An Update on The McAfee Story

going to just do an episode a week. It will still be every week. I'm still gonna be working on this show. When the time has come to the point where we're able to go back to two a week, we will, So this is just temporary, nothing to panic about. I still love the show, is still going to be doing the show, but want you guys to be aware of it. So if you are looking for new episodes of Tech Stuff, they should be going up from this

point forward every Wednesday. So thank you guys so much for listening, and now on to today's episode, Get in Tech Technology with Tech Stuff from Stuff Tacon. Hey there, everyone, welcome to Tech Stuff. I am your host. Jonathan Strickland is today, I've got a little listener mail that I wanted to read. This listener mail goes Hey, Jonathan Kenny here, longtime listener, first time emailer. First off, love the show

as a lifelong tech geek. I love hearing about cool tech, historic hacks, interweb lore and all the topics you've covered, both with Lauren and all your cool guest hosts. On recent sign offs, you mentioned possible suggested suggested topics like personalities in tech, and I remember how interesting your episode with Chris was on John McAfee back in two thousand

and twelve. You've probably been following more recent events surrounding McAfee, his controversial actions and his wacky sense of humor, and I was wondering if an update to the original podcast is on the cards. Anyways, keep up the good work, you're interesting topics, and you are terrible pons, so bad they're good. Greetings from Northern Ireland, Kenny, Kenny, thank you so much. We are going to do an update on

Mr John McAfee now. In order to do this update, I am going to play a part of the episode that that Kenny was referring to with me and Chris Palette, so that those who have not heard it, because it goes all the way back to two thousand twelve, can understand what we're talking about. Now. This is about twenty minutes of an episode we did about McAfee and other

quote unquote eccentric personalities in technology. And after we listen to that classic piece of tech stuff, I'll come back and talk about some of the updates things that have happened since we recorded that show. So enjoy this classic piece of tech stuff lore about John McAfee, and I'll be chatting with you again in just a few minutes. You know, we've talked a lot about people who have very strong personalities, people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs

and um, you know, very very powerful personalities there. Uh. They may be friendly, they may be you know, have thorny anger management problems or whatever. But for the most part, you know, you can see a pretty good picture of the person involved. Um. And then there are other people who you go, wait, what what Yeah, And we've had a pretty big one of those towards the end of there's a spectrum of of normal, right right, there's some people who are further out on the edges of that spectrum.

I would say, people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are a little further out on that spectrum than others because they are very they were both very driven. Of course Steve Jobs unfortunately passed away, but both very driven individuals who were passionate about their interests and UM, and both reportedly had times when they were not the most pleasant of people to be around. So so yeah, you've

got that whole spectrum thing. Well that we wanted to talk today about some people who kind of fall outside that spectrum to the point where you'd say, all right, either this person has something seriously wrong going on with them, or perhaps the things that are being reported about this person are putting them in a really bad light. But in any way, they are clearly they're they're in a situation that is not normal, and they themselves may not

be what we would call normal. Um. And the first one we wanted to talk about was the one who was in the news recently is John McAfee. And McAfee is a guy who's he's been known as being an eccentric for uh for more than a decade UM. But McAfee he was born in England and raised in Virginia. He went to Roanoke College and got a degree in mathematics from that college. UH he spent time as a programmer for NASA's Institute for Space Studies. He worked for

a couple of big companies. He worked for UNIVAC, he worked for Xerox, UH nine, joined the Computer Sciences Corporation, and then he started working for Lockheed. And while he was working for Lockheed, that's when he started to develop the software that he has really become known for. In fact, it shares his name, the McAfee anti virus software. While at Lockheed, he was he became very interested in this idea of detecting and removing computer viruses because they were

just really starting to blossom at that time. We're talking about UM the late eighties, and you know, this is before we really get into the eras of web. The Web doesn't really exist yet, actually doesn't exist yet in the in the eighties UM and very few companies have access to some of the other Internet functionalities like file transfer protocols or email, although they do exist at this time.

But he was he could see that there was this rise in computer viruses and that because computers followed directions, there are ways of creating directions that make your computer do things that you don't necessarily want it to do, whether that's uh completely filling up a hard drive with meaningless information and breaking it, or installing some sort of of of uh trojan program that protects a nasty piece

of malware from being detected. He was very much dedicated to creating software that would that would find that and remove it. Now. UM, it's interesting to note a little bit about his background and UM, I I read not too long ago a piece from released by Wired called John McAfee's Last Stand by Joshua Davis also have a an e book available on Amazon that you can purchase. I think it's ninety nine cents and I think it's

a I want to say it's thirteen chapter something like that. Yeah. Uh, it's it's not a long long book, but it's it's you know, more than an article. Because apparently this guy from Wired was there for like six months yea. Um, but yeah, he he had been um, you know, as he was working for uh, you know, companies like omex Um in the early nineteen eighties. I mean, he was a pretty heavy drug user. Apparently I used cocaine, coeludes. Um, you know, he he had been a pretty heavy drinker

