John McAfee Tells World How He Fooled Cops and Escaped Belize 243
It looks like the long and winding road of the John McAfee saga is going to continue for at least a little longer. McAfee posted a detailed blog post about how he was able to elude Belizean authorities and sneak out of the country. From the article: "'It's visually interesting and it is mostly a happy story — in line with most Christmas stories,' he wrote.
The former software executive describes an operation that was heavy in advance planning and trickery. He says he planted a lookalike ('my double — a man I have known for over 30 years and who years ago legally changed his name to John McAfee') and had him picked up by authorities in the northern Belize-Mexico border, while he and a group of friends and reporters loaded up a truck and headed in the opposite direction, to a southern town called Punta Gorda. With the news that he'd been arrested broadcasting on a local news station, McAfee figured that checkpoint security would relax."
Re:Would /. please spare us ?? (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't like the Lord of the McAfee franchise, you can:
Hey, if I don't like the stories that get posted, I remind myself that with Slashdot, I get what I pay for it . . . and it's worth every penny of it . . .
Re:Would /. please spare us ?? (Score:4, Informative)
I would think the witnesses seeing him hose out the blood from his car, or the fact that he somehow misplaced the passenger seat, would be pretty good clues.
But when he lead them to the body, that was a dead giveaway.
Re:Would /. please spare us ?? (Score:3, Informative)
And the new slashdot would send an investigative reporter to the Belize holding cell and hear out the double's story, and come out with a book called False Positive The Story of McAfee's Escape
Published by Packt, so naturally it would get a great front-page review on Slashdot. Win-win!
Re:Would /. please spare us ?? (Score:4, Informative)
Incorrect, the criteria is "beyond a reasonable doubt". Very, very little can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. For instance, it's not beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was framed, and then coerced into confessing. It's possible. Heck, it's happened. But I don't think it's reasonable to think that's what happened in this case.
Since he did plead guilty, I imagine that at least he was under the impression that there was sufficient evidence to find him guilty, and the most likely reason for that is that he did in fact commit the crime. Unless you've got an argument that's more convincing than a confession that involves producing the hidden body, I fail to see why we should have let him go.
Re:Would /. please spare us ?? (Score:5, Informative)
The parts we hate were written long after he sold out and moved on.
He sold out in 1996, or so as far as I can tell. Did you actually use virus scanners about that time, or are you just revisioning history? Norton was better then. McAfee AV was horrible on servers (where most used scanners then, before they were everywhere). It was a massive resource hog, and would prevent normal operation of the server. One of the reasons people put Linux boxes out in front of MS Exchange is that products like McAfee to scan user emails before delivery would simply kill the server. MS wouldn't support an Exchange server with AV on it because they were so bad. A separate server was a cheaper/easier solution than getting McAfee to work on an Exchange server. Worst software ever.
The only way you get away with saying such things is that likely so many here are new enough to IT that they didn't administer a server while McAfee owned McAfee to be able to form an opinion, or they see an AC with unsubstantiated opinion stated as fact and ignore it, as 99% of all slashdot comments are unsubstantiated opinion stated as fact, so everyone else just ignored you.