26-year-old computer whiz, creator of RSS and founder of Reddit, kills himself in Crown Heights apartment
Computer prodigy Aaron Swartz, who helped develop RSS and co-founded Reddit, hanged himself in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn, apartment, his family in Chicago confirmed in a statement Saturday. He was pronounced dead Friday evening at his home, Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for New York’s chief medical examiner, said. He was 26.
As a young teenager, Swartz helped create RSS, a family of Web feed formats used to gather updates from blogs, news headlines, audio and video for users. He co-founded the social news website Reddit, which was later sold to Conde Nast, as well as the political action group Demand Progress, which campaigns against Internet censorship.
A zealous advocate of public online access, Swartz was extolled Saturday by those who believed as he did. He was “an extraordinary hacker and activist,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international nonprofit digital rights group based in California wrote in a tribute on its home page.