Aaron Swartz (born November 8, 1986) is an American programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist. He is best known in programming circles for co-authoring the RSS 1.0 specification. He received mainstream media attention after his federal indictment and arrest on 19 July 2011, for allegedly harvesting academic journal articles from JSTOR.
Swartz is the co-founder of Demand Progress and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Swartz was active in discussions of Internet standards from an early age, and co-authored the specification for RSS by the time he was 14.[citation needed] Since then he has been a member of the W3C's RDF Core Working Group, co-designed the formatting language Markdown with John Gruber, and worked on many other projects.
Swartz attended Stanford University for a year, leaving to start the software company Infogami, a startup that was funded by Y Combinator's first Summer Founders Program. Infogami was built around a wiki backend, a subject of interest for Swartz since his early effort to develop theinfo, a wiki-based encyclopedia, in 2000.
In the Hebrew Bible and the Qur'an, Aaron ( /ˈærən/ or /ˈɛərən/;Hebrew: אַהֲרֹן Ahărōn, Arabic: هارون Hārūn, Greek (Septuagint): Ααρών ), who is often called "'Aaron the Priest"' (אֵהֲרֹן הֵכֹּהֵן) and once Aaron the Levite (אַהֲרֹן הַלֵּוִי) (Exodus 4:14), was the older brother of Moses, (Exodus 6:16-20, 7:7; Qur'an 28:34) and a prophet of God. He represented the priestly functions of his tribe, becoming the first High Priest of the Israelites. While Moses was receiving his education at the Egyptian royal court, and during his exile among the Midianites, Aaron and his sister Miriam remained with their kinsmen in the eastern border-land of Egypt (Goshen). There, Aaron gained a name for eloquent and persuasive speech, so that when the time came for the demand upon the Pharaoh to release Israel from captivity, Aaron became his brother’s nabi, or spokesman, to his own people (Exodus 7:1) and, after their unwillingness to hear, to the Pharaoh himself (Exodus 7:9). Various dates for his life have been proposed, ranging from approximately 1600 to 1200 BC.
Cory Efram Doctorow (/ˈkɒri ˈdɒktəroʊ/; born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-Britishblogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the weblog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and "post-scarcity" economics.
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Trotskyist teachers, Doctorow was raised in a Jewish activist household. His father was born in a refugee camp in Azerbaijan and Doctorow became involved with nuclear disarmament activism and as a Greenpeace campaigner as a child. He received his high school diploma from SEED School, an anarchistic "free school" in Toronto, and attended four universities without attaining a degree.
He later served on the board of directors for the Grindstone Island Co-operative in Big Rideau Lake in Ontario.
During 1992 Doctorow went on a volunteer visit to Costa Rica with Youth Challenge International (YCI), which he found "profoundly good and profoundly enriching".