Yahoo has given podcast haters a Halloween treat: On October 31, it will discontinue Yahoo Podcasts. That you likely have never heard of Yahoo Podcasts speaks to the wisdom of the decision, and the new bouts of rationality sweeping the company under Sue Decker. [Read/WriteWeb]

Vonage, the Internet phone service, has found itself besieged by more legal woes. A court has found it infringed on six Sprint Nextel patents, and ordered Vonage to cough up $69.5 million and a 5 percent royalty on future sales. Last March, Vonage suffered similar penalties after it was found guilty of infringing on Verizon patents. A royalty here, a royalty there, and soon you're talking serious money. [Silicon Alley Insider]

SCO, a company which once claimed to own the rights to the Unix operating system and all Linux derivatives, is, unsurprisingly, one step closer to its deathbed. Nasdaq has sent a notice that they will be delisted from the exchange. Refusing to admit the fight is over, SCO will appeal the delisting. But with its cases against IBM and Novell in tatters, a bankruptcy filing, and dwindling cash reserves, the persistent litigator is unlikely to reverse Nasdaq's decision, which comes after after earlier warnings from the exchange.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, the annual videogame trade show, was recently downsized from 60,000 attendees to a scant 3,000 or so. Why? Because exhibitors were sick of the exorbitant costs associated with putting together a booth in the cavernous Los Angeles Convention Center, and wanted an insidery event, not one open to all comers. Seeing a void left, IDG Entertainment, publisher of GamePro and the now defunct GameStar (a sort of Maxim for videogames), swooped in to host E For All. It's a public event, unlike the new E3's restricted-access gathering, and tickets for the four-day show go for $90. There's one problem: Exhibitors have no desire to attend.

The internet phone provider Vonage is hanging on for dear life, somehow fending off a Titanic-like doom. Hauled into court by Verizon, Vonage was found guilty of patent infringements. Although fined $58 million penalty and forced to abandon any infringing technology, the VOIP Internet-telephone service provider overturned a ruling that would have barred it from conducting business altogether. Not that it's conducting business in a particularly admirable manner.

More bad news for Ziff-Davis, the storied, and troubled, tech publisher: Two executives in its videogames group have left the company. General manager Ira Becker and editorial director John Davison announced they're departing to start a new venture, thought to be a family-oriented videogame site. Opportune timing considering Ziff's uncertain future. It's also sure to dampen any enthusiasm among potential buyers for the technology publisher's shrinking game portfolio, which have been on the block since late last year. Becker and Davison, you see, were responsible for the website 1UP.com, the only segment of the group that has shown consistent growth. Ziff-Davis has been trying to sell off its magazines (Electronic Gaming Monthly and Games for Windows) as well as 1UP.

PlayboyU is stealing a page from Facebook — Facebook circa 2004, that is — and launching a college-only social network, restricted to people with ".edu" addresses. With help from Ning, it's starting PlayboyU — but not, sadly enough, delivering the goods in the form of nude coed shots. No matter. The college-only restriction limits the potential audience. And why would college kids, when Facebook and MySpace exist, bother to sign up for this website? The association with a porn brand alone should be enough to scare most students off. One thing Playboy forgot: ".edu" addresses include professors and alumni, who might take an interest in students' extracurricular activities on the site. We're placing the site on immediate deathwatch.

Big media has scored another victory in its grinding war against online video sites. Bolt.com has, ahem, bolted, from the Web, seeking protection from creditors. A target of Universal Music's copyright-infringement rampage in October 2006, Bolt hoped to settle the suit by promising Universal a stake in its pending sale to fellow video site Gofish.com. Well, that deal fell throughearlier this month, and now out of options, Bolt is all but dead. For Universal, though, it's a very Pyrrhic victory. One site down, infinity to go.

A file-sharing network claims to go legitimate, offering only properly licensed files. Does anyone not see through this tired old ruse, which surely dates back almost a decade to the first incarnation of Napster? For LimeWire, one of the last networks to still keep going, it's a measure to keep the RIAA's legal hounds at bay. How? By launching a LimeWire store that will offer legal music downloads. No doubt this show of good faith is an attempt to sidestep its current legal dispute with the record industry, which is seeking $150,000 for every song downloaded over the network. Scott Gilbertstein of Wired News points out that this "is probably more money than the U.S. GDP." But think of all those starving recording artists!

Despite the recent sale of its enterprise group — a set of tech trade magazines including eWeek — vultures are circling technology publisher Ziff-Davis. Today it announced it was forced to forgo an interest payment on its $390 million debt. The skipped payment is permitted under its debt covenants, says CEO Jason Young, who expects Ziff will "be able to restructure our debt outside of the courts." Young, of course, would like you to think that the aging print publisher is remaking itself into a digital-media growth machine. But how many startups do you know have $390 million in debt — largely because of bets on print vehicles that have yet to pay off?

