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The much-reviled “podcasting patent” — initiated by a company called Personal Audio, LLC to demand licensing fees from podcasters — is now defunct, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has reported. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today invalided key claims of that patent in response to a petition for review from the EFF. Today’s order by the USPTO rejects the claim by Personal Audio and its founder, Jim Logan, that they are owed money by podcasters because of a US Patent 8,112,504 with a priority date of 1996, which refers to a “system for disseminating media content representing episodes in a serialized sequence.” This decision breaks a major grip of patent…
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Back in December, we reported on the alpha for BitTorrent’s Maelstrom, a browser that uses BitTorrent’s P2P technology in order to place some control of the Web back in users’ hands by eliminating the need for centralized servers. Maelstrom is now in beta, bring it one step closer to official release. BitTorrent says more than 10,000 developers and 3,500 publishers signed up for the alpha, and it’s using their insights to launch a more stable public beta. Along with the beta comes the first set of developer tools for the browser, helping publishers and programmers to build their websites around Maelstrom’s P2P technology. And…
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Sometimes all you want to do is send a quick note — preferably hand-drawn, in pencil — to a friend or loved one. Sure, there are plenty of messaging apps like SnapChat that let you send disappearing messages, or Moju, which added chat and clever face recognition to its photo animations, and even comics, but the actual pencil-to-paper sketch paradigm is a specific niche that Psykosoft CEO Mathieu Gosselin was unable to find when he wanted it. And so, the developer of Psykopaint decided to create it himself. Sketches, doodles, call it what you want. What you create with the new Sketchat should not take more…
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James Clear writes about using behavioral science to master your habits and improve your health. His free guide, Transform Your Habits, has been downloaded more than 80,000 times. This post originally appeared on his blog. Dana Vollmer did not have an easy road to the Olympics. Vollmer is an olympic swimmer, but it wasn’t just the grueling practice schedule that made her journey to the top difficult. At the age of 15, Vollmer discovered that she had a heart disorder known as long QT syndrome. She had heart surgery later that year, but the operation didn’t eliminate the risk of heart failure. (Even today,…
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