About the legend:
Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. He was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the Markdown publishing format, the organization Creative Commons, the website framework web.py, and joined the social news site Reddit six months after its founding.
In 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT. Federal prosecutors, led by Carmen Ortiz, later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release. Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison. Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead by suicide in his Brooklyn apartment. In 2013, Swartz was inducted posthumously into the Internet Hall of Fame.
A developer appears to have purposefully corrupted a pair of open-source libraries on GitHub and software registry npm — “faker.js” and “colors.js” — that thousands of users depend on, rendering any project that contains these libraries useless, as reported by Bleeping Computer. Both libraries still appear to be affected by the bad code, but the issue can be worked around by downgrading to a previous version (faker.js v5.5.3 and colors.js v1.4.0). GitHub has issued a security advisory about the issues affecting color.js, but doesn’t seem to have added an advisory for faker.js.
My custom made debugger used color.js and yesterday I saw it wasn't working (not outputting anything just errors!) I also used faker.js for placeholder information and yet that had been removed as well
He was a genius and it's damn true that commercial companies steal code in the name of open source
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