before that, even in his college days. It looks like um and apparently got to a point where he decided, you know, that was it, he wasn't going to do this anymore. And he really straightened up, um cleaned up. And this was you know, this was before he really got the idea to go in and do this himself,

to launch his own company, um so. And you know, it's not that I necessarily want to smear mud on John McAfee so much as I think it provides some context for for the kinds of things that happened later on in his life. Sure, and uh, he made some interesting decisions with that software that he created. One of those was that he decided upon the shareware distribution model, which ended up being a very effective way for him to get that software out there on the market. Um So.

In eighties seven he formed McAfee Associates, which was essentially in charge of creating this MacAfee anti virus software. But it wasn't that much longer. I mean, it was just in ninety four when he resigned from the company, and a couple of years later he sold his his stake uh in the company entirely and just completely got away from it. Um. At one point I hear that he

was valued at around a hundred million dollars. He himself stated that due to the economic depression and downturn and and all these other issues, that he was reduced too closer to four million dollars uh after that was all over, although more recently in two thousand twelve, he said that that was probably not entirely accurate. He may he may in fact have had a bit more than four million dollars UM. And this is where we start getting into

some pretty strange stuff. Um. He one thing was that he was really interested in this this concept of quorum sensing, now uh quick. Quarum sensing, especially when it refers to bacteria, is a way of that bacteria have of reacting in a certain manner, and that manner is completely dependent upon

how much bacteria is present at at time. So in other words, if you were to provide a stimulus to these bacteria, they would provide a response that would be based mostly upon how many other uh instances that bacteria are present. So if there is X number or greater, it will respond one way, But if it's fewer than that it will respond a different way. And uh McAfee said that he was doing this in order to try and develop new anti biotics, antibacterial treatments, things that could

help humans, uh in a medicinal way. And he relocated to two Belize, just in Central America, the only country in Central America, by the way, for which English is the official language, although from what I understand it is not the most prevalent language spoken there. It is however, the official one. Anyway, he moved to Belize, Um created this lab in his home in a apparently a pretty large compound there, but he has a lab at that compound.

That was from what he was saying, all about studying this stuff to try and create better medicines, mostly medicines that he was looking at. He was looking at a lot of natural elements, things that were um found out in rainforests, things like that as the key to these sort of medicines. That's what he was claiming. Yeah, it would seem that his his entrepreneurial spirit hasn't completely left because he's he's done this. He's also even apparently tried to come up with a a sport. Yes when he

was living out in the southwest. Now this is before he moved to Belize. Um. Apparently, Um, I was listening to a radio report from someone who had been uh you know, who had met McAfee more than once, and he said, yeah, I want you to come out here and check out this new sport, apparently, narrow treking. You're supposed to fly, I don't know, very very close to the ground, um. Ideas, you fly very low to the ground using some form of aircraft. It might even be

a hang glider with a motor attached to it. But the idea is that you are flying close to the ground so that you get that real sense of speed and danger from being you know, just a very short distance away from crashing to a potential terrible injury or death. And in fact, McAfee was involved in a wrongful death lawsuit that was the result of a person dying from

an arrow trekking accident. Um. So I mean this was you know, he's known as a daredevil as well as many other things, which will I guess we can kind of segue into. Now this is gonna get really weird, folks, because here here's the thing is that there are a lot of different reports. There's what McAfee has said through or we presume it's McAfee, through various blogs and Twitter at count Twitter messages, things like that, there are things that he has said, there are things that people who

know him have have said. There's things that journalists who have investigated this have said, and honestly, we don't have the whole story. But no matter who's telling the story, it's weird. UM well known that the Belize police have visited him on more than one occasion. Yes, they're their gangs unit actually rated his house in April two thousand twelve, the Gang Suppression Unit in Orange Walkdown, Belize. They rated his home under suspicion that his laboratory was actually producing

crystal meth. That that was in fact what he was interested in making and not UM medicine. And in fact there are there are journalists, they're bloggers who have said that, UM that that McAfee was very active in online discussion forums that were dedicated to drug manufacturer like as an illicit drugs or or recreational drugs UM. Although there is a woman who um he talked into a job offer to come down and work on UH medicinal drugs as well,

so that again, this is their conflicting report. So they could be that these reports that he was the one who was on these recreational drug sites, maybe that wasn't him, you know, because they were using uh pseudonyms, I mean handles,

they weren't It wasn't just him there. But Gismoto published a report that very much seemed to indicate that he was one of the people on this recreational drug forum talking about trying to perfect a typical kind of drug that would, um well, supposed to enhance his his sexual experiences as well as give a sense of euphoria and supposedly would create a very gradual and mel oh come down afterward. So uh and and he the guy who was posting under this name, posted a lot about this

particular kind of drug. Um Whether or not that was John McAfee, however, is still a question. Now. One of the things that people have said is that the drugs that he was talking about often can create a sense of paranoia in someone who's using those drugs. Now, again, whether or not McFee was using those drugs is a is a question that's left open. However, I think it's safe to say that paranoia is something he has felt,

