Lexington (dpa) – The Life of John McAfee is a 70 year-long roller coaster ride: An ex-junkie who co-founded the antivirus industry, so was filthy rich, supposedly lost everything again and weeks fled to a suspicion of murder through the jungle.
In the weeks before his 70th birthday on 18 September alone saw McAfee twice headlines. He announced a candidacy for the post of US president and was arrested for driving under the influence of drugs. He gave up claims to even a brief exchange of fire with the police in the state of Tennessee. He thought that his ex-wife found him, and therefore returned fire, was his explanation.
McAfee never fit into the image of the typical software millionaire. He grew up in a dysfunctional household with a violent father, who took his own life, when he was 15 years old, like McAfee a reporter of the magazine “Wired” told. As a teenager, McAfee sold with a trick newspaper subscriptions on the doorstep: He claimed that the subscription is free – and took the cost of an alleged shipping and handling fee in again. Until 1983, he consumed large quantities of cocaine and alcohol, since it is dry by its own account.
When it was mid 80 programmers at Lockheed, McAfee heard from the computer virus “Brain” written by two brothers from Pakistan. McAfee did the idea to write a program that could detect “Brain”. As one of the first he recognized the big business behind it. He founded the company in their own home McAfee Associates and convinced companies to install its software on their computers for a license fee.
It was like thick on McAfee. He stuffed a mobile home with computers fully and thus drove up with customers. These “mobile unit to combat viruses,” they should impress, but that did not show how McAfee later acknowledged.
Legendary is the story of Michelangelo virus early 90s. McAfee settled then quote in media reports with the forecast, up to five million computers could fall the malicious program to the victim. In the end only a few thousand infections have been reported, McAfee said he had been misquoted – but his company sold in the year seven million software packages. However, the case weakened confidence in the young industry and especially in the swaggering McAfee founder.
After McAfee companies went public in the 1990s, he got out of the business. Since 2011 the company belongs to Intel Security. For the company’s founder, the exit was worth. McAfee’s assets were temporarily estimated at more than $ 100 million. He lived for several years the civic life of a respected software pioneer, to the riches as House and aircraft were a burden to him, as he told “Wired”. So it moved McAfee into the small Central American country Belize, where there is poverty, violence and gangs.
He whirled much dust. He built himself a guarded estate on the jungle, boasting of young lovers trying to ensure armed force for order in the neighboring village. In a private laboratory he had also search for a novel antibiotic plant by its own account. The authorities closed more of a drug production not out, and smote in the spring of 2012 with a raid on. Drugs found it not, but raised a lot of illegally possessed weapons.
McAfee’s neighbor was then found dead. McAfee asserted to have nothing to do with the murder. But when the authorities wanted to question him about the case, McAfee deposed. For weeks, he fled across Central America, until he was finally arrested in Guatemala: A reporter who accompanied him, published on the Internet by mistake a photo with geodata. From there McAfee was deported to the USA, where it initially was a little quieter around him, except for occasional TV appearances and stories of alleged assassinations. About the “Cyber Party”, would compete with it in the US presidential election campaign, we know far not much. Only that they should fight against the secret service surveillance.
No comments:
Post a Comment