McAfee May Have Been Captured 148
netbuzz writes with a quick update about John McAfee on the run. From the article: "A blog being maintained for the past three weeks by antivirus pioneer John McAfee and others is claiming to have received "an unconfirmed report" that McAfee has been captured near the border of Belize and Mexico. However, authorities in Belize say that report is not true and that the whereabouts of McAfee, wanted for questioning as a 'person of interest' after the Nov. 11 murder of his neighbor, remain unknown."
He actually made it out already (Score:2, Informative)
He is still in hiding though because he is afraid (rightly so) of being extradited or killed.
Re:Why is McAfee's affair on Slashdot? (Score:5, Informative)
I guess it depends when you were reading it. In 2006 the Hans Reiser murder case started, which also got a lot of attention.
Re:not "antivirus pioneer" (Score:5, Informative)
Bubble-era businessman? McAfee resigned from McAfee Associates in 1994. You might as well reference the Dutch tulip bubble, that's just as relevant.
When McAfee Associates started in 1987, it was only shortly after the very first IBM PC viruses (The Brain boot sector/Pakistani flu) appeared. And when the first PC virus mania hit, the 1992 Michelangelo scare, many of us used the shareware McAfee anti-virus program to check if our computers were infected. That era, his 1987 to 1992 work, was where the pioneer label comes from.
Re:Even if... (Score:5, Informative)
They have no reason to hold him other than being suspected for a crime in the US. If they captured him, they'd let the world know how helpful they were being.
Didn't the crime in question [wired.com] occur in Belize?
Re:Why is McAfee's affair on Slashdot? (Score:0, Informative)
You won't get any sensible discussion here.
Around 2007, Microsoft realised tech sites like Slashdot had a significant involvement in the very public rejection of Vista as a replacement for XP. They hired several reputation management companies, including Waggener Edstrom and Burson Marsteller to manage their online presence before the W7 release.
One of the results of that was that the reputation mangers ran hundreds of sock-puppets in blogs and news aggregators, like Slashdot and Reddit. They swamped the discussions, including those unrelated to their OS with scripted comments based on a few themes - "Have you tried it yet?" "Much faster than XP" etc etc. There was no opportunity to discuss Linux/FOSS or any other non-proprietary effort without wading through dozens of highly moderated pro-Win 7 postings. Pretty much every first post was a Microsoft-favorable pamphlet.
The result was that almost anyone with a real interest in tech abandoned the site. There are still a few of the old die-hards here, but it's mostly marketers and sock-puppets now.
Re:Why is McAfee's affair on Slashdot? (Score:4, Informative)
I think it is really because his "I'm running off to another country because of taxes!" shit appeals to many of the Rand-types that hang around on Slashdot.