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MIT Students Subpoenaed Over Tidbit

posted by Dopefish on Monday February 17 2014, @02:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the government-should-mind-their-own-business dept.
mattie_p writes "MIT students won a hackathon last November with a non-functioning demo of Tidbit. The concept is to replace web advertising revenue with a tiny amount of Bitcoin mining on the user's browser. Out of the blue, the students were hit by a subpoena from the New Jersey Attorney General demanding that the founders 'turn over sensitive information including source codes, hosting websites, and all of the Bitcoin wallet addresses associated with Tidbit.'

At first MIT council referred the students to legal assistance from the EFF, who quickly came to their defense. Now there is a petition going around requesting the MIT administration support the students directly. Parallels are being drawn to Aaron Swartz, possibly because one of the authors of the recent petition is Prof. Hal Ableson, although details of the two cases have very little in common.

MIT President Reif has now come out strongly in support of the students--and in favor of academic freedom from interference by government."
 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by internetguy on Monday February 17 2014, @03:13PM

    by internetguy (235) on Monday February 17 2014, @03:13PM (#761)

    Websites have get income somehow or they will eventually go lights out. Hosting, maintenance, and electrcity are not free. Ads have been the dominate way but unless increased costs are significant I could see the majority of users preferring computing networks like Tidbit.

    Maybe the world-wide-web Internet was designed wrong and a peering model is a better approach.

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  • (Score: 1) by githaron on Monday February 17 2014, @03:26PM

    by githaron (581) on Monday February 17 2014, @03:26PM (#768)

    Explain.