12.07.12
The Purpose Driven Life or Livin’ Like John McAfee
Wrote itself. Play loud. Theme and film trailer for the upcoming cable reality show on National Geographic, Living Like John McAfee. Promotional tie-ins: graphic novel and tell-all books, also available for Kindle.
Just in e-mail:
I’m worried.
You’re starting to become a news source for me.
Chuck said,
December 8, 2012 at 11:10 pm
“Hours after his arrest, McAfee was rushed to a hospital for what his lawyer said were two mild heart attacks. Later he said the problem was stress. McAfee said he fainted after days of heavy smoking, poor eating and knocking his head against a wall.”
John wants to flee to the US now. Apparently Belize wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
George Smith said,
December 9, 2012 at 1:16 am
The only problem with fleeing to the US is nobody will give a toss unless he’s part of the weekly entertainment media stream. Which, sans a reality TV show deal, presents an obstacle to the McAfee way.
He can’t rely on his old lackeys in anti-virus. They’re all flabbergasted corporate zombies who are afraid to even voice an opinion. The only people from the old school scene who’ve satirized him outright are me and Rob Rosenberger.
George Smith said,
December 9, 2012 at 1:47 am
The thing was, back in the early Nineties, all McAfee’s rivals, particularly those from England and Europe, love to privately talk to me about how technically deficient he was. Scan, it was just trash compared to their great scanners. But it wasn’t really. It was good enough and it was American and he won, despite his many foibles. McAfee hired the nerds — and they were some nerds, equal to the best of them, he had to and they did the job.
When you really got right down to it — if you went to the conventions — the anti-virus industry guys were never the rock stars they thought they were. I remember being at a convention and a couple asked me, I was the designated evil virus writer because I was Crypt Newsletter: “Hey, we’re going for pizza with [usta-be-famous Russian dipshit with a squeaking voice who worked for F-Prot name omitted], you wanna come?”
And I said, “No, I’m not going anywhere with that bore. You’re here and you want to eat pizza? You can have cheap ass pizza anywhere.” Or something to that effect, it was a long time ago, you get the idea.
So they waited a minute, called him up and canceled, and then said, “Where do you wanna go?” And I said let’s go into Alexandria and have some drinks and eat at a posh restaurant on company cards. You can say you were talking to a virus writer. Which we did.
This wasn’t a single thing. Once it got around at the tables that I wrote about people and was an avuncular and fun fellow, the guys who needed an excuse to spend the evening at the bar or in the hotel ballroom blew off the nerds early.
“You know, I wanted to punch you so bad when I was disassembling one of your viruses one night,” one of them said to me. I’d included some trivial anti-debugging code in it which had made, apparently for him, hard to step through the virus, taking him an hour or more of time. Actually, it took about a second or two to NOPcode in a disassembler if you knew what you were doing and while I did, I was hardly as knowledgeable about it as most. And I just said, “Boy, sorry, didn’t mean to spoil your evening.” And he just said “Well, why don’t we have a couple drinks then.”
Chuck said,
December 9, 2012 at 12:24 pm
I always had a lot more respect for the crackers–the guys who’d go and unravel someone’s elaborate copy-protection scheme. (Remember when IBM demoed the PS/2, they had to use a copy-protection defeating package to get 1-2-3 onto a 3.5″ floppy?). The virus writers always seemed to me like a bunch of punks who didn’t want to put their talent to work writing something useful.
I stayed away from those people, although we did sell product to McAfee.
George Smith said,
December 10, 2012 at 12:47 pm
From the NYTimes today:
“While Mr. McAfee seems determined to drag out his drama as long as he can, some of the journalists who have covered him say they have had enough. “People try to behave ethically,??? said Mr. Johnson [of Wired.] “And he milks that out of them until they get to the point where they’re like, ‘You know what, you’re just nuts.’ ??? “I know as a journalist I can’t say that, so I’ve got to get out of this story.???
You deal with John McAfee, you get what you deserve.
He’s about out of opportunities which will make him act more crazily, provided he is released from jail.
And this is another attempt, Living Like Joh McAfee comes true, from the Hollywood Reporter:
“U.S. anti-virus pioneer John McAfee, arrested by Guatemalan police and facing deportation to Belize, has apparently entrusted his life story to Montreal-based TV producer Impact Future Media.The TV producer is currently looking for investors and production partners which is tentatively titled Running in the Background: The True Story of John McAfee.”