Google Bard has had a fuzzy sense of my Washington Post career

Posted on May 25, 2023 by robpegoraro

Rejection hurts, but does it hurt more or less when a faceless conversational artificial-intelligence chatbot has done the rejection? And when the rejection comes in the form of erasing a large chunk of one’s career?

Trying out Google Bard, the “large language model” AI that Google opened up to U.S. users in March, forced me to think about questions like that. It started when I saw a Mastodon post from my Fast Company editor Harry McCracken recounting how Bard reported having no information about him–and then, after Harry asked the exceedingly resume-specific query “Who’s the guy who worked at PC World and then started Technologizer and then worked at TIME and now works at Fast Company?,” Bard responded by giving credit not to him but to my old Yahoo Tech colleague David Pogue.

Screenshot of Google Bard attempting to answer "Who is Rob Pegoraro?" and "Who wrote a personal-tech column for the Washington Post from 1999 to 2011?"

I had to repeat the experiment, but I didn’t see quite the same results. While I got the same “I do not have enough information about that person” brushoff to a who-is query about myself, asking “Who wrote a personal-technology column for the Washington Post from 1999 until 2011?” yielded a flattering response that said I currently write for USA Today (not any more) and Wired (never have); had earlier written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic (the last is true); and had won a National Press Club Award for Consumer Journalism and the Gerald Lob Award for Commentary (if only).

A few days later, I tried again and got a different set of results. Once again, Bard couldn’t say who I was–but this time, asking who wrote a personal-tech column for the Post until 2011 led to Bard naming former WSJ tech columnist and all-around mensch Walt Mossberg. Walt has won a Loeb award, so maybe Bard’s earlier “hallucination” (the current term of art for a conversational AI making shit up) involved a fusion of his c.v. and mine?

A few days later, I took myself out of this equation by asking a Google rep at a tech-policy event in D.C. Monday to repeat my searches. She, too, saw Bard decline to answer a who-is question about me and then reassign my Post column to somebody else–this time, Wired’s Steven Levy, another member of the graybeard tech-writer contingent. The Google rep clicked the thumbs-down “Bad response” button (which I thought I’d done earlier, but maybe not) and invited me to write the correction.

But my pointing out that I wrote the Post’s personal-tech column over those years apparently needed more than three days to get processed. Because when I tried the same series of questions Thursday, I got the same “I do not have enough information” answer to “Who is Rob Pegoraro” and a comparable erasure of my Post history:

Steven Levy wrote the Washington Post’s personal-tech column from 1999 to 2011. He is an American journalist and author who has written extensively about technology and the internet. He is the author of several books, including Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, and In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.

Once again, I clicked the “Bad response” button but this time also talked back to Bard: “Try again.”

The answer this time:

Rob Pegoraro wrote the Washington Post’s personal-tech column from 1999 to 2011.

Victory at last! Or maybe just for now.

Weekly output: VPN guidance, new Verizon plans, Supreme Court rules on content moderation, Dish Wireless, Mark Vena podcast

Posted on May 21, 2023 by robpegoraro

The weather outside is as good as spring gets around D.C., and it was made even more pleasant by catching up with friends at the Nats game this afternoon and seeing our rebuilding team go on a hitting spree and beat the Detroit Tigers 6-4.

Screenshot of the U.S. VPNs guide as seen in Safari on an iPad mini 6, with a VPN connection active as indicated at top right.

5/15/2023: 10 Best VPN Services of 2023, U.S. News & World Report

My first writing for U.S. News since last May was once going to consist of updating a few comparisons of virtual private network services, but then another freelancer backed out and my editor asked if I could take on some extra work. (Cardinal rule of freelance writing: Try to be the person who solves an editor’s problems, especially if the editor can offer more money for a rush delivery.) So my contributions here wound up including profiles of seven VPN services–Hotspot Shield, Private Internet Access, PrivateVPN, PureVPN, TunnelBear, VyprVPN, and Windscribe–plus guides to cheap VPNs and VPNs for streaming video and four of those comparisons (Surfshark versus ExpressVPN, NordVPN versus IPVanish, NordVPN versus ExpressVPN, and Surfshark versus NordVPN).

