Mark Brandon, a polar oceanographer at the Open University who specialises in public understanding of science, compiled his own account of recent communication on the Arctic.
One man claims to have had some fun with the tool at a New York Starbucks recently, looking at what a fellow WiFi user ordered on Amazon and then sending him a message about it from his own Facebook account.
But it is profoundly embarrassing for him that it was not till the end of 2010 that - onhis own account - he began to learn of the scale of malpractice at newspapers that were his responsibility.