To date, I've mostly told you about the mayhem on the masthead of Red Herring, the troubled tech publication whose finances are so dire that it recently received an eviction notice. And sure enough, there have been further departures since our last report. But the business side, it seems, is in equal disarray. David Dolnick, a longtime right-hand man of Herring owner Alex Vieux. Dolnick ran the conferences business for Vieux, and, rumor has it, acted as a "fixer" for all kinds of matters on Vieux's overseas trips. Also gone: Herring president Gordon Haight, who headed up sales. With both conferences and ad sale in disarray, the Herring's next payroll run should be, as they say, quite interesting.

No longer able to muster any enthusiasm for Dean Kamen's transportation nonrevolution, the Segway Enthusiasts Group gives up the ghost and folds. Across the nation, tourists and Segway-mounted police mourn while looking dorky. [Techdirt]

I'm sure that for people at Red Herring, the troubled tech publication that has difficulty paying its bills, updating its masthead has long been the lowest priority. The list of staffers has seemed out of date every time I've checked. It has changed recently, I note — but not fast enough to track of the latest round of departures. Red Herring board members got an eyeful of the shrinking masthead when they arrived at the office last Friday and were greeted by a nearly empty newsroom. Even people still on payroll — whatever "payroll" means at the Herring — are often absent, ostensibly for "health reasons" (translation: job interviews). After the jump, a list of the fish who we hear have jumped out of the pond — or are trying to do so.

An idea so brilliant, we hate its creators for coming up with it before we did. Some mischief-makers have launched Dead Herring, a "parody of business" mocking Red Herring, the Silicon Valley tech publication. Flopping around like a fish gasping for air in its efforts to stay in business, the Herring is clearly making enemies — first and foremost the companies and writers it's apparently stiffed. An amusing anecdote: According to the site, the Herring named Text 100 as a conference sponsor without consulting the PR agency first. That's going to make for an interesting collections call.

Olive Software, a Santa Clara-based company that may, quite possibly, be almost as badly run as the Red Herring, has teamed up with the troubled tech publication to announce a Herring digital edition. It's supposedly a faithful copy of the print Red Herring, which has been missing from newsstands for month. Unsurprisingly, there's no link to the digital edition in the press release, and it's nowhere to be seen on the Red Herring website. "Viewing Red Herring on the Web is now as compelling and easy as reading the magazine in print," Olive boasts. True enough. Neither one can be found by readers. And I suspect neither one really exists, excepts in Herring owner Alex Vieux's fevered imagination.

A failed side project, dubious funding, and an inconvenient employee gets scrubbed from the site in this story about the meltdown of one of the Bay Area's most-known tech video networks. (I'm not chronicling the death of PodTech out of glee for sticking it to the man, but because the company has broken its promises to the community that tried so hard to make it work, and because its founder John Furrier has shown blatant disregard for the truth and for his employees in his crass race to inflate PodTech's value and sell off the doomed company. Okay, also a little glee.)

A year late to the party, Newsweek has discovered Second Life with its usual laughably bad timing. Its cultural speedometer fatally tuned to a slower-moving society, the weekly magazine has lavished the 3-D virtual world with gushing praise at the exact same moment that Wired, one of the first to hype Second Life, has abandoned it. In the August issue of Wired, media writer Frank Rose dissects the disastrous failure of corporate advertising in Second Life, as major brands used to measuring audiences in the millions find themselves lucky to count their Second Life audience in the hundreds. More highlights from the Wired piece — and lowlights from the Newsweek article — after the jump.

Fortune's summer party, scheduled for today, has been postponed, ostensibly for weather reasons, as New York is under siege from a nor'easter. With sister publication Business 2.0 on the rocks, it might have been seemly to cancel it altogether. We've learned, however, that the all-day shindig has been rescheduled for tomorrow. So, as Fortune staffers party, Business 2.0 employees will continue huddling under a storm of their own. Rumors, true and false, are flying. (I should note that I'm covering this as a former Business 2.0 editor who worked at the magazine for seven years — but events are moving so fast that all of this comes from new reporting since I left, not any knowledge I acquired on the job.) Here's what I know, and what I don't know, so far:

Still on deathwatch, Red Herring, the once-storied tech publication, is displaying its straitened circumstances even in its copy. The few articles on its website that aren't Reuters wire stories seem to be written by a skeleton crew, with equally skeletal thought behind them. Take, for example, Cassimir Medford's puff piece on Ooma, the also-doomed VOIP startup. Medford, ostensibly Red Herring's "telecom and wireless reporter," includes this doozy:

Google's free food is the greatest tangible evidence of "Googliness" — the company's twee description of its eccentric and goofy culture. The snack rooms and cafeterias are legendary, and four of the cafes made our list of the top things to see on Google's campus. The only question: How long will it all last?