Month: July 2019

Former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens died Tuesday at the age of 99. During Stevens' tenure on the high court, which stretched from 1975 to 2010, Stevens had a huge impact on legal issues affecting the technology sector. Tonight we're republishing a lightly edited version of our 2010 story that originally marked his retirement from the Supreme Court.

In April 2010, the Supreme Court's most senior justice, John Paul Stevens, announced his retirement. In the weeks that followed, hundreds of articles were written about his career and his legacy. While most articles focus on "hot button" issues such as flag burning, terrorism, and affirmative action, Stevens' tech policy record has largely been ignored.

When Justice Stevens joined the court, many of the technologies we now take for granted—the PC, packet-switched networks, home video recording—were in their infancy. During his 35-year tenure on the bench, Stevens penned decisions that laid the foundation for the tremendous innovations that followed in each of these areas.

Enlarge / Apple will replace iTunes with Music, Podcasts, and TV on Mac. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Podcast fans will want to keep their ears to the ground with the latest Apple news. Bloomberg reported that Apple may be looking for deals to bring exclusive original shows to its podcast-listening platform. Unnamed sources said the company is reaching out to media companies to secure rights for podcast exclusivity.

This development would mark a shift in how Apple runs its podcast platform. Shows that list on Apple Podcasts can also make their episodes available elsewhere. Exclusive arrangements in the future could come with different restrictions. This might mean that Apple’s app is the only place where you can hear an entire show, or this could be a windowing deal where new episodes first appear on Apple before the podcaster can send them to other platforms.

Apple’s app for podcast listening has long been the most popular place to get your fix of the latest shows. However, as the audience for podcasts has grown over the past few years, more and more businesses are trying to secure their own dedicated listener bases, which could erode Apple’s dominance in the space.

Enlarge / Elon Musk in Idaho in 2015. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Tonight, Elon Musk has scheduled an event where he intends to unveil his plans for Neuralink, a startup company he announced back in 2017, then went silent on. If you go to the Neuralink website now, all you'll find is a vague description of its goal to develop an "ultra-high-bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers." These interfaces have been under development for a while, typically under the monicker of brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs. And, while there have been some notable successes in the academic-research world, there's a notable lack of products on the market.

The slow progress comes, in part, because a successful BCI has to tackle multiple hard problems and, in part, because the regulatory and market conditions are challenging. Ahead of tonight's announcement, we'll take a look at all of these and then see how Musk and the people who advise him have decided to tackle them.

A series of problems

An effective BCI means figuring out how to get the nervous system to communicate with digital hardware. Doing so requires solving three problems, which I'll call reading, coding, and feedback. We'll go through each of these below.