This VPN immersion left me with a real dislike of the marketing tactics many of these services employ, so I unpacked those trust issues for Patreon readers this week. They also got my own picks for VPN service.

5/16/2023: Verizon ‘myPlan’ Condenses Wireless Menu to 2 Plans, Plus Optional Perks, PCMag

Verizon solved one problem with its old spread of unlimited plans by paring them down from six to two, but in the bargain it left potential customers with as much of math exercise as before–and, if they had appreciated the streaming-media freebies of the old plan, a sense of getting shortchanged.

5/18/2023: Supreme Court: Lazy Content-Moderation Doesn’t Mean Platforms Aided Terrorists, PCMag

I suspected that the Supreme Court would decide that Twitter, Google and Facebook overlooking some of the ISIS terrorist cult’s abuse of their platforms did not amount to aiding and abetting that abomination, but I didn’t expect a unanimous opinion. Or one written by Justice Clarence Thomas, who in 2021 suggested that social platforms needed stricter regulation.

5/19/2023: Dish Wireless: We’ll Meet June Deadline to Cover 70% of Americans With 5G, PCMag

I was going to write up this Wednesday-afternoon session from the wireless trade group CTIA’s 5G Summit on Thursday, but then the Supreme Court upended my plans.

5/19/2023: S03 E54 – SmartTechCheck Podcast, Mark Vena

We talked at some length about the court’s opinion on this episode of my analyst friend’s podcast (also available in video form) before turning our attention to car and smart-home security.

Apple’s “Magic” keyboard may be inhabited by some unkind sorcery

Posted on May 19, 2023 by robpegoraro

My desk has been more cluttered than usual the past couple of weeks, and I couldn’t blame that only on my inability to toss receipts and scan business cards. Instead, I have too often had a proprietary cable snaking its way from my computer to my keyboard–as in, my allegedly wireless keyboard.

An Apple Magic Keyboard showing a Lightning cable left just apart from its Lightning port.

I’m not unfamiliar with getting lied to by promises of Bluetooth wireless just working, but having this $179 Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad drop a connection to this Mac mini is more annoying than the average Bluetooth fail. It’s not just the lack of a proper error message from macOS when this happens; it’s that my only reliable fix for this is to fish out the proprietary USB-C-to-Lightning cable that came with the keyboard and use that to plug the peripheral into the computer.

(That’s also what I do every time the keyboard battery runs down.)

My cranky Mastodon post Thursday about the latest outbreak of this problem–a bizarre breakdown in which the keyboard transmitted no keystrokes to the Mac even as macOS reported that the keyboard remained connected–led to some commiseration with longtime Mac writer Dan Moren. He replied that “I got so tired of this I just now leave the Magic Keyboard wired to the mini.”

I’ve done that for a stretch a few times, but that sticks me with another problem: This cable stretches about 40 inches, which means I have to plug it into the back of the mini and then drape it across the top of the desk to reach the keyboard shelf.

Apple does, of course, sell a version of this cable twice as long that would let me run the cable around the back of the desk and underneath it to that shelf. But Apple charges $29 for this luxury, 2-meter cable, which reminds me that this not-so-magic keyboard should have a USB-C port instead of an Apple-exclusive port that no longer has a functional reason to exist.

And yet using any third-party keyboard is a total nonstarter, because then I’d lose Touch ID fingerprint authentication and would have to type one password or another every time I unlock the computer or 1Password. That would be worse, not that this realization makes me feel like less of a chump for dealing with Apple’s dysfunctionality.

