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The hacker-activist group Anonymous says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide. The FBI is investigating.
The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was taken over early Saturday and replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago “a line was crossed.”
The hackers say they've infiltrated several government computer systems and copied secret information that they now threaten to make public.
Family and friends of Swartz, who helped create Reddit and RSS, say he killed himself after he was hounded by federal prosecutors. Officials say he helped post millions of court documents for free online and that he illegally downloaded millions of academic articles from an online clearinghouse.
The FBI's Richard McFeely, executive assistant director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch, said in a statement that “we were aware as soon as it happened and are handling it as a criminal investigation. We are always concerned when someone illegally accesses another person's or government agency's network.”
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shareDiv.innerHTML = templateHTML;
/* append the new div to the end of the document, which is hidden already with CSS */
document.body.appendChild(shareDiv);
/* Store the div in both a regular JavaScript variable and as a jQuery object so we can reference them faster later */
var shareTip = document.getElementById('shareTip'),
$shareTip = $('#shareTip');
/* This extends our settings object with any user-defined settings passed to the function and returns the jQuery object shareTip
was called on */
return this.each(function() {
if (options) {
$.extend(settings, options);
}
/* This is a hack to make sure the shareTip always fades back to 100% opacity */
var checkOpacity = function (){
if ( $shareTip.css('opacity') !== 1 ){
$shareTip.css({'opacity': 1});
}
};
/* Function that replaces the HTML in the shareTip with the template we defined at the top */
/* It will wipe/reset the links on the social media buttons each time the function is called */
var removeLinks = function (){
shareTip.innerHTML = templateHTML;
};
/* This is the function that makes the links for the Tweet / Share functionality */
var makeURLS = function (link, message){
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var tweetConstruct = [
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],
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tweetURL = tweetConstruct.join(''),
/* Same story for Facebook */
fbConstruct = [
'http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=', link, '&src=sp'
],
fbURL = fbConstruct.join(''),
newHTML = [
''
],
shareHTML = newHTML.join('');
/* Load in our new HTML */
shareTip.innerHTML = shareHTML;
};
/* Since the shareTip will automatically fade out when the user mouses out of an element */
/* we have to specifically tell the shareTip we want it to stay put when the user mouses over it */
/* This effectively gives the user a 500 ms (or whatever) window to mouse */
/* from the element to the shareTip to prevent it from popping out */
$shareTip.hover(function(){
$shareTip.stop(true, true);
$shareTip.show();
checkOpacity();
}, function(){
$(this).fadeOut(settings.speed);
});
/* This function handles the hover action */
$(this).hover(function(){
/* remove the old links, so someone doesn't accidentally click on them */
removeLinks();
/* If there's already an animation running on the shareTip, stop it */
$shareTip.stop(true, true);
var eso = $(this),
message,
/* Store the width and height of the shareTip and the offset of the element for our calculations */
height = eso.height(),
width = eso.width(),
offset = eso.offset(),
link;
link = eso.children('a').attr('href');
message = escape( eso.find('img').attr('alt') ) || eso.attr(settings.message_attr);
if (link.search('http://') === -1){
link = 'http://www.latimes.com' + link;
}
link = encodeURIComponent(link);
/* If it's at the top of the page, the shareTip will pop under the element */
if (offset.top
