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‘The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz’ does effectively compute in triumph and tragedy

Sometimes there is a heavy price to pay for being a vocalized genius. In the case of the late computer programming prodigy and internet innovator in Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz the brilliance and the burden of a young man’s crusade for basic justice in computer-sharing information and technology reached a tragic ending. However, the triumph in Swartz’s shortened twenty-six years of existence is celebrated and remembered in the aftermath of this gifted online political activist whose shocking suicide quieted a vibrant voice in the cause for the power of freely attaining knowledge no matter how sensitive its revelation may be at large.

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See Reddit users’ favorite movie from each year

Throughout the summer, an admin on the r/movies subreddit has been leading Reddit users in a poll of the best movies from every year for the last 100 years called 100 Years of Yearly Cinema. The poll concluded three days ago, and the list of every movie from 1914 to 2013 has been published today. …

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The Best of Tilda Swinton’s Reddit AMA

In addition to still-life model at MoMA and dance leader at Ebertfest, Tilda Swinton has now added “Redditeer” to her resume. She was on hand Monday for an AMA to promote Snowpiercer and put on her signature arty charm, earning a few nicknames (T-Swinny), declaring her love of Alt-J and revealing she’s actually a clone …

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The Good Wife, Ep. 5.09, “Whack-a-Mole” has a strong center, problematic fringe

Ah, The Good Wife. You’re always good for a thinly veiled riff on a relevant piece of internet culture, aren’t you? “Whack-a-Mole” focuses on Scabbit, a website that is distinctly not Reddit (just kidding. It totally is.) which the FBI uses to crowd source an investigation of a terrorist attack, leading them to suspect Alicia’s kindly professor, who is writing a book on jihad, but not that kind of jihad.

The show’s interest in social media and internet culture occasionally leads to it being silly and obtuse in a vain attempt to be hip and relevant, but it returns to these issues again and again for a reason. Say what you will about it, but The Good Wife is incredibly skilled at keeping tabs on salient legal issues and building episodes around them. And the old refrain that privacy will be the issue of the twenty-first century means the show will look again and again at these debates. The internet is a fascinating place from a legal perspective, a playground where anonymity is theoretically guaranteed, where law can be subverted or ignored, and where regulation is either nonexistent or completely ineffective. Alicia’s efforts to get an injunction tonight are a perfect example: everyone agrees the legal system is woefully inadequate to deal with the situation, which makes it easy for Scabbit to exploit the law for its own benefit.

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