Weekly output: Android outside phones, Wear OS 4, Covid exposure-notification apps

Posted on May 14, 2023 by robpegoraro

The case of Covid that I was sure would trash my Mother’s Day agenda faded remarkably swiftly–I had one test come out negative Saturday morning and another barely positive, followed by two negative tests Sunday morning. That freed me to stick to my original plan of going to the Nationals game with my wife, which the Nats then lost to the Mets 8-2. Eh; as this week has reminded me, things could be worse.

5/10/2023: Google Touts Android Progress Beyond Phones, Teases XR Platform, PCMag

Google PR gave me an advance copy of its Google I/O talking points about how Android is faring in tablets, smartwatches, TVs and cars. This post includes a couple of data points that contradict Google’s narrative.

5/10/2023: Google Unveils Wear OS 4, Featuring Gmail and Calendar Apps, PCMag

My other I/O advance consisted of details about the next version of Google’s Android-based wearables operating system.

5/11/2023: You Can Uninstall Those COVID Exposure Notification Apps Now, PCMag

Writing this felt like putting together an eulogy for the Apple-Google attempt at pandemic defense to which I devoted thousands of words in 2020 and 2021, including a 19-page report for O’Reilly Media that remains (I think) my only post-college work assignment to be budgeted in pages instead of words.

Covid, continued: I’m once again housebound for at least the next few days

Posted on May 11, 2023 by robpegoraro

My souvenirs of my trip to Brazil last week for Web Summit Rio are no longer limited to my conference badge and a few items of event swag, because it appears that I also imported a case of Covid from that gathering.

My first heads-up that I might have repeated last year’s pattern–go to an event in a new-to-me country, pick up Covid there, test positive at home only after a few days of mild symptoms–came when I got a message Saturday from my fellow Web Summit speaker and Fast Company editor Harry McCracken, saying that he’d just tested positive after feeling some nasal congestion.

A rapid Covid test shows the solid stripe of a positive result, with instructions for this test kit visible behind it.

I felt a little sneezier than usual myself but tested negative Saturday night. With those cold-like symptoms still around, I tested negative a second time Monday morning. Would the streak persist through a third test Wednesday afternoon? No, reader, it did not.

So just like I did last year, I’m isolating at home from my so-far symptom-free wife and kid (it helps that it’s so nice outside that opening every window is not just doable but desirable) and wondering when symptoms that have reached the annoying end of common-cold severity will fade. And how long it will take me to test negative again.

And like last year, I’m wondering when and where I might have picked up this case. Web Summit’s venue, the Riocentro conference center, had what seemed good ventilation, with doors wide open to the outdoors in every exhibit hall and the speaker lounge. But that was not the case for the Riocentro arena and the shuttle vans in which I spent way too much time in traffic–in where I did not wear a mask.

My thinking, presumably like that of the infectious-disease experts who picked up Covid at a Centers for Disease Control conference last month, was that the risk had ebbed far enough. Covid stats are way down worldwide, and I’ve been vaccinated four times–the two original doses in the spring of 2021, a booster in the fall of 2021, and a bivalent booster last fall–on top of last summer’s case.

But that protection might not be as effective if I ran into a new variant–a subject on which researchers may now have a data point from me, thanks to my spending a few minutes at Dulles after arriving Saturday morning to provide a sample at a CDC genomic-surveillance testing station.

And even if I’d masked up more at Web Summit, that still would have left my time indoors at receptions and dinners. There’s only so much you can do to buy down the risk if you’re going to fly to another continent to speak at a conference drawing 21,000-plus attendees from 91 countries, and I decided upfront that the opportunity justified the risk. On in fewer words: Buy the ticket, take the ride.

Unlike last year, this case of Covid isn’t throwing a wrench into any travel plans. It is, however, icing my Mother’s Day agenda for my wife, and I feel lousy about that.

Weekly output: applied AI, open innovation, Mastodon updates, AI equity, 1Password, Signal, Eve Air Mobility, travel tech, travel tips

Posted on May 7, 2023 by robpegoraro

After getting back from Brazil early Saturday morning, I’ve napped more than usual but have also spoken at an event in D.C., gotten in some gardening, and enjoyed a shorter-than-usual bike ride.

