Paul Boutin

Mark Durham has whipped up a list of more than 400 public 802.11b access points in America for the April issue of Wired magazine. It’s bigger than WiFinder’s database, and presented as a PDF file you can store on your computer for those times you can’t get online.

This isn’t a war-driver’s list of office LANs that will be shut off next week. Like WiFinder’s online database, each entry is a commercial or community-minded installation meant to draw Wi-Fi users to the location. A few are free residential bases set up by BAWUG members, but most are cafe, hotel, or airport sites that require a one-time fee or subscription through Boingo, Wayport, Surf and Sip, or VoiceStream’s MobileStar network. Will a Boingo subscription cover them all? I’ll post the answer as soon as I hear back on that.

As I reported for Salon last week, Wi-Fi bases are mostly springing up where there are travelling business customers to pay for them. Rick Ehrlinspiel at Surf and Sip says well-chosen sites can pay for themselves and be profitable in three months, rather than going broke as did blanket coverage schemes like Ricochet, or the original Starbucks project underwritten by MobileStar.

A two-page map showing the geographic distribution of these access points appears in the magazine’s Infoporn section this month as a companion piece. I assigned the project to Mark right before leaving Wired last fall, after editor in chief Chris Anderson asked for a map of real access points instead of yet another story on 802.11b vs Bluetooth. So of course I’m glad to see Mark’s always-thorough research making it to publication.

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Elsewhere, Reuters picked Addamark as the focus of a story about dot-com vets staying in the start-up game: Searle has put profitability before growth at his new company that sells software that aims to keep companies from drowning in event log data — talk that would have gotten him kicked to the curb at Bamboo.com.

[UPDATE: See "Hunt the Boeing" Answers with science writer Patrick Di Justo]

I’ve been linked to by one of those conspiracy sites that claims Flight 77 didn’t hit the Pentagon, as if I support their ridiculous claims. I’d be more likely to believe the counter-theory that these sites are part of a government plot to discredit the Internet.

Contrary to the claims on such sites that there are no photos showing the plane, the 757 is visible hitting the ground at the right of the first photo in this set at CNN. It’s disturbing, but impossible to miss. The accompanying CNN video points out the plane via highlighting.

Having seen plenty of airliner crash photos and talked to eyewitnesses from D.C., I admit the Hunt the Boeing asks some tricky math and science questions, but that’s about it. In the end, I believe what I do because of eyewitnesses and a credible network of sources in D.C., not photos that can be doctored and/or misleading.

Of course, we should still wonder why the Pentagon didn’t release the above photos until last week. If rumors on the Web prompted the brass to stop sitting on them, great. Let’s hope that happens more often. That government plot may be backfiring.