Tech News: The Mystery of McAfee

some news. Top of the news today is that yesterday we learned from authorities in Spain that John McAfee, who founded the McAfee anti virus company, was found dead in his jail cell. There is a lot for us to unpack here, because there are elements to McAfee's life story that sound like they could have come from some over the top film about excess and handle. McAfee founded the company back in the late nineteen eighties to market anti virus software, but he actually resigned his position in nine

sold off his stake in the company. So McAfee Anti Virus hasn't had anything to do with John McAfee for nearly thirty years now, and in fact, McAfee would go on to kind of slag off on McAfee anti virus, calling it unnecessary, recommending people not install it, arguing that

it had bloatwear in it. He even said at some point that he had never bothered to install anti virus software on his own computers, that rather he would just keep his devices UH disconnected from his own identity, he would not link them to him, and that he wouldn't go to sites that would typically host malware anyway. He went on to found or work for several other companies. He accumulated a pretty sizeable amount of wealth, but lost a great deal of that during the global financial crisis

around two thousand eight. He lived in Belize for quite a while, where authorities once rated his home on suspicion that he was connected to unlicensed drug production. That was a whole story, and he was also accused of having hired a hit man to torture and kill one of his neighbors in Belize. That was stemming from a long

kind of feud between the two UH. The neighbors certainly was murdered, and there were questions about whether or not McAfee was involved, either directly or, as is the case with the hitman allegation, indirectly McAfee fled Belize in the aftermath of that, and after refusing to show up in court for charges connected to that neighbor's murder, the court ordered him to pay twenty five million dollars to the neighbors next of ken, which was a judgment that McAfee

just dismissed out of hand. But then he had a habit of dismissing court judgments out of hand, kind of made it part of his His stick is not paying the court mandated finds that he got hit with multiple times. He toyed with presidential campaigns at least twice, but they never really seemed terribly serious to me. It seemed more

like almost a publicity stunt. Last October, Spanish authorities arrested McAfee as he was preparing to travel to Turkey, and the charge was that McAfee had been committing tax evasion for four years, essentially not filing taxes, which he thought of as being illegal. Uh. Turns out that's not how the US government sees it, and this week a Spanish court ruled that he would be extradited to the United States, a ruling that could have been appealed, but he was

found dead in his jail cell. Not long afterward, authorities say that it appears that it was suicide. McAfee himself actually sowed the seeds of out about suicide a couple of years ago. He claimed he would never do such a thing, and he got a tattoo that said whacked on.

It actually had like a dollar sign in w H A C K D. He argued that if he were ever found dead by quote unquote suicide, that all his true believers could take faith that it was actually murder, that he had been killed while in prison, And not long after authorities discovered his body, his own Instagram account posted an image of a giant Q on it, presumably

a reference to the Q and NON group. But McAfee also has a team of folks who worked with him, and some of them were managing his social media profiles. That has been a thing that's been going on for a while, so it's not like McAfee had some sort of dead man switch to to post a picture of Q. And while I'm certain there will be no shortage of conspiracy theories coming out about McAfee, I do want to point out that he was certainly not a reliable narrator.

By any stretch of the imagination. I'm not saying that there aren't questions about his death. There certainly are. There are questions, um, whether it was by suicide or some other means, there are definitely questions. However, I wouldn't take anything McAfee said in the past as something truly reliable. In rock Steady, the Spanish court had already ordered him to be extradite to the United States, which would give

the US the chance to prosecute McAfee. So the story that was being pushed around is that the US wanted McAfee dead. But if the US had just successfully one out an agreement to have McAfee extradite to the United States, seems like having a murdered wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I mean, I'm not like deep state Michael Crichton level kind of thing thinking sort of stuff. So maybe I'm just missing it. But my advice is,

don't go spreading conspiracy theories. Use critical thinking. You can ask questions. There's nothing wrong with asking questions, but it's the leaping two answers that part that is the problem. Um, I don't know what happened. I I'm inclined to think that this is a case where he committed suicide after coming to the realization that he was not going to be able to slip out of this like he had

