In a short piece on warchalking, writer fails the test: The author of this article in Time magazine finds a warchalk symbol (so he says...I've yet to see one in the wild), and writes a good, short piece about it.

Good until he notes, Nobody knows who invented warchalking. This reminds me of some of the lines from my favorite canceled sci-fi animated series, Futurama, set 1,000 years in the future.

We're in the present, so I type who invented warchalking into Google, and most of the matches explain precisely, as is well known, Matt Jones invented it. He designed the sign, spread the meme, posted a PDF with the graphics in it. I wrote about him and warchalking for The New York Times, in fact.

Hilariously, the 2nd match on Google right now is this Time article. They have a lot of inbound links does Time magazine.

Time published a huge package of wireless stories about a week ago. They come off as a little bland to me, because I know everything that's in them. To an audience that knows little or nothing about Wi-Fi, I'm sure this sounds much more exciting. But it reads like circa 2002 newspaper coverage.

The articles all have some missed notes, too, mostly in the technical and statistical details. In an article detailing business use of Wi-Fi, this statistic is thrown in: a surprisingly small number of U.S. firms that have installed wi-fi networks. Fewer than 5% of U.S. workers use them today, according to an estimate by Gartner, a high-tech research firm.

Unfortunately, the author has confused five percent of workers with five percent of companies. In this News.com article from a few days ago, the reporter presents an array of statistics on business use, including overall industry sales figures, and cites Jupitermedia's number: 57 percent of businesses are using Wi-Fi already to some degree. (Damn, I even know that magazine reporter; we worked on our college paper together.)

Given that companies like Microsoft and Novell have thousands of workers -- basically everyone with a laptop -- using Wi-Fi all the time all day everywhere on campus, that five percent of all workers is the mobile, laptop-connected five percent. What percentage of U.S. workers have computers at all? What percentage have laptops? That would better contextualize the number.

Maryanne Murray Buechner's pieces, including this FAQ, are quite excellent, offering sensible accurate advice for installing and securing home networks. Her take on WEP and explanation of using WPA are on the money.