Yes he has. He has demonstrated, uh, paranoid tendencies. Now again there's always that joke just because your paranoia doesn't mean they're not out to get you. But we can't really say that, but we can definitely say that he has shown some some paranoid tendencies. One of those is trying to evade the police. Now, as of the recording of this podcast, which is at the end of November twelve,

he's still on the run from police and Belize. And the reason why the police are interested in him is that someone who lived near him, Gregory Vellant Fall, was found shot dead a few several meters away from from McAfee's property and um Fall and McAfee had a history of some arguments, some some uh, some disagreements, one of which was that Fall said that McAfee mcfee's dogs, but I think McFee owned like eleven dogs, but that his dogs were barking all the time and that was driving

Fall crazy. And uh. One of the other issues that happened recently was that several of McAfee's dogs, I think four of them died of poisoning. So the implication here and again this is all unfolding, so we don't have the full information, but the implication is that perhaps Fall or someone that Fall knows, poisoned the dogs, and that perhaps there was an act of retribution against Fall. So when the news first broke, it sounded like McAfee was

not just a person of interest but a suspect. Since then, the Belize police have said, no, he's not a suspect. We just want to talk to him because we want to find out who killed Fall. It's possible that perhaps someone around McAfee killed Fall for McAfee, not necessarily on McAfee's command, because, as it turns out, McAfee has seemingly started to hang out with some pretty rough customers in Belize. Yep, the photography that that accompanies the Wired book includes some

people with some very large guns. Yeah. The stories that are essentially I'm sorry, I mean, there's a guns are pretty heavily restricted in Belize too. So the story essentially is that it sounds like McAfee has um formed relationships with several of the drugs in Belize. Now, it may be that he was doing this in an attempt to get hold of materials for his legitimate medical you know, research that could be the case, it would not be necessarily the wisest move a person has ever made to

get involved with drug lords, but that's a possibility. Now a lot of other people are saying, no, what's happening is McAfee got involved with them so he could get the ingredients he needed to make the recreational drugs that he was interested in, which again we don't know, um so. Anyway, it's possible that maybe one of these you know, gang members that he hangs out with committed the murder and

it wasn't McAfee at all. So we don't know if McAfee shot Fall, or if someone McAfee knows shot him, or if it was just some random crime that seems that seems the most unrealistic of the various possibilities, but we don't know, um so. McAfee has been on the run and has been posting, or at least there have been blog post attributed to McAfee that have posted in his absence that have made things sound even more strange, for instance, that McAfee has been using elaborate disguises to

to hide in plain sight. Yes, he appeared as a German um tourist basically using profanity and just shouting at people randomly, or tried to uh disguise himself and hunch over so that he didn't appear as tall as he normally is, and uh spoken heavily accented English, trying to sell trinkets to uh he said even or this person said he even attempted to sell something to an Associated Press reporter who didn't recognize him, a wooden dolphins. Yes, uh,

that the reporter suddenly had an urgent call to attend to. Yeah, it's in the blog post McAfee assuming in his McAfee claimed that he nearly sold one of these trinkets before the p reporter was called away. Um. Now the police police have been asking him to turn himself in so that he can talk about whatever it is that happened to fall, like who who could have possibly killed him,

and to clear his name. McAfee in turn, has said that, or at least according to these reports and according to people who know him who say they've talked to him, says that he doesn't want to go into police custody because he firmly believes that the police will kill him once he's in their custody. Yeah, he um. He even reacted to the that's the way he's on the run now. Actually was because when the when the police showed up, he thought they were coming to hassle him again. So

he here, that's what he says. Anyway, so he escaped before they could catch him. Yeah, he um. So anyway, he's saying that the police are definitely going to kill him if they take him into custody. Uh. He's also at one point apparently suggested that, uh that fall falls death was really meant, was that there was a hit gone wrong. It was meant to hit McAfee and instead hit Fallum. That was one of the other possibilities I

heard a couple of weeks before we record this podcast. Um. So it's these are these are definitely tendencies that we would classify as paranoite. Um. And honestly, again we don't know all the information. It maybe that perhaps McAfee is a very eccentric but otherwise mostly innocent person. Now it's true that his personal life also has some other complications.

