No problem, happy to help. 
Extremely unlikely.
Aaron didn't hack any private databases or download random information wholesale. He downloaded academic articles from the JSTOR archive as he had a legal right to do so. It's a paywalled but public system, archiving academic papers that have previously been published. There's nothing secret about the research papers, they've just been ringfenced for profit.
The only difference between him and thousands of other students and research fellows (as he was) at MIT was that he wrote a piece of code - that importantly stayed on is laptop - to make the download requests for the PDFs incredibly quickly and efficiently, and to keep starting new sessions in case system admin tried to ban requests over concerns that it was some sort of DDOS attack (which they did). One of the MIT system admins even said in relation to the trial that it was just 'an incredibly efficient bit of code, but not particularly subtle, never mind secretive'.
You can see my longer comment in this thread for why he was a threat to the surveillance state complex trying to control the internet, but it wasn't because of some smoking gun or finding secret information.
His murder by the state (which it was, even if he hung himself after they hounded, threatened, and relentlessly prosecuted him without cause) has more in common with the way the state went after civil rights organisers in the past, than some sort of whistlerblower murder.
Regardless of whether they physically hung him or not, Aaron Swartz was murdered by the state.
His crime was downloading information that he legally had an entitlement to access. He never hacked a computer system or broke a lock. He never even trespassed. JSTOR, the supposedly damaged party was happy to take a settlement and did so.
His actual crime was that he was a prominent and talented advocate against the government and surveillance industrial complex's hostile takeover of the internet to be used entirely as method of propaganda and control.
After his death when there were some minor (ass covering) inquiries into the prosecution, congressional staffers told that the reason the FBI and intelligence connected people at MIT & in government went after him so extremely was cited as being due to the fact that he'd written the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto many years earlier - a short arguement in favour of open access that said that, if required, direct action may require breaking the law, specifically copyright law. This was used to frame him as a sort of information terrorist who might need to be dealt with before the open access movement grew beyond a small activist tech circle.
It was, of course, an absurd characterisation.
But he was a threat to an oppressive intelligence state that was trying to tighten it's stranglehold on the internet while feeling increasingly paranoid following the exposures of war crimes by Wikileaks and other disclosures in previous years. He was an exceptionally talented coder, MIT research fellow, and believer in progressive American democratic activism. He'd built useful tools like the code for RSS, a successful social media company (Reddit, and look at what they've done with that since), and most importantly tools and organisations like Creative Commons for public good and Deaddrop for secure communication channels for journalists and whistleblowers. He was dangerous to the state precisely because he had done everything right, because they couldn't publicly paint him as some cyber terrorist or technoextremist. He represented the things the state claimed to be for, claimed to encourage and value, rather than the corrupt, criminal, and oppressive reality.
After his death, numerous people in media and even government asked why the state refused to drop more than 10 felony charges against him. Or why both the government, MIT, and FBI kept refusing to release anything but a handful of mostly redacted documents about the investigation and prosecution.
It seems that this need to baselessly frame Aaron as some sort of radical extremist meant that as the case began to fall apart, they got increasingly desperate to simply forcibly take him 'off the board' one way or another. Backing down on anything less than jail time and a ruinous admission of felony guilt wouldn't just be seen as an embarrassment, but counter suits and follow ups threatened to expose the fact that much of the investigation and prosecution hadn't just been overreach, but also deeply corrupt and seemingly illegal.
In congressional hearings it was stated that
prosecutor Stephen Heymann "instructed the Secret Service to seize and hold evidence without a warrant... lied to the judge about that fact in written briefs... [and] withheld exculpatory evidence... for over a year
Naturally the hearings and enquiries went nowhere, as designed, despite numerous bi-partisan legislators' concerns over government and prosecutorial actions and a growing movement of civil rights and open access groups campaigns.
Bills that would at least remove simply breaking Terms of Service from being (absurdly) and offence under the computer crimes and wire fraud laws looked promising, but stalled and were snuffed out in the legislature by the white house and the influence of CIA-front tech firm / US defence contractor Oracle.
Members of the government and prosecution after Aaron's death public attacked and smeared his grieving family.
Reddit became the intelligence service controlled, bot-maintained, consent factory it is today. The open access movement was successfully beaten back. And both the surveillance state and it's corporate partners in increasingly corporatizing or criminalising the internet. The state doubled down on prosecuting, imprisoning, and torturing whistleblowers and publishers of information. And increasingly any large enough app or site that cannot be tightly controlled by the state is banned or prosecuted.
Reminder for anyone who doesn't know that Bethany here works for ASPI (Australian Strategic Policy Institute) - a borderline apocalyptically inclined think tank that pushes for nuclear war with China and is funded by the most unhinged people in the US defence & intelligence industry as well as the US and Taiwanese governments.