5/1/2023: Companies adopting AI need to move slowly and not break things, Fast Company

I wrote about how two companies I’ve covered elsewhere recently–the satellite-imagery firm Planet and the customer-support platform Intercom–have been deploying AI-based tools a little more cautiously than others.

5/1/2023: How open innovation can drive your organization forward, Web Summit

I led this somewhat-vaguely-titled roundtable discussion at this offsite conference the day before Web Summit’s programming schedule got into gear.

5/2/2023: Mastodon Makes It Easier for Beginners to Get Started, PCMag

I was going to write a reasonably short post about the federated social network Mastodon’s founder deciding that it was time to add quote-posting and text-search features–both of which had been historically unwelcome there–and then realized that PCMag hadn’t written much lately about Bluesky, another interesting, decentralized Twitter alternative.

5/3/3023: AI Can Give Us a Productivity Boost, But Will Everyone Get a Fair Shot at It?, PCMag

I wrote about the talk that Google’s chief design scientist Cassie Kozyrkov gave to close out the conference’s first day, which I found more enlightening than the conference’s description had suggested.

5/3/2023: Goodbye passwords!, Web Summit

I accepted this opportunity to interview 1Password CEO Jeff Shiner about that password-management service’s hopes for no-password passkey authentication, and then Google announced Wednesday morning that it had added passkeys as a login option worldwide.

5/3/2023: Building an app from the ground up, Web Summit

My second panel Wednesday had me interview Signal president Meredith Whittaker about how that encrypted-messaging app could avoid making the privacy mistakes of other competitors in that market.

5/5/2023: This Florida Startup Says It Can Make Electric Air Taxis Happen, PCMag

My longstanding interest in aviation led me to watch and then write up this Thursday-morning panel in which Eve Air Mobility CEO André Stein talked about Eve’s ambitions in electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) aircraft.

5/6/2023: Will AI Eat Travel? (Clickbait Title for Session on Travel Tech), Frequent Traveler University

In my first appearance at this frequent-flyer gathering since March of 2020 (which feels like 10 years ago), travel blogger Stefan Krasowski quizzed me about the possibilities for conversational AI and many other tech topics. He’s a good onstage interlocutor and I enjoyed the conversation.

5/6/2023: The state of miles and points – what to expect in the next year, Frequent Traveler University

I closed out the day by joining this plus-sized panel featuring other FTU speakers, during which we answered audience questions about things like recent or impending devaluations among frequent-traveler programs.

Starry-eyed in the Southern Hemisphere

Posted on May 3, 2023 by robpegoraro

_{RIO DE JANEIRO}

A city of almost 7 million people with an attendant level of light pollution isn’t the optimum place to take in the night sky, but I can’t stop doing that here anyway. Because for the first time in my 52 years on this planet, I don’t see the same stars and constellations when I look up after dark.

The obvious attraction above is the Southern Cross, a constellation iconic enough to figure in the flags of Brazil, Australia, New Zealand and other Southern Hemisphere nations. I first spot it as a slumped triangle, and after a few minutes for my eyes to adjust I can make out its fourth-brightest star and then the fifth that completes the constellation formally known as Crux.

There’s also the closest star system visible to the unaided eye–which I knew as Alpha Centauri AB as a younger space nerd but now see in my phone’s sky-map app as Rigil Kentaurus.

(Until writing this post, I did not realize how complex stellar nomenclature can get or how it had changed recently as the International Astronomical Union has worked to get more systematic about it.)

The 4.3 light years and change separating our sun from that binary star might as well be walking distance in our galaxy; the closest star visible in the Northern Hemisphere, Sirius, is twice as far away. Meanwhile, Beta Centauri, the triple system visible as a bright star near Rigil Kentaurus (and through which you can visualize a line pointing to the top of Crux) is another 386 light years distant.