Apparently he has several people living at that compound with him, including several young women with whom he often has sexual relations, and including one who is identified over and over as a seventeen year old girlfriend. But then there are other women, uh, and and at that compound as well, and so I mean they're they're definitely. So it's kind of this weird, larger than life, odd David Lynch sort of story thing. Like if if I saw the US in a film,

I would think the Coen Brothers made it. Yeah, it's just it's just so weird when you think of somebody who has gone down in history as coming up with a very successful tech product. Um. You know, you you don't typically think of that. You think of somebody like Jobs or Gates or um, maybe Larry Ellison. Uh, you know some some people who they've got lots of money,

they live a jet setter's lifestyle. Maybe maybe not um, but you don't really typically think of you know, when you hear something like, well, John McPhee is a person of interest in this murder case, and really that's just strange. All right, now you've heard the beginning of that story and how crazy it God and believes. But now let's

talk about what's happened since we recorded that episode. We recorded it back and I think November of two thousand twelve and In fact, quite a lot happened after November two thousand twelve, just to round out the year. So we left off with McAfee on the run and in disguise, occasionally updating his status through a blog. The Prime Minister of Belize named Dean Barrow stated that McAfee was paranoid

and quote bonkers. In the quote, he said McAfee was refusing to answer questions as a person of interest, and said McAfee was unfairly portraying Belize as a corrupt nation. So we have two very different stories going on here. McAfee is claiming that the government of Belize is inherently corrupt uh and that the police were not just out to ask him a few questions, but we're possibly going to actually kill him. Meanwhile, you've got the Prime Minister

of Belize saying this is not true. We're just investigating the death of a person who was killed in beliefe ease and all you want to do is ask some questions. In fact, Dean Barrow said this is so high profile now, it's so focused on in the media that it would be ridiculous for any harm to come to McAfee in Belize. Police custody. It would end up being proof that what McAfee was saying was true, which doesn't make any sense on the part of Belize. However, that being said, McAfee

was having none of it. He did not want to come back. On December five, two thousand and twelve, McAfee was arrested by Guatemalan police, who tracked him to a posh Guatemala City neighborhood. They arrested him on the charge of entering Guatemala illegally. Now McAfee had sought asylum in Guatemala to avoid contact with the police force in Belize. The police in Guatemala determined his location by a pretty simple method. They looked the meta data on a photo

uploaded to VICE. A group of VICE reporters were actually traveling with McAfee and documenting the whole experience, and they failed to strip the photo of metadata before they uploaded it, so the photo actually included information on where the picture was taken, and the police were able to use that to narrow their search and catch McAfee. Now, Guatemalan authorities announced they would deport McAfee, though at the time it wasn't certain if they would send him to Belize or

send him to the United States. Keep in mind macfee's actually was born in the UK. He lived in the US when he created McAfee software, then moved to Belize. This is a pretty complicated issue here now. No no, no formal charges have been leveled on McAfee from Belize, so that also complicated matters. A few days later, McAfee complained of experiencing symptoms that were similar to that of a heart attack, and in fact, it was widely reported that he suffered a heart attack and was rushed to

a hospital in Guatemala. Meanwhile, his attorney was filing appeals for his deportation, and his attorney actually said that McAfee had not suffered a heart attack per se, but rather an acute anxiety attack and actually was having changes in his blood pressure and that was what had set off his his uh, his symptoms, and that he had even fainted from this. Meanwhile, the doctor said there was no reason to hold McAfee and they discharged him from the hospital,

so he went back to the detention center in Guatemala. Meanwhile, you have these appeals coming in and I guess either the Guatemalan government figured that sending him to the United States was the most logical conclusion, or they just didn't want to deal with him anymore. At any rate, they deported McAfee to Miami on December twelve, two thousand twelve.

He then claimed that he had essentially faked all those symptoms in order to give his attorney enough time to file the appeals before he could be deported to Belize. McAfee then offered a twenty five dollar reward for information that could lead to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for Gregory Falls murder. There's a lot to say about this. I personally have never spoken with John McAfee. I do not know him at all, so I only

know of him. I know what I've read, and I know that there are a lot of conflicting depictions of McAfee and the media. There's some that portray him as very much the victim. There's some who suggest that he is manipulating the media and people around him, and we'll talk more about that in a second. So who is actually telling the truth here is hard to say, but it's certainly seems to be the case that McAfee has a history of what he calls playing hoaxes on people.

Some might say that the hoax is an excuse for his behavior, saying that, oh no, he wasn't really trying to achieve this underhanded tactic. He was just playing a trick. Um. It all sounds fishy to me, But I don't know the man, and I was not involved in any of this, so I can only speak from my own personal perspective here. Anyway, let's move on to two thousand thirteen, because we got

so much more to talk about here. So in April, it's announced that the drug smuggler George Young, whose own biography was told in the film Blow That was the movie that had Johnny Depp playing the part of Young, that George Young would write McAfee's biography. It was going to be called No Domain. However, as of August when I'm recording this, it has yet to be published. And honestly, when I was doing searches on this, I couldn't find

any updated information. Now that could very well be that this is still a book that's in the writing process. Books to time to write and to edit and to publish. My father is an author, and I have seen this process take more than a year. Several times. But that being said, I haven't seen any more updates on this, so I don't know if this project is dead in the water or not, but it certainly made the news.