previous times. But that's just a guess. I don't have the information to make, you know, a solid statement on it. I do believe that there will probably be a billion movies made about this guy in the years to come, maybe one with Adam Sandler playing the part. I think that, you know, this is sort of an uncut Gems kind of opportunity here. In other news, the reddit crowd over at Wall Street Bets might be doing a little bit

of a victory lab this week. Vice reported on Tuesday that White Square, a hedge fund that had recommended a short cell of game Stop stock, has shut down. All right, So if you're like me and financial stuff is a bit outside of your wheelhouse, let's go ahead and break all this down. And for the record, you know, I had to refresh myself on all this kind of stuff

because this isn't my world. But hedge funds are investment bouls in which people, typically really rich people, pour a lot of money into the fund in the hopes of turning it into a lot more money. So it's one of the many ways on how the wealthy get even wealthier. Anyway, hedge funds tend to have more risky strategies than other types of investment funds. Uh. It tends to be a high risk, high reward kind of situation. So when it works,

it's paying off big time. Hedge fund managers have to be accredited by the SEC, but in return, hedge funds have less oversight and less regulation than other types of funds, which gives them the freedom to make these kind of risky moves. All right, we got hedge funds. So what's a short sell? Well, if you suspect that a company's stock price is going to go down, you can do something called selling short. And essentially what's happening is you

don't own any of this company's stock already. Okay, you just think, oh, this company X is about to have a decline in stock price. Maybe you thought that the stock price was overvalued and it's going to be readjusted. Maybe you think the company's entering into some choppy waters. Whatever the case. So what you do is you borrow shares of that company's stock from some other investor. And you're essentially saying, I'll give these shares back to you

at this specific date. So you you're you set a date when you have to return the shares to that investor. Then you sell these borrowed shares, You wait for the price of the stock to go down. Then you buy back the shares you borrowed, but at a lower price. You return the borrowed shares and you get to keep the difference. So, in other words, uh, let's say that you borrow some shares and you sell these shares at twenty dollars apiece, but you buy them back when they're

down to five dollars a piece. That means you would make fifteen dollars per share profit. But if the price doesn't go down, if the stock price goes up, then you're in trouble because you still have to return those borrowed shares. So let's say you sold off the borrowed shares for twenty dollars each, but now the price is

fifty dollars each and you're due. That means you're gonna lose thirty dollars per share because you have to buy back the borrowed shares to return them to the other investor, so White Square shorted game Stop, and then, because a bunch of folks really wanted to mess with hedge funds, and more than a few of those folks also wanted to make some money in the process, a ton of small independent investors began buying up game Stop stock that eventually drove up the price to a point where when

it came time for White Square to return those shortened shares, the company was hurting pretty badly. Now, for the record, White Square reps say that the closure of the hedge

fund is unrelated to the game Stop stock issue. Instead, according to the reps, the issue was that two of the really big investors into that hedge fund withdrew their investments from the pool, which made the hedge fund untenable, and that this really was marking a shift toward a different approach to making investments just generally that's happening in

the market. Which might be true, But I do imagine that the company was rocked pretty hard by the game Stop issue, just you know, perhaps not enough to precipitate

the funds actual demise. Over in the UK, authority these want to have a word with Amazon and I t V News investigation captured footage of Amazon warehouse workers packing returned and unsold merchandise, including stuff like laptops, tv other electronics, books, into boxes, and those boxes had the word destroy on them, and that the workers then loaded trucks down with these boxes before driving the trucks over to landfills or recycling centers.

A former Amazon employee told the investigative team that workers were expected to dispose of more than a hundred thousand items every week. Activists pounced on this. They pointed out the enormous amount of waste that this generates, and they also questioned how can a company behave in this way, throwing out hundreds of thousands of products each week and still remain profitable. As Greta Thunberg pointed out, quote that's a clear sign that something is fundamentally wrong end quote.

