The weekend was made very sad for me when I read of Aaron Swartz’ suicide. The reverberations of both what Aaron accomplished in his far-too-brief life, and the Internet reaction to his death, are going to last a long time. MIT was hacked yesterday by Anonymous, which left a call for reforms in computer crime laws and intellectual property laws.

Aaron: a new Twitter campaign, #PDFTribute, has researchers contributing links to academic papers (PDFs) on Twitter. There is a big scraped/aggregated list here. Also, 10 simple ways to share PDFs of your papers.

Aaron: there is a Tumblr for remembering Aaron and a “We the People” petition to posthumously pardon Aaron (though I’m not sure how that would work since he was not convicted.)

Would you pay $100 to message Mark Zuckerberg?. Personally I would not, knowing that $100 out of my wallet is not going to be exchanged for $100 worth of his attention.

Okay, Java has gotten to the point that the Department of Homeland Security is urging computer users to disable Java in their browsers following news of yet another zero-day exploit. The article I’m linking to includes a good guide to turning off Java in the browser. UPDATE: Oracle has issued an emergency fix, but I do not care, as I have officially put “secure Java” in the same mythological realm as the Easter Bunny.

Google Trends says this year’s flu season is going to be a whopper.

Lifehacker has a roundup of the best online classes for spring semester. I enrolled in the basic physics course.

The Library of Congress has received a large collection of sports recordings. “The Library of Congress announced today the acquisition of 15 years of recorded sports interviews originally broadcast on the radio network program ‘Sports Byline USA,’ hosted by Emmy Award-winning broadcaster Ron Barr, between 1988 and 2003. This marks the beginning of a three-year collaboration with the program’s producers to preserve these historic interviews and to make them available for listening on a streaming basis free to the public on the Library’s website (www.loc.gov). Programs produced from 2004-2014 will be added to the collection over the next two years.” The collection will ultimately have over 10,000 interviews.

Smashing Magazine pipped me to Throwww, which looks like the most basic blogging platform ever. Interesting. I can see where this would be useful for liveblogging, etc.

Mashable has a wish list for GMail. I can think of several things I’d like to add to this, though to be fair if it were a “Wish List for Thunderbird,” I’d probably come up with 9000 items. I really miss Eudora. (And yes, I know there’s a Eudora OSE, but it hasn’t been updated in over two years, last I checked.)