Back in also inteen and May, McAfee sat down for a four hour interview with USA Today, and in that interview, he proclaimed his innocence of the Gregory Fall murder and suggested perhaps it was another American expatriate who committed the murder and said that he believed believes authorities were persecuting him. That is McAfee, because he had refused to pay a two million dollar bribe earlier, and by this time he was living near Portland, Oregon. This is where the story

gets even more weird and complicated. Belies authorities say they have no idea who McAfee is talking about with this or American expatriate. McAfee says it was another neighbor. The Belize authorities say, we don't even know that such a person exists, And again it becomes difficult to figure out who is telling the truth. And it may very well be that the person exists and the Belize authorities aren't aware of the person. That's a possibility to it could

be that both parties are telling the truth. I honestly don't know. Also, in May of twenty thirteen, Jeff Wise publishes a piece in Psychology Today about McAfee and alleges that McAfee delights in manipulating the media and twisting stories for his own amusement. Essentially that he finds it entertaining and possibly advantageous to manipulate the media and create a narrative vision of what who he is and what he's

all about. It's not entirely clear what Wise thinks actually happened with McAfee in Belize, and it's possible that Wise himself isn't really sure what happened because McAfee has this weird behavior. He says that he visited McAfee in Belize and felt very much ill at ease during that visit. He had visited him more than once, but on his final visit to McAfee and Belize, he seems to indicate that he felt like he was in danger or potentially

in danger. He saw that there were security that were armed that were walking around, there were no other people there besides the security, and some women hanging around, and

that he felt it was a dangerous situation. He also reported that a former partner of McAfee's who was working on the antibiotic project, had said that McAfee had switched things out eventually, had decided instead of going after antibiotics UH, to concentrate on drugs that would affect the female libido in other words, to convince women to have sexual relations

with men, which is super duper creepy. And she also alleged that he was, if not abusive, he was at least very scary around her, and she felt like she needed to escape that situation. So all of this points to some pretty negative depictions of McAfee UM that seemed to fall in line with what other people have said. But McAfee himself says that this is all incorrect, that none of this is really who he is UM and in fact wise would go on to say that McAfee

shared several qualities with people who have psychopathic personalities. UM. He didn't go so far as to call McAfee an actual psychopath, just said that he appears to have some personality traits that are similar to that of psychopaths, including things like making grandiose announcements or plans UH and also having like this kind of paranoid persecution complex that he is so important that other entities wish to knock him off his pedestal, like the idea that he himself is

the target of a lot of uh scrutiny and of spying, and he's also actually a target of assassins, that that he believes these things because of his his his feeling of self importance, that's wise his position. He also says that McAfee seems to have very little care or regard about how he affects other people, which is another quality of a psychopath um But again, Wise never actually says that McAfee's a psychopath. He says he has some psychopathic tendencies,

just subtle distinction. Also, also in May two thousand thirteen, two of the buildings on McAfee's compound, back and Belieze, were burned down. And it all depends upon the account you read, and some accounts it's called a brush fire that's spread to the compound, and that these two buildings burned down as a result. McAfee made statements that essentially made it sound like he believed these fires were arson, that they were essentially set possibly by the authorities of

Belieze on his former compound. Again, no way of telling what the truth is here. In June, McAfee shoots a spoof video. This is still in two thousand thirteen. He shoots a spoof video called how to uninstall McAfee anti Virus. And this is all done as a joke. It's a pretty tasteless joke in some cases, but it is a joke, and it's mostly McAfee pointing poking fun not just at the anti virus software that still has his name but he has no connection to, but also poking fun at

the public image of McAfee himself. So in the video, at first he's wearing a smoking jacket that's over a tuxedo, and he explains that he still gets tons of requests from people about how to uninstall the McAfee any virus software, but he says, I don't know because I'm not connected to it. I haven't had anything to do with that software for more than fifteen years. Then he lights a cigarette using a one dollar bill and then starts reading

messages from various people about the McAfee software. And these messages have lots and lots of profanity in them. This whole video, by the way, is probably not safe for work for most people. If you work in like an off typical office environment, I would say probably not safe, and also shows McAfee surrounded by women who are wearing various sexy costumes like a you know, like the sexy

nurse costume, that kind of stuff. He's also surrounded by guns and supposedly indulging in rugs like he's clearly uh snorting various stuff using a crazy straw at one point. Um, but uh, clearly this is played up in a big way. Also, meanwhile, a technician is attempting to explain the uninstalling process while all of this other stuff is going on. And um, it's a weird video. Again, it's obviously a joke, it's not meant to be taken seriously, and it does incorporate