When they're not pushing for nuclear conflict with China, they also have a side business in helping the US fill in the gaps with misinformation for other conflicts.
One recent example being that when Israel bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital at the start of the most recent genocidal operation in Gaza, UK (and other Euro) media rushed to create the false narrative that the hospital wasn't bombed by Israel, but that it was a 'stray rocket' fired by Hamas. Despite all independent analysis and common sense saying that it was indeed an Israeli bombing, Western media, including notably the BBC and Guardian here, continued trying to push this line for weeks by doing deep dive investigations and fact checks. If anyone had bothered to check the sources of these they would have found there only were two sources - one from a US military college and defence company, the other was an 'independent rocketry expert' who they didn't disclose worked for ASPI.
In the weeks that followed these 'investigations' Israel continued openly bombing hospitals.
It really was so good. A genuinely wildly cool and intuitive thing to have on a console game.
Timesplitters 2 was the absolute peak of me playing shooters and still my undisputed multiplayer GOAT. I remember coming back from raves and spending an entire day and/or night playing it with mates as a student. God only knows how many hours I put into it, more than any other game ever for sure. I probably put more hours into the level editor than most games I've played since. High camp, perfect multiplayer, and just a crazy amount of content all wrapped up in a single game.
I fucking looooved Kula World. Great post rave / club game. It sounded great as well. The music's rad and the sound effects still live in my head, from that heavy single this beach ball bounce, to the jingle of coins, to nom-nom-nom mouth noise when the ball eats(?) the bonus fruit, to the WEEeeOOooH when it takes(?) the psychedelic pills.
Learning from Trump stiffing contractors all through the 80s and 90s then.
Kind of vindicating all of us who took a look at his new atheism 20+ years ago, and the way it was mostly fearmongering about Islam with a much less severe side order of aren't Evangelicals stupid, and went "I'm pretty sure you're just a racist but too cowardly to do it directly".
Surprise surprise, the next great threat to the white man (that the left refuses to join his crusade against) after the scary Muslims is the scary Chinese. Weird how 'the threat' is never the evangelicals that frequently run the US government & military, or Christian Fascist parties increasingly running Europe.
The American fash are cool with smoking weed now, what are you waiting for Bill? Just join them already.
Fuck, I'm sorry to hear that comrade.
Genuinely radical, working-class, left unity punk with an empowerment message, who also name drop the likes of Vladimir Tatlin and aren't afraid to talk theory in interviews.
Best punk band in Britain for the last decade, hands down.
Because it's 
It makes me dare to dream. 
I'm about 80% of the way through it and it's been not just a welcome distraction from a stressful couple of weeks, but one of my favourite things I've played in a long time.
Pretty chill, but still with some challenge on higher difficulties. Wonderful art style and satisfying fold-in on themselves level design. The writing is good and succinct with what could be just another cozy game unfolding into something more varied in tone and having genuine things to say about regional identity, tourism, and commerce at the expense of locals.
What really (pleasantly) surprised me was what a love letter it was to all sorts of great past video games. Sometimes via a specific mechanic, sometimes a themed level or ability. Persona, Mario Galaxy, Zelda, Ico, SSX Tricky, Fez, classic RPGs, you name it.
Anyway, I think it's pretty neat.
If a harcore band sings in mostly German, old fucks are wearing black and red pins by the bar, and I tell you (in English) at the bar that you're likely to get your arse kicked as American tourists, you probably shouldn't jump in with the regulars and then be all 
when you catch a stray to the shouldershoulder to the chest.
Agreed. I don't think it was his death per se, but it did feel like it represented a totemic shift at the time.
In the years of his harassment, grand jury, and eventually death you had Reddit becoming an independent subsidiary instead of being under Conde Nast, it being able to remake not just the site but their corporate structure, staff, and board of directors, the Digg migration that made it much more visible and mainstream, and some major early landmarks in it being used as a political tool like the AMA of Obama. Reddit still ostensibly opposed things like SOPA, but it was mostly due to concerns about being liable to the copyright whims of people like the MPAA.
This is a little more
but I've always wondered if the infamous RedditFindsTheBostonBomber disaster was an early experiment to test not just the idea of Reddit as an OSINT/surveillance analysis tool, but also as a test of its potential for information warfare in reaction to live events.
Liberals in particular love to point to Ajit Pai being an early Trump appointment in 2017, the fact is that the state's battle against net neutrality had been building for years, kicking into high gear around Aaron Swartz's last year's and the movement and general culture against it weakened considerably after his death.