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Submission + - Tracy Kidder, Author of "The Soul of a New Machine", has died.

Submitted by wiredog
wiredog writes: Tracy Kidder, author of "The Soul of a New Machine" has died at the age of 80.

"The Soul of a New Machine" is about the people who designed and built the Data General Nova, one of the 32 bit superminis that were released in the 1980's, just before the PC destroyed that industry. It was excerpted in The Atlantic.

"I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

Comment A Surprising Result From This Crew (Score 1) 87

Given that the Roberts Court is one of the most corporate-friendly in history, this decision comes as something of a surprise.

Nonetheless, it appears to be largely concordant with the so-called "Betamax case" from the early 1980's which established the principle of significant non-infringing uses as a defense and, despite passage of the DMCA, still largely informs the contours of contributory infringement.

Comment Re:Inflatable modules (Score 1) 31

by Burdell (#66053962) Attached to: Can Private Space Companies Replace the ISS Before 2030?

It sounds great, but the primary benefit is quickly providing open space. However, work done in space isn't done in open space, but with equipment. So now instead of having the bulk of the equipment mounted inside a module on the ground (where it's usually much easier to handle, with lots of lifting equipment and people and tools), you've got to do it in zero-G.

You still have to launch the entire mass (possibly more if there's extra tools and packing) and much of the volume, you've just significantly expanded the amount of on-orbit construction, which also means you're using very expensive labor to do it.

It may eventually even out, but I don't think the economics work today. It would only make sense if you had a specific need that required a larger-volume module than can be launched on a vehicle today, and I don't think anybody's had such a requirement.

Submission + - Python `chardet` Package Replaced with LLM-Generated Clone, Re-Licensed

Submitted by ewhac
ewhac writes: The maintainers of the Python package `chardet`, which attempts to automatically detect the character encoding of a string, announced the release of version 7 this week, claming a speedup factor of 43x over version 6. In the release notes, the maintainers claim that version 7 is, "a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet." Problem: The putative "ground-up rewrite" is actually the result of running the existing copyrighted codebase and test suite through the Claude LLM. In so doing, the maintainers claim that v7 now represents a unique work of authorship, and therefore may be offered under a new license. Version 6 and earlier was licensed under the LGPL. Version 7 claims to be available under the MIT license.

The maintainers appear to be claiming that, under the Oracle v. Google decision which found that cloning public APIs is fair use, their v7 is a fair use re-implementation of the `chardet` public API. However, there is no evidence to suggest their re-write was under "clean room" conditions, which traditionally has shielded cloners from infringement suits. Further, the copyrightability of LLM output has yet to be settled. Recent court decisions seem to favor the view that LLM output is not copyrightable, as the output is not primarily the result of human creative expression — the endeavor copyright is intended to protect. Spirited discussion has ensued in issue #327 on `chardet`s GitHub repo, raising the question: Can copyrighted source code be laundered through an LLM and come out the other end as a fresh work of authorship, eligible for a new copyright, copyright holder, and license terms? If this is found to be so, it would allow malicious interests to completely strip-mine the Open Source commons, and then sell it back to the users without the community seeing a single dime.

Comment Re:This is not the business model (Score 1) 15

by Burdell (#66021170) Attached to: Accenture Acquires Ookla, Downdetector As Part of $1.2 Billion Deal

Ookla charges ISPs a bunch of money to host speedtest servers for them. When I worked for a company that supported a bunch of small rural telephone company ISPs 5+ years ago, IIRC Ookla charged them each over $2000/year. I expect they charge bigger companies (especially with multiple servers) a lot more, and they plaster the app with ads. They also have more than just the regular speedtest servers.

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