(Updated)

Aaron Swartz, a cofounder of Reddit, coinventor of RSS, and high-profile activist for open data, has committed suicide, according to MIT newspaper The Tech. He was 26.

The list of Swartz’s contributions to the Internet is long. At age 14, he helped write the RSS 1.0 specification. He was a cofounder of Reddit.* He worked with Internet legal activist Larry Lessig on the creation of Creative Commons. And he created the initial version of web.py, a Python-based framework for websites that is used by Reddit and many other sites.

Beyond his technical contributions, Swartz was also an opinionated writer and an active proponent of freedom of information. He drew attention in 2008 for downloading almost 20 million documents from PACER, a for-fee database of court records, and then distributing them to the public. While the documents in PACER are public domain, Swartz’s actions angered the managers of PACER because they gave the public a way to avoid its usual fees of 10 cents per page. That action drew an FBI investigation but, apparently, no charges.

Swartz got into more serious trouble in 2011 after using MIT’s network to download almost 5 million articles from JSTOR, a nonprofit that provides access to academic journals. That brought a federal indictment and a total of 13 felony counts against Swartz. He could have faced dozens of years in prison and up to $1 million in fines if convicted. His downloading script was aggressive enough that it brought down MIT’s network and prevented access to JSTOR for days at a time, the charges alleged.

It was this case that people close to him suggest was haunting Swartz in his last days. After Swartz turned over his hard drives, JSTOR decided not to pursue legal action. However, MIT apparently did not back off, and U.S. Attorneys Carmen Ortiz and Steve Heymann continued to pursue the case. Lawrence lessage, an activist lawyer with a strong following in the technology community, penned a post yesterday calling it “Prosecutor as bully.”

Update 1/13/2013: The president of MIT has issued a statement on Swartz’s death.

In both the PACER and JSTOR cases, Swartz’s stated goal was to liberate information and make it more freely available.

He was also an activist who used his computer skills and devotion to public information to foster political change, most recently through Demand Progress, a nonprofit that he founded. And he was a prominent opponent of SOPA, a draconian anti-piracy act that the U.S. Congress considered and then rejected under political pressure in 2011. See below for a video from May, 2012, where Swartz explains “how we stopped SOPA.”

Cory Doctorow’s eulogy for Aaron Swartz on BoingBoing does a better job of explaining who this man was, and why he mattered to so many people, than anything else I’ve read this morning.

I never met him, but I am sad this morning just the same. His death is a loss to anyone who uses the Internet.

* UPDATE 10am: Swartz’s contribution to Reddit is in dispute. His startup, Infogami, merged with Reddit; both startups were in the first class of Y Combinator companies.

UPDATE 6:50pm: Swartz’s family issued the following statement earlier today.

Official Statement from the Family and Partner of Aaron Swartz:

Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing.

Aaron’s insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We’re grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world.

Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more.

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.

Additionally, the statement noted that a funeral will be held on Tuesday, Jan. 15. Remembrances and donations can be submitted at http://rememberaaronsw.com.

Photo credit: Sage Ross/Flickr

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You might not actually be dead, but Facebook could think you are. The social network puts profiles into a “memorial state” when it believes that person has died, and it’s not very hard to trick Facebook into doing this.

Buzzfeed discovered how to prank your friend’s death on Facebook, and it’s a fairly simple process. First, you’ll need to have a friend with the same name of someone who has died recently. Then you need to find that person’s obituary and fill out the “Memorialization Request” form provided by Facebook. It asked for the name of the person, as it is listed on their account, e-mail address, Facebook URL, your relationship to that person, and “proof” of their death. This is where a link obituary comes in.

As Buzzfeed notes, it gets even easier. When writer Katie Notopoulos tried the “prank” out on an editor’s account, she didn’t even need an obituary with the same name spelling. John Herrman in the Facebook profile did not match the name “John Herrmann” on the obituary, but it still went through. This might be understandable, however, as any publication has typos no and again.

Once the Facebook  page has been memorialized, anyone trying to access the account will be met with a message that says, “This account is in a special memorial state. If you have any questions or concerns, please visit the Help Center for further information.” Then there is another form you must fill out called the “My Personal Account is in a Special Memorialized State” form.

Rusty Foster, who fell victim to the tomfoolery filled out the form and tweeted that it had been two and a half days since he’d requested access to his Facebook, and had heard “nothing even resembling a human response.” Facebook spokesperson Fred Wolen told Buzzfeed that the staff does look at each request made regarding Facebook accounts, and provides “appeals” for when the company makes a mistake.

Hand image via Shutterstock

The plane crashed at the Boise, Idaho airport. It was a single-engine fixed-wing experimental aircraft. The incident is sure to raise alarms about CEOs who engage in risky behavior.

Appleton, 51, built Micron from one of the also-ran memory chip makers into one of the world’s largest producers of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), which is used as main memory in PCs and stores data in a wide variety of electronic equipment.

Appleton started out as a production worker on the factory line and received a series of promotions. He became a statesman of the industry and an active leader as he advocated free trade in competition with Japanese rivals. Back in the 1980s, the Japanese all but took over the memory chip industry, partly due to a practice known as dumping, or selling chips below costs.