a lot of the behaviors McAfee has been accused of. Uh, and I assume an attempt to say this is ridiculous, this isn't who I am. In November, McFee was sued by Gregory Fall's daughter in a wrongful death lawsuit. Now McAfee said the timing seemed rather convenient to him, as it was public knowledge that he had lost nearly everything back in Belize and had to start back from scratch, but no one sued him during those months when he had nothing. It was only when he began to long

a new business that, uh, this lawsuit came forward. And so he was essentially alleging that Gregory Fall's daughter only sued him because he clearly had some money again, and that it wasn't in an effort to actually get justice for the murder of her father. That I'm I am definitely inferring a lot from what McAfee said in the

various reports, but that seems to be the gist of it. Uh. He even mentioned that his efforts to launch a business had been covered in the media and that he had even made statements saying he didn't have to seek out venture capital in order to launch his business. So he was just suggesting that Falls family was jumping at an opportunity at that point. McAfee also did found a new

company at that point called Future Tense Central. Uh. It's dedicated to online security and privacy, and I'll talk a little bit about the product they offer when we get to twenty fifteen, but first let's move on to thousand fourteen. In July, McAfee is found to have been legally responsible for the death of Robert Gilson, who died in an ultra light aircraft crash in two thousand six. The pilot of that aircraft was Joel Gordon Batau, which was McAfee's nephew,

who also died in that crash. U The charges were that Bto didn't really have a full pilot's license, so therefore was not qualified to teach this in the first place, and that it was McAfee who was responsible because McAfee ran the business promoting what he called aerotrekking, which is a sport in which small aircraft are flown at low altitudes over rough terrain. So McAfee was ordered to pay

two and a half million dollars in damages. Also in fourteen, Intel, which had purchased McAfee software, decided to rename McAfee and call it Intel Security, and this rebranding was in part to distance the product from John McAfee himself, and that was probably because of all the negative press that was coming up around John McAfee and the descriptions of his behavior.

But for his part, McAfee said he was really happy that Intel renamed the software because he had had no connection with McAfee software since he got out of the company in the mid nineties, and he felt that the product was a subpar, inferior product, and it's still had his name on it. So he said, I'm glad they changed the name of the stuff because I don't want to be associated with that program. He had some probably stronger language to describe all that. By the way, now

let's get on up to two thousand and fifteen. I'm skipping over a lot of stuff because honestly, to cover all the different elements of McAfee's life would probably take me another episode or two, and most of them are again elements that it's hard to describe exactly what happened because there's so many different accounts, and as people have said, McAfee himself maybe an unreliable narrator. I'll say maybe, because

again I don't know the man. But in two thousand fifteen, Spike TV commissions a six part mini series on McAfee, so they followed him around quite a bit this year, uh and leading up to August two thousand fifteen. I'm just gonna skip straight to it. Because a lot has happened this month. I'm recording this on August two thousand fifteen. So in August two thousand fifteen, McAfee is arrested in Tennessee for driving under the influence of prescription drugs while

in possession of a handgun. So he's driving under the influence and he has a handgun in his car, both of which together are very much against the law in Tennessee, and so he's arrested and booked for that. Uh. He was released on five thousand dollars bond, and he wrote about it online and said he apologized if he offended anyone with the way he likes to dance around the

boundaries of what is considered to be normal. Now, I'm gonna take just a little moment here to express my own personal opinion about this, And keep in mind this is my personal opinion, but I feel that if you are operating a vehicle while under the influence of drugs, prescribed or otherwise, you are no longer just dancing around what is to be normal. You are taking a risk not just to your own safety, but the safety of

everyone else around you. If you are driving while your abilities and your judgment are impaired, then you are a danger to other people out there. And that goes beyond just being eccentric or deciding that normal isn't for you. That's being irresponsible. So I very much take issue with him saying I'm sorry if you're offended. First of all,

never use that phrase. Don't ever say I'm sorry if you feel that way, or I'm sorry if you're offended, because you're still putting the responsibility the accountability on the person you are supposedly apologizing to. If you're actually apologizing, apologize for whatever it was you did. Don't say I'm sorry you're hurt or I'm sorry if that makes you angry, because you're suggesting that the other person is responsible for what has happened. If you're not sorry, then you're not sorry.

