're in for a treat. [AllThingsD]

California Rep. Zoe Lofgren has proposed a bill that she hopes will be called "Aaron's Law" aimed at modifying the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act which many say was abused in the Aaron Swartz case. [The Hill]

New MySpace seems kind of like it's just a big ad for Justin Timberlake's new song. [TechCrunch]

The awesome NASA mohawk guy is going to ride with a Mars Rover float in the Inaugural Parade, because America. [Wired]