John McAfee, who once upon a time helped to pioneer antivirus software, leads an interesting life.
Lately, interesting would be defined as a cameo appearance at the 2014 Def Con security conference in Las Vegas, where he spoke at a seminar and delivered a prototypically inscrutable rant against the use of smartphones.
McAfee told the enraptured listeners that he no longer uses smartphones, since they use apps to spy on people and violate their privacy in many ways. He claimed that software companies get away with this by burying the right to snoop in user agreements that no one actually reads before jumping into using the app. It is not known how many of his listeners found these insights to be revelatory about Internet privacy in any way.
Just to ensure that the crowd knew for sure that it was really him behind that podium, he also regaled the attendees with tales about smoking marijuana while listening to an audio Bible, the age of consent, his fear of Google, receiving death threats from people in Belize (more on that later), and how he does not understand why Intel, which bought him out, stopped using his name on the product.
Perhaps that had something to do with his pronouncement that he no longer uses the product. Intel now markets the software as Intel Security.
The man who helped create the popular McAfee Security suite of antivirus, malware, phishing and identity protection for computers and mobile devices, and who later cashed out in 2010 when Intel bought the company to the tune of $7.68 billion, is technically a fugitive from justice. He is wanted for questioning in Belize, where he is a "person of interest" in a 2012 murder case there.
His stealthy self-deportation from Belize found him in Guatemala, where he faked a heart attack to provide cover for his return to the U.S.
He currently lives in an undisclosed location, with plenty of bodyguards and security systems.
He has also set up a website for logging consumer complaints about corporate abuses, poor customer service, parking tickets not deserved, and other injustices petty and earth-shaking. The site, BrownList, claims to have the wherewithal to investigate complaints and take up the battle on the complainant's behalf.
McAfee's entertaining behavior reminds us that if you're poor and you act like this, you will be diagnosed as crazy. If you're a wealthy man, like McAfee, you're just eccentric. In a way, he's the Howard Hughes of his generation.
