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  • The saddle-shaped chip that let Pringles stack — and win

    The saddle-shaped chip that let Pringles stack — and win
    2026/09/07
    The saddle-shaped chip that let Pringles stack — and win

    In 2008, the children of a retired Procter & Gamble chemist buried part of his ashes inside one of his own inventions: a Pringles can. He had spent two years perfecting the shape that let the chips stack without breaking — then was pulled off the project before it ever reached a shelf. How does an object outlive the argument over who actually made it?

    In this episode, we trace the fifty-year dispute over what a Pringle legally is, who invented it, and who profited from it, asking what happens to credit and identity when a single product passes through four inventors, two tax courts, and three corporate owners.

    Person: Fredric J. Baur
    Location: Cincinnati, Ohio
    Date: 1956
    Case: the hyperbolic paraboloid potato chip and its stackable can
    Status: sold twice, taxed both ways, name still unconfirmed

    - Procter & Gamble assigned Fredric Baur, an organic chemist born in 1918, to fix broken and stale potato chips starting

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    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    20 分
  • The Dime That Proved Two Million People Bet on Privacy

    The Dime That Proved Two Million People Bet on Privacy
    2026/09/07
    The Dime That Proved Two Million People Bet on Privacy

    Somewhere in a crowdfunding ledger sits a single dime, part of a total that ends in exactly ten cents — proof that someone, somewhere, tracked a two-and-a-half-million-dollar campaign down to the last coin. The money bought a phone that did not yet exist, built around a promise that its hardware, not its policies, would keep its owner's life private. But hardware is one thing, and a company's conduct years later is another — so what happens when the people who trusted that promise start asking for their money back?

    In this episode, we trace Purism's Librem 5 phone from its record-breaking 2017 crowdfunding campaign through its delayed 2019 shipment to a 2023 refund controversy, asking whether a company can be trusted to remain the thing it claims to be once the specifications sheet stops being the whole story.

    Person: Louis Rossmann (repair advocate who documented the refund disputes)
    Location: San Francisco, California
    Date: August 24, 2017
    Case: the crowdfunding campaign for the Librem 5 phone
    Status: phone shipped in November 2019, but the company's handling of 2023 refund disputes drew public criticism

    - The Librem 5 crowdfunding campaign closed with $2,677,609.10 raised, 78.5 percent over its $1.5 million goal
    - The campaign reached its $1.5 million goal within two weeks of launching on August 24, 2017
    - The Librem 5's baseband processor connects via USB, isolated from the phone's main computing system, unlike most smartphones
    - PureOS received full endorsement from the Free Software Foundation in December 2017 under its GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines
    - The Librem Key, Purism's USB security token, weighs six grams, measures 48mm long, and contains a 40-kilobit-per-second true random number generator
    - The first Librem 5 units shipped in November 2019, twenty-five months after the campaign closed
    - The cellular modem's firmware remained proprietary, as Purism publicly acknowledged, because no free alternative existed
    - In 2023, Louis Rossmann published two videos documenting customer refund disputes with Purism, and declined a request from a former Purism associate to remove the first video

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    21 分