I'm not going to tell you to apologize if you feel like you shouldn't apologize, but if you feel like you should apologize, it's much better. It doesn't feel good at the moment, but you'll feel better afterwards, trust me. All Right, tangent aside, let's get back to McAfee. He appears at def Con. That's a big hacker conference. In case you're not familiar. Uh, it's a conference where a

lot of white hat hackers get together. Not just white hat hackers, they're hat hackers there too, white hat being the people who test various systems for vulnerabilities and then attempt to make that information known to the entities responsible for the systems so they can patch those vulnerabilities and make the systems stronger. There's also black hat hackers which look for vulnerabilities in an effort to exploit them, not to make the system stronger, but to be able to

use the system for their own purposes. So it def con. McAfee promoted a product called demons Saw, which is a product from Future Tents, that company he founded back in two thousand thirteen. And demons Saw is an attempt to create a very safe encryption process that doesn't require public and private encryption keys. And I've talked about encryption keys in previous episodes, so I'm not going to go into that.

But what these usually use our random number generators to create the the the encryption key itself, and it has to have some sort of seed to go into a random number generator to get that random number. Because machines are actually not good at actually generating random numbers. You typically feed some information into a machine and you get a random quote unquote random number after a series of operations are performed on that data. Uh, And there are

a lot of different ways of doing this. You might use the amount of time it takes between typing a word, like the time between each letter being pressed down. That might be the information that ends up generating an encryption key, or it might be something like a weather pattern where you have a sensor picking up a change in air pressure or humidity or something along those lines, and that becomes the information that then is fed through a random

number generator to create an encryption key. But demon saw was a is an idea where the encryption channel is created through shared experiences, meaning that you and the people you wish to communicate with all end up sharing some

sort of experience. It might be a picture that's on the Internet, or a sound file, or some other web based or Internet based thing that you all have in common that ends up being the information that's fed through the random number generator because that way, it's the shared experience is something that is unique to the group. At least that's the idea, And this was something that McFee worked with Eric J. Anderson on. Eric J. Anderson is a coder and a programmer. He's also known for working

on video games. He's a programmer for rock Star and worked on g T A five Grand Theft Auto five and the criticisms I've read of this mostly rely on the fact that one, it does not appear to have why spread adoption. There are not a lot of people using it right now, and to um, there haven't been any third party UH analysts who have had a chance to look at this and test it to make sure

it's actually secure. All the the notifications we have about the security of the product comes straight from McAfee or Anderson, and therefore you know, you you don't know if you can trust those statements or not. So that also happened at def Con. McAfee held an A M A and asked me anything on Reddit UH, and it was long.

He did this just a few days ago from when I'm recording this six days previously, so sometimes like August one, he held this a m A and um, I printed the whole thing out, and it's a lot of stuff in it. He talked about tons of things, including UH, the Internet, of Things and how it could pose a serious risk to security, something I actually agree with. I in fact, I agree with a lot of the things

McAfee says about security in general. I don't necessarily believe all the information he cites, but I definitely agree with a lot of the conclusions he's come to. UM like the idea that the Internet of Things could be a huge security issue. Whether it's because it introduces more vulnerabilities

into a system, which is entirely possible. If I hook up a whole bunch of different products to my home network and those products aren't really secure, then you might be able to get an intrusion on my network through

one of these products. Uh Also, he said that anti virus software is becoming less useful, which I would also agree with, mainly because you know, back in the day when anti virus software was first invented, when McAfee had started working on anti virus software, viruses were being produced any slowly. You would get a release occasionally, maybe a few times in a month. These days, there's tons of

malware being released. Lots of it tends to be uh tweaks to earlier types of malware, but you just have a sheer enormity of viruses and other types of malware hitting the Internet every single day, and anti virus software can't keep up with all of that. So it is getting to a point where anti virus software is not

really doing the job that we needed to do. He also said that uh, in Belize, there is quote nothing illegal that the government there is not into end quote, essentially saying Belize government is doing all sorts of illegal things. He accused the Minister of Defense of Belize of being the largest dealer in human trafficking, for example, So lots of different accusations from him in this a m A

uh there were level that believes um. McPhee also said that he thought, and this was in a separate article, that the Ashley Madison hack, that's the website that was geared to UH two people who wanted to have extramarital affairs, very famous hack there that has it's the story still unfolding, but several gigabytes of data have been released to the

dark web. He said he thinks that the Ashley Masson hack wasn't really a hack, it was a leak, meaning that someone from within the company itself, either a current or former employee took that information from the company and then released it on the dark web. He also said he thought it was a solo job. He didn't think it was actually a team, although the the party claiming responsibility refers to itself as a team. And he also

thought that this solo person was a woman. And he cites unnamed sources on the dark web as his sources for this information, which doesn't do a whole lot for the credibility of the claims because they can't be you know, they can't be be ratified. We can't find out if in fact this is accurate. Um. However, I will say that it is. It does make some sense for it to be an internal leak as opposed to a hack,

simply because of the huge amount of information UM. It would be easier to get that from within the company than to try and access it from outside the company, particularly if you don't know how the company's UH data is structured. In fact, that was one of the arguments that McAfee made was that the person who grabbed all this information clearly knew where to look for it, and that suggested they already had worked for the company. As for the fact that he believes it to be a woman.

