By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

When TIME hired Joshua Quittner to write about information technology, we knew we were getting a savvy reporter. What we didn't realize was that we were also getting a corporate raider. For an article in Wired magazine late last year, Quittner found out that McDonald's was one of several big corporations that had not registered their company names as domain names on the Internet (those letters that follow the @ symbol, identifying the sender). After trying in vain to find a company executive who could tell him why, Quittner simply registered the McDonald's name for himself.

When the article appeared, McDonald's realized it had to try to get its name back. Quittner offered to relinquish the name if McDonald's would pay to have P.S. 308, a New York public school with a special curriculum designed to attract all sectors of society, wired to the Internet on a high-speed connection. The company agreed. ``I took two information have-nots,'' says Josh, ``and turned them into information haves.''

With Quittner's arrival, TIME has definitely become an information have. He comes to us after eight years on the beat at New York Newsday, where he wrote a weekly column called ``Life in Cyberspace.'' Says Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who pioneered the info-tech beat at TIME before being promoted last year to senior editor: ``Josh not only knows his way around cyberspace--and can write about it with grace and wit--but he's amazingly prolific.''

Indeed he is. Quittner, 37, wrote his first story for TIME--on people in the U.S. returning their holiday computer gifts because they didn't work--a week before he was scheduled to report for duty. HarperCollins has just published his third book (written with his wife, Michelle Slatalla), Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace, about an on-line ``war'' between hacker gangs. Quittner, who got his first computer in 1979, has watched the interest in his field grow exponentially. ``People who used to be afraid of computers now can't seem to get enough of them,'' he says. ``Writing about this stuff has become very mainstream.'' We're happy Josh is around to help TIME navigate the waters.