11.19.12
The Love Blog of John McAfee
I’d noticed WhoisMcAfee over the weekend and decided to ignore it. However, media fascination with the life of the avuncular perv ex-king of anti-virus, John McAfee will thrust it in everyone’s face.
From McAfee’s blog, aka The Hinterland, the freshest entry:
Many have commented here about me being used by women, or controlled by women, or the reverse – I am taking advantage of gullible, naive women. Many have commented that these women were only with me because of my money – a fact that I have to agree with. I am wealthy and living in a country of extreme poverty. Parents here “promote??? attractive daughters to men with money constantly. It helps the families through “trickle down???.
Sam, and others, can verify if they choose, that I am not foolish enough to believe that many young women could love a 67 year man. Being loved does not interest me much. Loving does. I truly love, not with a desire to possess or control, but with compassion and empathy. I care immensely, about many people. What they may or may not feel for me is their own issue.
Up front, before Sam and I became intimate, I explained to Sam that I did not expect her to love me. I only expected honesty to the degree that she could muster it. She tells me many times a day that she loves me and I smile. I take is a sweet gesture, since it is spoken with sweetness. I do not believe that anyone can ever know another’s heart.
McAfee’s comment policy, which seems wise, all things considered:
We are posting nearly everything. Comments like “please kill yourself??? and “how long have you been shagging that whore??? are sent immediately to the trash. Questions that have been asked, and answered, dozens of times likewise go to the trash. All spam goes to the trash. Everything else is posted.
I think that’s enough. Proceed at risk of your own brain damage.
I suspect my Ernest Hemingway/Hunter Thompson allusion on Sunday was correct. Add a little Peter Matthiessen crazy, too, I think.
Matthiessen is most famous for Far Tortuga, a novel of a group of sailors turtle fishing in the Caribbean. Many years ago I interviewed him briefly. He was a bit tight, which seemed a not uncommon condition.
McAfee cannot write like any of these men. But the idea that he would, maybe, like to be taken as such and sell his story as a graphic novel of intrigue, life on the run, drugs and an abundance of impoverished but libertine young poon in the Third World, is crystal clear.
Look at the artist’s portrait. Am I wrong?
Read to the foot of the blog and you will note McAfee’s aggravation at Gizmodo which he accuses of stealing his on-line diary and publishing it.
“I emailed Joel [Gizmodo reporter] and asked whether moral imperative shouldn’t dictate that he send the money he received from Gizmodo to me,” McAfee writes plaintively. “After all, it was my effort, my photos, my time, my words. Shouldn’t I get the money? He did not respond.”
John McAfee had always been good with the press. In 1992 it was that facility that catapulted the McAfee name in anti-virus into daily newspapers on the back of the Michelangelo scare.
I wrote about it for the American Journalism Review (later incorporated into the Virus Creation Labs).
Weeks after M-Day, many antiviral software vendors and some reporters still insist the coverage prevented thousands of computer users from losing data. John Schneidawind of USA Today says “everyone’s PC would have crashed” had the media not paid much attention to Michelangelo. The San Jose Mercury News credited the publicity with saving the day. One widely quoted antiviral vendor, John McAfee of McAfee Associates, says the press deserves a medal …
One vendor who played a key role was McAfee, one of the nation’s leading antiviral software manufacturers and founder and chairman of the nonprofit Computer Virus Industry Association (CVIA). It was McAfee who told many reporters that as many as 5 million computers were at risk. He says he made the projection based on a study that found the virus had infected 15 percent of computers at 600 sites. Both Reuters and the Associated Press sent the figure around the world.
McAfee says he didn’t present it the way it was reported. “I told reporters all along that estimates ranged from 50,000 to 5 million,” he says. “I said, ‘50,000 to 5 million, take your pick,’ and they did.”
While many articles failed to disclose or merely mentioned in passing the fact that McAfee’s antiviral software company has sold more than 7 million copies of its Viruscan and expects revenues of more than $20 million this year, McAfee scoffs at the idea that he or other vendors hyped the threat to generate sales. “I never contacted a single reporter, I never sent out a press release, I never wrote any articles,” he says. “I was just sitting here doing my job and people started calling.” He maintains that the coverage of Michelangelo cost him money. “It was the worst thing conceivable for our business, short-term,” he says. “We offer share-ware [where users are trusted to pay], so we got tons of calls” from non-paying customers.
“Before the media starts to crucify the antivirus community,” he continues, “they should look in the mirror and see how much [of the coverage] came from their desire to make it a good story.” But he adds quickly, “Not that I’m a press-basher.”
Schneidawind’s and AP’s efforts after March 6 to track Michelangelo found only a few thousand afflicted computers worldwide, including 2,400 erroneously reported to be at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The institute actually had only 400 computers infected with any virus; few had Michelangelo. A Philadephia Inquirer reporter got it wrong, says institute spokesman Paul Hassen, and it spread like wildfire. “That was the first time I’ve been that close to a feeding frenzy,” he says. Perhaps the most embarrassed news organization was CNN, which on March 6 staked out McAfee’s offices in Santa Clara, California, waiting for a doomsday that never came.
Soon after the clock struck midnight on March 6, many reporters seemed to suspect they’d been had. The Los Angeles Times, which had quoted McAfee’s 5 million figure on March 4, carried a Reuter story three days later that reported the “Black Death” had turned out to be more “a common cold.” AP downgraded its “mugger hiding in the closet” to a mere “electronic prank.”
AP Deputy Business Editor Rick Gladstone says the wire service quickly downplayed the story after its initial reports and included comments from the ICSA’s Rutstein, who said the threat from the virus had been exaggerated. “Our big oversight was to quote McAfee’s 5 million figure in the beginning of the coverage, but we backed off that,” Gladstone says, adding that his staff “felt somewhat vindicated” when relatively few computers were affected on March 6. “Some of us in the press were suckered,” he says.
Later, USA Today’s reporter admitted to me that John McAfee had always been helpful in talking with the press on computer virus issues. Because of that there was a feeling, the reporter said, that “we” owed him.
Who the editorial “we” meant was not precisely defined.
John McAfee was genuinely facile with the media. However, that was on the business of computer viruses. It is not at all clear that splashing a story of “love,” suspected murder, an as yet undetermined amount of prevarication, eccentricities and perversion in the Internet media will turn out favorably.
McAfee’s attitude has also undergone something of a metamorphosis.
He writes, again at the foot of The Hinterland:
The world press certainly has not helped. Autonomous and self-serving, the press does what it does best – sensationalize. And my character and the recent events of my life have been sensationalized to the max.
Times have changed. These things often turn out badly.
Anyway, McAfee’s anti-virus success was dictated, not on the technical merits of SCAN, but on the peg that shareware provided an in at corporate America. SCAN just had to be ubiquitous, easy to use for the standards of the time, and mostly reliable.
The home users who were anti-virus utility early adopters often worked in budding IT departments. When management inevitably realized they had people using SCAN, they figured they’d better start paying for it in site licensing and contracted support.
And McAfee’s competition in the American marketplace was not particularly strong.
Primarily, there was the Norton Anti-virus from Symantec and Central Point Anti-virus of Central Point Software. The latter came to be recognized as one of the worst anti-virus programs, ever. It wound up licensed to Microsoft which peddled a bowdler-ized version of it, now infamously known as the Microsoft Anti-virus, for old DOS and Windows PCs. Central Point eventually went out of business.
So by the late Nineties the two players with unbreakable positions in anti-virus in the US were McAfee and Symantec/Norton.
Of course, there were many other very good shareware anti-virus programs. Almost all went out of business or were bought and killed by competitors.