He cites the language used in the commu nications from the Responsible Party as being that the words and language that a woman would choose, which to me sounds incredibly sexist, but again that's my own opinion. McAfee also has spoken

out against smartphones. He said that they are essentially spying machines and says that somewhere around a hundred million or a hundred fifty million devices at the very least have been compromised by various types of malware, and that each key stroke can be logged, the camera can be activated remotely, and the microphone can pick up on conversations and more. He talks about not just hackers, but the government releasing

malware that could allow for this sort of thing. Uh, And certainly there are types of malware out there that will do this kind of stuff if you were to install it on your your device. Whether the numbers he sites are accurate is another question, and it may be that he's being conservative now as of the recording of this update, I tried to go to the quorum x website that's the antibiotic company that McAfee founded, but it

no longer appears to have an active website. Going to quorum x dot com gave me a no result both on my computer and on my my phone. And there is a Facebook page for the company, but it hasn't been updated since two thousand twelve. However, the Twitter account for the company has one recent tweet on August twenty, two thousand fifteen. It essentially was sharing a news story that related back to some of the research that was going on in Belize, or supposedly going on in Belize.

And if you look at that to the next tweet on the list, there's a huge gap. The next most recent tweet dates from September two thousand twelve. So what's up with that? Who knows? Um? Most people just say that that company doesn't really exist anymore. Uh. Also, McAfee himself is quite a character. I think he revels in being a character. I don't know what the man is like personally, but he certainly seems to relish his role in the public spotlight to some degree or another. Uh.

He doesn't appear to necessarily shy away from it. So UM, I don't know. I don't know that I have a better grasp on who this man is than I did back in two thousand and twelve. To be perfectly honest, his behavior is so very different from that which I am accustomed to in the people that are around me. That's very difficult to to say one way or another. I think he has um or he appears to have

a very large paranoia streak going through him. Uh. I think if what he says, if he sincerely believes what he says, he's probably more paranoid than needs to be. He seems to suggest that there are lots and lots of people all out to get him all the time. And I'm not sure he's really that important in the grand scheme of things. I don't know that he's as important as he uh seems to to think he is. But that's my own personal opinion, and it's all based

on things that are reported in the media. It may be that if I had a conversation with the man, I would go back and say, no, he's very much a genuine person and his fears are warranted. But based upon my limited perspective, that's kind of the feeling I end up getting um And again, you never know who to believe in these things, but it's definitely one of the strangest stories I've ever looked into with technology and

definitely worth looking into it. As an update, I'll continue to keep an eye but on McAfee because I'll want to see that this mini series. There was also supposed to be a Dateline special. Uh, The Real Blacklist is

a series on Dateline where they did folks. They would focus on various weird stories, crime stories, and there was going to be one on on John McAfee and it was talked about way back in March of but I haven't found any information on the actual episode, and I don't know if it just never aired or if for some reason it's not popping up in search. I don't know, So if you have come across that episode, send it to me tech stuff at how stuffworks dot com because

I would love to see it. I really did look for it for this episode, but could not find the actual one. So if you happen to have that, let me know. I'll check it out because I want to hear more about this and find out if there's any other information to really kind of glean some light on this stuff. All right, hold the presses. I recorded this update. I had all that information I added in you know we threw in that at twenty minutes segment of a

classic tech Stuff podcast. It was ready to go, it was in the can, it was prepared to publish, and then of course Mr McAfee goes and does something else crazy. So after I wrapped up the recording of that update, McAfee then declared that he intended to run for president of the United States in two thousand and sixteen, and that he would be founding a new party, so he

would not be running as either a Democrat or a Republican. Instead, he will have a new party, which by the time this episode goes out he may have named, but as I am recording right now, it is so far an unnamed party. But I figured I had to throw that in. It would have been ridiculous to have an update on McAfee and leave out the tiny fact that he is going to run for president. And why is he running

for president? Well, he says that the main reason is because he feels that the candidates running for president have been for years completely ignorant when it comes to technology, and he feels that technology is playing an ever increasingly important role in our lives, and that whomever is leader of the United States needs to have an innate understanding of technology in order to be an effective leader. Uh that sounds pretty you know, reasonable on some levels. I'm

just not sure if McAfee is supposed to be the guy. Um, I don't know. He's had a pretty crazy life, as we have explored. But why do you, guys think? I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are on the subject. Right me at tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. Tell me what you think about McAfee's bid for presidency. Do you think it's sincere? Do you think it's just a cry for attention? Do you think he makes good points? Would you vote for him? I want to hear from you, guys,

and now I gotta say goodbye. I will talk to you next week. I hope you have a great one and you'll hear from me again. Really So for more on this and balthands of other topics, is it how staff works dot com