Appleton and other executives in the chip industry got the U.S. government to negotiate a fair trade agreement that put an end to the dumping and enabled the U.S. to hang on to the strategically important industry. But while other memory chip makers went out of business, Micron alone survived and became a huge employer in Idaho.

Micron’s board said in a statement: “We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Appleton, Micron Chairman and CEO, passed away this morning in a small plane accident in Boise. He was 51. Our hearts go out to his wife, Dalynn, his children and his family during this tragic time. Steve’s passion and energy left an indelible mark on Micron, the Idaho community and the technology industry at large.”

Appleton was a stunt pilot for many years and he always talked about how he put safety first. I visited him in Boise once at the company’s headquarters and he talked about one incident when the engine of his plane cut out on him. He had a choice of either bailing out or going into a power dive in the hopes of restarting the engine. He chose to dive and the engine restarted.

He actually crashed a plane in 2004 and survived. But today that didn’t happen. It’s a sad day for the entire chip industry and for Appleton’s family. In November, Appleton won the industry’s highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce award, for his contributions to the semiconductor business.

“Steve was a visionary and a true leader in our industry. He will be deeply missed by the entire semiconductor community and our prayers and thoughts are with his family,” said Brian Toohey, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association.

1000memories, which got its start in life at startup incubator Y Combinator, creates landing pages for individuals. Anyone can jump to a page and write a few words or post a picture or song. The result is a collage of photos, music and thoughts that’s supposed to capture the essence of that person. With Shoeboxes, 1000memories is trying to distance itself from being solely an obituary-focused site and hopes to become a more general story-sharing site.

“One of the main things we want to communicate with this announcement is that we’re not longer a ‘site for the dead’ — we’re now a place for you to share your old photos and stories of anyone, whether it’s yourself or your great-great-grandma,” 1000memories spokesperson Helena Price told VentureBeat.

With the Shoeboxes feature finished, the company might now turn its gaze to creating photo books and finding a way to monetize a site built around strong emotional investments.

“We’ve recently been testing out photo books, and they were received really well by our users — we’re going to wait on a full launch for them until we develop software to better automate the process,” Price said. “Otherwise, we’ve been totally focused on building a solid product for now, and our investors have been happy with that.”

When I last spoke with 1000memories’ co-founder Rudy Adler, he said the company wasn’t yet planning on monetizing the service. 1000memories isn’t alone, either — GroupMe, another zero-revenue company, was recently picked up by Skype for an undisclosed, but large, amount. There’s a long history of companies with zero revenue being acquired and receiving large investments.

“Most companies that enter an incubator are in the idea phase — especially those that go through Y Combinator,” Greenstart, a cleantech company incubator, co-founder Mitch Lowe told VentureBeat. “They don’t have real revenues or have them on the horizons.”

The new Shoeboxes feature is a faster, more efficient way of uploading photos and other pieces of content. Similar to Facebook, you can now edit tags and other parts of the photos in bulk and organize them around specific topics. Other users can visit any Shoebox and add comments or adjust tags for the photos.

Most crowd-sourced sites run into the problem of ruffians and trolls infiltrating the community and trying to disrupt — such as at sites like news aggregator Digg and online message board 4chan. 1000memories seems to have avoided that problem thus far.

1000memories participated in the summer 2010 class of Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley-based incubator run by super angel Paul Graham, and has raised $3 million in funding to date. Greylock Partners led the company’s most recent $2.5 million funding round. A number of other angel investors including Keith Rabois, Ron Conway and Chris Sacca also participated in its recent funding round.

It’s an online site that creates individual landing pages for people who have died. Anyone can jump to a page and write a few words or post a picture or song. The result is a collage of photos, music and thoughts that’s supposed to capture the essence of an obituary. The site is also working on ways to share memories from the site by creating widgets and other types of sharable content, he said.

The site is free for the time being and there aren’t any near-term plans to monetize the content, Adler said. 1000memories might look into creating personalized websites and having ways to output the content on the site — say, through a “book of memories” — as a way to monetize the site, he said.

“Right now we don’t limit for how people can use it because we’re so interested in seeing how we use it,” said site co-founder Rudy Adler. “People use it to make memorials for pets, and a lot of other unexpected things — we’re in the stage of having a conversation with our users.”

The funding is a pretty big vote of confidence from Greylock Partners, which was a natural fit for the site because of the firm’s storied history with social networking sites, Adler said. The venture firm has invested in the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn.

1000memories seems like a huge emotional investment for a lot of people. Most crowd-sourced sites run into the problem of ruffians and trolls infiltrating the community and trying to disrupt — such as at sites like news aggregator Digg and online message board 4chan. 1000memories seems to have avoided that problem thus far from inspection — most of the publicly available sites seem genuine enough.

“We got a lot of spammers at first, but that seems to have scaled back,” he said. “There have been very few disruptions.”

1000memories participated in the summer 2010 class of Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley incubator, and has raised $3 million in funding to date. Greylock Partners’ David Thacker will join 1000memories’ board as part of the funding deal. A number of angel investors including Keith Rabois, Ron Conway and Chris Sacca also participated in this recent funding round.