John doesn't like the idea of IoT-enabled devices

Sep 4, 2015 09:20 GMT  ·  By

Being a millionaire sure helps when you say controversial things on daily basis. John McAfee, the founder of the McAfee antivirus company, has participated in a Reddit AMA that's full of interesting facts.

Here's a summary of his most interesting answers, on a series of topics ranging from the Internet of Things (IoT) to the current state of the antivirus market.

Asked how he views malware and IoT, and if IoT devices will play a role in the future of cyber-crime, John McAfee had the following to say.

John McAfee: "It will play the main role. Example: here's what's happening with IoT. [...] At DEF CON I attended a talk by Bishop where the BRINKS smart safe (touted as best safe in the world). Brinks knows how to make safes, their trucks are like tanks, but their smart safe came with the Windows OS and a USB port on it. [...] It took these hackers 30s to hack into the safe. [...] You can't expect a smart fridge to be any better. [...] China is probably waiting for us to tie everything together to electrocute everyone. [...] We're in a dangerous situation with IoT."

We don't disagree with him on this. In the past three months alone, we saw the following IoT and smart devices being hacked: gas stations, fridges, baby monitors, sniper rifles, electric skateboards and smart cars (lots of them).

John McAfee: McAfee (antivirus) is one of the worst products on the planet

The conversation then moved to his former company, McAfee Antivirus, now Intel Security. Here are his thoughts on how the company got started.

John McAfee: "When I started, there were 4 of us. Generating $10M/yr, we could have lived happily for our lives on that. VCs came and offered to make it bigger, we had to grow, we didn't have sales, marketing, etc. [...] Once I went public, I had 1000 bosses, investors, FTC, SEC, all my time in meetings and interviews. I hired a programmer/day for over a year! I used to spend time taking apart viruses, not I was an accountant. Once a company gets big, it becomes slow, and cannot survive in its current form."

And his thoughts on the Intel acquisition and the slow rebranding of his product.

John McAfee: "You have no idea how glad I am about that. It's become the worst piece of SW [software] on the planet. You cannot uninstall, scans all the time, slow as [expletive], I'd have fired them, thank goodness I've freed from association with that."

Probably this explains why a few years back, John publicly stated that "Antivirus is dead." To nobody's surprise, he later confirmed in the AMA he doesn't use an antivirus anymore either, choosing to use flip phones without GPS, and a Samsung smartphone for mobile Internet, which he changes for a new one every two weeks.

When he has to use a computer, he constantly switches between Windows, OS X and Linux on a regular basis. His reason for doing this is government surveillance, which he is sure to be under.

Below we have some more answers listed.

Other AMA Answers