McAfee dead
John McAfee, one of the early anti-virus promoters, has been found dead by hanging in his cell in Barcelona. Apparently, it's suicide.
McAfee was one of our biggest competitors, in terms of volume (but not quality), and John was a larger-than-life figure. I was at a talk he gave, sitting at the back of the hall with Patty Hoffman, and we were giggling over each of the howlers that he spoke. He was very much a marketing guy.
After getting out of the anti-virus business, he led a very colourful life; at one point, he was a "person of interest" in a murder case.
Most recently, he was arrested for possible tax evasion, and on the day that he dies, his extradition to the USA was approved. The chickens (and there were a lot of them) were about to come home to roost.
The product is still for sale; for the last 25 years, it has used the engine that I designed and wrote.
Delta plus
It's early days, but this has been found in India and the UK - but only in small numbers.
It's thought to be more infectious that the Delta variant, which is twice as infectious as the original Covid.
16135 new cases UK on Tuesday, that's 50% higher than previously this month. We're in the fourth wave, and we're all getting fed up with this. No wonder our oven-ready government is authorising 60,000 sized gatherings - presumably they're using a secret magic spell to prevent the virus from spreading at football matches. If only that magic could be used more widely.
He had a higher=grade degree in maths than you, mate.
ReplyDelete... and you claim that it's actually you who wrote the core of the 7.62 billion dollar product. 25 years ago?
(Dead men don't sue, eh?)
You're sad, mate.
He had a higher=grade degree in maths than you, mate.
ReplyDelete... and you claim that it's actually you who wrote the core of the 7.62 billion dollar product. 25 years ago?
(Dead men don't sue, eh?)
You're sad, mate.
No. He had a bachelors. And yes, I did..
Deletedrsolly refers to events all but lost in the mists, but which were well-known at the time:
Delete"In the mid-90s John was kicked out of McAfee Associates (or he resigned, depending on who you ask), the company threw away his shitty product and bought Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit - one of the best anti-virus products in the world at the time."
https://twitter.com/VessOnSecurity/status/1036673773691449344
For the full story, read this:
ReplyDeletehttps://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1036668139185098752.html
I just found this blog by accident while reading the news about John. He was an interesting character as you say, and I don't know if you remember me - I was a young lad from Slough who wrote an AV scanner and came and swapped viruses with you in Amersham and you and Susan were kind enough to have me over for dinner a couple of times.
ReplyDeleteI hope you are keeping well.
Yes, I remember, you called it DCD, Dangerous Code Detector".
DeleteYes! Quite pretentious of me, but I was young. :)
ReplyDeleteOK, this was about 30 years ago. WOW!
ReplyDeleteI was very impressed with the speed at which DCD ran. I'm guessing it used a 12 bit hash table?
God no. That's far too sophisticated for what I was capable of programming back then. I used roughly 20 byte arrays for the signatures and coded in Turbo C. If I remember rightly you used Turbo Pascal? The only thing I did to try and speed up the detector was to follow the initial JMP instruction in the .COM files to get to the actual virus code and avoid having to scan the entire file for sigs.
DeleteFollowing the jump was a good strategy. Yes, I used Turbo Pascal.
Delete