Author Archives: robpegoraro

About robpegoraro

Freelance journalist who covers (and is often vexed by) computers, gadgets and other things that beep.

The D.C. seafood establishment that’s only open one night a year

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Dinner Wednesday night was an exceptional treat: an all-you-can-eat selection of small plates of seafood, with beer and wine included, in the unlikely venue of the Department of Commerce’s headquarters and at the improbable price of $35.

A plate of delicious scallops at the 2018 NOAA Fish Fry, with other attendees seen in the background.

But I won’t be able to make another reservation like this until next June, because the NOAA Sustainable Seafood Celebration is a once-a-year deal. Wednesday was also my first opportunity to indulge in the event formerly known as the NOAA Fish Fry since 2018–I was out of town in 2019, then the pandemic sank it in 2020, 2021 and even 2022.

By any name, this annual seafood feeding frenzy is an excellent reason to spend an early-June evening under the trees in the courtyard of the Herbert C. Hoover Building. Staged by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration volunteers, it draws chefs from the around the country, as in literally from Alaska to Florida, to show off what they can do with what’s in the water there.

Wednesday, for example, I enjoyed shrimp, oysters, fish tacos, sablefish, salmon and even a geoduck fritter (the mouthfeel was a little weird on the last one), but didn’t get to the lionfish ceviche in time. Enjoying this feast with friends was even better, even if the pal who works at NOAA and looped me into this well over a decade ago had family obligations and couldn’t make it.

Since the Fish Fry–er, Sustainable Seafood Celebration doubles as a fund-raiser for one charity or another, this year’s cause being the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, I don’t know why the organizers don’t charge more. Because at just $35, it sold out in minutes when tickets went on sale May 17, and you should expect the same next spring.

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Reflections on Georgetown reunions

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This weekend features my 30th college reunion. Thirty years is a long time since I collected the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service diploma framed on the wall above this computer–a long enough time for one of my college-paper friends to show up at a reception Friday evening with a son who will be starting at Georgetown in a few months.

Healy Hall, the building described as either neo-Romanesque or Gothic revival, is decorated with banners in Georgetown's blue and gray and the red, white and blue of the United States.

Because all of my years since graduation have never had me live farther than four miles from Georgetown’s entrance at 37th & O Streets NW, this weekend’s festivities are also the sixth Georgetown reunion I’ve attended:

• The fifth-year reunion was not that special, in part because I missed the first day of activities because I was covering the E3 video-game convention but also because five years don’t give people that many life events to catch up on.

• The 10th reunion, on the other hand, allowed me to introduce many of my Georgetown friends to my fiancée a week before our wedding. That was pretty great!

• The 15th reunion seemed to draw fewer people, maybe because that number doesn’t seem to have quite the weigth of 20 or 25 years.

• My 20th reunion was my first reunion as a dad, so I could finally compare notes with other Hoyas who had joined the parent demographic years earlier.

• By the time my 25th reunion rolled around, that kid was old enough to take in some events with my wife and I–which is how we got to see 1968 School of Foreign Service graduate Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary emerge from the building that was my dorm sophomore year and walk to a waiting van to cheers from attendees.

Two things have stayed constant over all these gatherings even as we have all aged in various ways: It’s terrific to catch up with friends and learn about what they’ve done since you last met them, but then you always think of the people who didn’t attend and hope (probably in vain) that they will show up five years later. But this weekend’s reunion has made me realize one new thing: With this many years since graduation, they really should increase the font size on the nametags.

Weekly output: Verizon business-5G ambitions, EU fines Meta, video viewing online, Comcast’s Now TV

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I often go for a bike ride on a Sunday, but when that Sunday is in the middle of Memorial Day weekend, I have to mix up my usual routing a little to pass by Arlington National Cemetery.

Screenshot of story as seen on Chrome in an Android phone on Verizon's 5G network.5/22/2023: Verizon Business CEO on private 5G: ‘Next year, we’re going full throttle’, Light Reading

I interviewed Verizon business CETO Kyle Malady at the wireless trade group CTIA’s 5G Summit on the previous Wednesday, then wrote and filed my story that Friday after having the Supreme Court eat Thursday of that week.

5/22/2023: EU Hits Meta With Billion-Dollar Fine for Failing to Secure Users’ Facebook Data, PCMag

I noted how the EU’s €1.2 billion fine of Meta for not undertaking the impossible task of securing its European users’ data from the National Security Agency should be seen as a threat to any large American social network–but I didn’t get into what this decision could mean to smaller U.S. tech firms or those in other parts of the world. For the context, you should see Twitter threads from privacy lawyer Whitney Merrill and Georgetown Law professor Anupam Chander.

5/23/2023: Time spent watching video online, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news channel asked if I could come in to opine about a recent survey on how much time people spend watching videos and video apps online. I told the hosts that while there’s definitely such a thing as too much TikTok or YouTube time, TV also accounts for a huge chunk of people’s video time and doesn’t give viewers any chance to create content of their own.

5/24/2023: Comcast Courts Cord Cutters With $20 ‘Now TV’ Skinny Streaming Bundle, PCMag

I couldn’t resist comparing the simplicity of the pricing in Comcast’s new skinny-bundle streaming option compared to the rates for its traditional pay-TV product–but then I remembered to check Now TV’s device support and compare it to the much broader compatibility of the Peacock service bundled with this.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Screengrab of story as seen in Chrome for Android,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

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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

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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.