I’ve seen less of the brightest star in this hemisphere because Canopus sits lower in the sky here. Above the sky, however, Canopus is unmissable enough to serve as a reference point for star trackers on spacecraft that have helped steer some of them out of the solar system.

Looking up at night far from home on this trip (note: expenses covered by Web Summit in return for my moderating two panels at the new Rio edition of their conference) takes me back to doing the same thing at home in rural New Jersey decades ago, where a clear summer night would treat me to a sky full of stars, with the Milky Way a glowing path arcing overhead behind them. That sight is one thing I still miss about country life, and it remains something I look forward to seeing anew when I have an overnight stay somewhere far from city lights.

Weekly output: Google Authenticator, smartphone-to-satellite call, social-media age-verification bill, climate optimism, “juice jacking” debunked

Posted on April 30, 2023 by robpegoraro

RIO DE JANEIRO–A year ago, Brazil and the entire Southern Hemisphere did not figure in my near-term travel plans, but then Web Summit announced plans to add a second edition of its flagship conference here. I asked the organizers to keep me in mind, they did, and now I have two panels to moderate Wednesday.

4/24/2023: Google Authenticator Now Syncs Your One-Time Codes Across Devices, PCMag

Writing this allowed me to recycle some choice quotes I got from Google’s security head seven years ago. And then a day later, researchers found that Google doesn’t apply end-to-end encryption to the underlying data. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Authenticator app on my Pixel 5a has yet to get this update.

4/25/2023: AT&T, AST SpaceMobile Claim First Smartphone-to-Satellite Phone Call, PCMag

I got a heads-up about this news from AT&T, which in turn let me engage in further story-notes recycling by using some quotes I’d gathered at the Satellite 2022 show in D.C. in March. And then a post that was supposed to be simple took far more time than I’d expected because AST needed prodding to provide the date when this groundbreaking call happened.

4/27/2023: Senate Bill Would Require Social Media Age Verification for Everyone, PCMag

The buried lede in this bill to require age verification to use a social-media service is its provision for a federal pilot program through which people could get a “secure digital identification credential” to present to social platforms instead of uploading a photo ID or providing a video selfie.

4/28/2023: Why some climate experts are optimistic about the future of cleantech, Fast Company

The idea for this story started with watching a SXSW talk–yes, I believe this is the longest I’ve taken to write up anything from that mid-March event. Now that it’s finally written, edited and published, I dearly hope that its optimistic tone will not require a correction later on.

(Patreon readers got a bonus post from leftover SXSW notes about my visit to a nuclear reactor then.)

4/28/2023: The FBI Is Warning About ‘Juice Jacking.’ Are Public Charging Stations Safe?, AARP

Asking the FBI’s public-affairs office about the unsubstantiated warning circulated by the bureau’s Denver field office reminded me of the first time the FBI figured in my copy: the December 1995 cover story I wrote for the Washington Post’s Weekend section about “X-Files” fan culture. This piece also features quotes from two of the people I’ve gotten to know through security conferences, and I’d like to think that it’s the first time a founding member of the L0pht hacker collective has been quoted in a story for AARP.

Why I’m back to filing our Virginia taxes on paper

Posted on April 27, 2023 by robpegoraro

One of the little luxuries of life in Virginia is having more time to file state tax returns–ours, unlike those of most states, aren’t due until the first business day of May. And one of the little indignities of life in Virginia is having this annual ritual offer a reminder of how badly our state got suckered by the tax prep industry’s “Free File” con.

Rewind 20 years, and the Virginia Department of Taxation was a leader in providing direct online filing with its iFile site. You plugged in a few numbers from your federal return, the site did the math, and you could then file directly to the department. What was not to like?

A printed-out copy of a Virginia Form 760, with a pen resting on top of it.