And I concur if a company can afford to throw out hundreds of thousands of unsold products each month, you know, high end products at that, like TVs and computers, then something wacky has got to be going on in order to keep that company profitable. Now, Amazon reps have actually responded to this. They said that no items were actually

sent to landfills. In the UK though, that could be a qualifier, but they rather went to some recycling centers for a quote unquote energy recovery, and that the company routinely donates unsold items to charitable organizations in the like. Other unnamed Amazon employees seem to contradict this, but a full investigation would need to follow to really ferret out the truth. I think it's pretty phenomenal. It's kind of crazy to think about a company literally throwing out hundreds

of thousands of products. It just it's so wasteful, and you you sit there and think, if you had a different approach to business, you wouldn't have that waste, which presumably would mean you would profit more. But maybe there's other stuff going on that I just don't understand. I admit I look at the world when it comes to business. I look at the world in a pretty simplistic way, and I acknowledge that things are way more complicated than

I particularly understand. Finally, a change in how Google handles unlisted links could mean that we'll see some stuff sort of just disappear from the web, or at least become inaccessible. So in an email to YouTube creators, I got one of these emails. Just so you know, the company wrote quote.

In two thousand seventeen, we rolled out an update to the system that generates new YouTube unlisted links, which included security enhancements that make the links for your unlisted videos even harder for someone to discover without you sharing with them. We're now making changes to older unlisted videos that were

uploaded before this update took place. End quote. So in other words, the company is retroactively applying this updated security SCHEMEAU to YouTube and also to Google Drive documents as well that have you know, links in them, and users will be able to choose one of several options with regard to this. They can opt out of this change entirely by filling out a form. They have to do that by July twenty one in order to keep those

documents and those videos in their current unlisted states. So in other words, no change is made, the unlisted u r L remains the same, and that way people who have the links to those videos will still be able to get them, or embedded videos and other platforms that otherwise are unlisted will still be accessible. Or creators can change unlisted videos and make them public, which just gets around the problem. Now the unlisted videos are public, they're

publicly available. That will take care of it as well. They can also re upload the old video as a new unlisted video, so essentially they just swap out one for the other, or they can do nothing at all, and the unlisted videos that were posted before will switch over to become private videos, which means no one will be able to access it other than the channel creator

or channel administrator. Now why is this all important, Well, it means that any videos that were made before but are unlisted, but are also embedded on other platforms like on a blog or something like that, those videos will disappear unless the creators actually take one of these options. So if I had made a video in two thousand fifteen, and I made it unlisted on my channel, so you wouldn't just come across the video if you were to

visit my channel. However, I then embedded that video on say a personal web page or something, then that video is going to be a broken link. Later this year, you would go and you would find a like one of those YouTube embedded videos that just has the little X on it where like there's no video there, You push play and nothing happens. Because the link doesn't work, it's a dead link. The same is true as I

said with Google Drive links. So if you have links to documents created and Google Drive from before, that's unlisted documents and things like that, the same sort of rules apply. This was all in an effort to improve privacy and security, which I think is the right move, but it is going to be a hassle for some creators and for

channels that have been inactive or even abandoned. That might mean that that video content will just disappear from Discovery, so that videos that people once were able to watch suddenly they won't have access to them anymore because those will be switched to private and the channel administrators just don't deal with that channel anymore, which is kind of

a bummer. I mean, we always say that everything lasts forever on the Internet, but things like this, where you break links, that kind of stuff is an exception to the rule, and I've certainly had experience with this kind of stuff before air a change in policy meant that suddenly linked documents were no longer linked, and it is a huge pain in the butt when that happens. Anyway, that's the news for Thursday. June twenty one. I hope

you all have a great day, a great weekend. As I said, it is my birthday weekend, so make sure you go out and do something you know, nice and thoughtful for someone else. That's that'll be a great birthday present for me. Just doesn't have to be big, just a nice, thoughtful gesture to someone else. And after you do that selfless act, you are to turn your face to the heavens and cry out, this was all for you, Jonathan Strickland, and I'll know wherever I am, i'll know

that you did that. Now, if you have any suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter handle is tech Stuff h s W. I've been getting a bunch of those recently,

which is awesome. I am currently still working through the glossary of tech to rms, or rather tech acronyms and initialisms, But as soon as that series is over, I'm going to be tackling some of these suggestions sent in by listeners, so you can get your suggestions into and I look forward to hearing from you, and I'll talk to you again really soon. YEA tech Stuff is an I Heart

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