The answer for commercial tax-prep providers was “competition.” And in 2010, they sold Richmond on a different deal: They would offer free tax prep and online filing through their apps and sites to lower-income taxpayers (as they had done for federal taxes since 2003 as part of the Internal Revenue Service signing onto this Free File proposition) if the state would first scrap its own tax-prep service.

As I wrote at the time at the Washington Post, the fiscal analysis prepared for the Free File bill introduced by Del. Kathy Byron (R.-Lynchburg) suggested this wouldn’t pencil out for the state unless almost no iFile users reverted to filing on paper. But bipartisan majorities passed Byron’s contribution to crony capitalism, after which Gov Robert McDonnell (R.) signed it into law.

The results of enabling Intuit’s rent-seeking strategy, as I wrote in the Post three years ago, have been woeful for taxpayers and the state: In 2019, more than seven times as many Virginia taxpayers filed on paper than availed themselves of Free File.

And since last year, I’ve become one of those people mailing in a Form 760 as if it were 1993. The clumsy but no-charge Free Fillable Forms option that I noted in my 2020 Post opinion piece–where I called it “the stone tablet of spreadsheets”–vanished from the Department of Taxation’s menu after 2021, which the department attributed to an unnamed software vendor (Intuit, perhaps?) dropping support for the product.

The actual work isn’t that much more than it was two years ago, except that I have to do the math myself after typing in numbers instead of clicking a “Do the Math” button (really!) in Free Fillable Forms. As before, I check my work by stepping through a Virginia return in TurboTax; I know my work isn’t done because Intuit’s app thinks we should get about $50 more in our refund, which also happens to be below the $59 Intuit wants me to pay for the privilege of filing my state taxes through that app. Figuring that out may be a hassle. Dealing with my printer probably will too.

I would love nothing more than for Virginia to renounce this failed experiment and restore something like iFile. But a bill introduced in January by Del. Kathy Tran (D.-Fairfax) to do just that instead died in a subcommittee, because recognizing past mistakes does not appear to be the high-order bit in today’s Virginia GOP.

Weekly output: Speedtest rankings, Starship test launch, new T-Mobile plans, social-media propaganda in Sudan

Posted on April 23, 2023 by robpegoraro

On Saturday I’m traveling someplace new to me–Rio de Janeiro, where Web Summit is hosting a second annual edition of its conference. My part of it will be interviewing 1Password CEO Jeff Shiner and Signal president Meredith Whittaker; last week, I invited Patreon readers to suggest questions for each of those sessions.

4/17/2023: In Speed Showdown, T-Mobile Leads the Pack, and Not Just in 5G, PCMag

Seeing T-Mobile vault to the head of network-comparison tests like this makes me feel old, because I remember when one of the primary ancestors of that carrier did business as VoiceStream and was nobody’s idea of a threat to AT&T and Verizon.

4/20/2023: SpaceX’s Starship Launches Before Exploding 24 Miles Up, PCMag

I once thought I would be able to write this story in early 2022, but I should have given Elon Musk’s optimistic words a much more skeptical hearing. And then the day finally arrived and the giant rocket didn’t make it to staging. I described that as a successful failure, in the sense that SpaceX should now have a wealth of flight data about Starship’s performance, but I didn’t know then that Starship had pulverized part of its launch pad. Or that SpaceX had conducted Starship’s static-fire test in February at only half of the first stage’s thrust.

4/20/2023: T-Mobile Makes a Bid for Hardcore Hotspot Users With New ‘Go5G’ Plans, PCMag

T-Mobile showed up in my coverage again when the carrier introduced two new plans that aren’t named “Magenta” and effectively bracket the previous top-of-the-line Magenta Max plan.

4/23/2023: The war of social media, Al Araby

This Arabic-language news channel had me on to talk about the dueling social-media propaganda campaigns unfolding from both sides of the civil war in Sudan–both of which seem to involve a great deal of deception that benefits from Twitter’s recent “meh” approach to disinformation. I leaned heavily on reports from the Sudanese news site Beam Reports and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab.