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Twitter / SophieCo_RT: is there a way to go about

is there a way to go about online life undetected? can you be on the grid and off it at the same time? my chat with #johnmcafee - tomorrow!

Twitter / SophieCo_RT: here it is! #johnmcafee was

here it is! #johnmcafee was probably in a good mood - he made a lot of sense, esp. on spying @officialmcafee http://rt.com/shows/sophieco/government-spies-master-paranoia-404/

​IT-Pioneer John McAfee: A government that spies on us all the time is no use ― RT SophieCo

SS: For your age, and I believe you’re 68, right? You just look amazing; you have this crazy energy level of a young man. You’re almost like Dorian Grey. What do you do?

JM: Thank you very much for the compliment. I‘m not sure what I do, I just get up early and work hard, I don’t eat right, I sometimes smoke cigarettes, I do all the wrong things. I’m not sure, the comparison to Dorian Grey is a little bit disconcerting because Dorian Grey, was, in fact, a very cruel and evil person, I hope that part is not applied.

SS: No, we’re just talking about looks.

SS: You claim you’ve stayed sober from drugs and alcohol for over 37 years. Although, in some ways you appeared to almost advertise drugs. Where do you stand? I just want to make sure and be clear - are drugs bad, evil and they should be banned, or people should make their own choice?

JM: Well, I think people need to make their own choice in every aspect of their lives. Once you become an adult, a freedom of choice is an innate right, I think. I have never advertised drugs, in fact, I advise everyone including my daughter, my close friends not to take drugs under any circumstances. I did so in the past, a lot of drugs, actually, so I do have experience, very negative experience from drug use. But people should be allowed make their own choice. I’m not trying to advertise drugs; I’m not trying to get people, other than my close friends and relatives, to not do drugs. It’s your personal choice. Your choices in life will come back to you, and you’ll learn yourself what is right and wrong for you.

SS: Talking about the electronic age, technology in your opinion, does it empower or enslave you?

JM: It does both, and again there is where you have freedom of choice. Technology has given us the smartphone which will allow us to communicate across the world, sometimes looking at the person’s face while we’re speaking. It allows us to access information, powerful information while we‘re travelling on trains or buses, or sitting in the restaurant or in our office. At the same time, it can enslave, and if you look around, you’ll see those who are enslaved. You can walk into many restaurants at lunch time and look at the people, over half of them are not looking at the partner or the person they are sitting across the table front, and they are looking down at their smartphones and texting. Sometimes everybody is doing that. That seems like slavery to me, where you’re enslaved to the device, to the point that you completely block out human presence. I think that’s a very bad sign. We need to use technology for what technology is intended for, automobiles to get to places faster, telephones so that we don’t have to run across town to talk to somebody. When they become our masters, then we become the enslaved.

SS: I want to talk a bit about “D-Central” – it’s a decentralized, encrypted wireless network that you’ve been working on. Trying to figure out the motives behind it, are you worried about everyone being spied on, or are you making a political stand? Do you have a political stand?

JM: I have no political stance. I believe that it does not matter eventually, what party is in power, the political process goes on as it always will. Power corrupts; people in power tend to do what all people in power do. I don’t have a political stance. I do have a stance as an individual, as a member of society. I do not want someone looking through my bedroom window, whether it’s an impartial observer or not, whether they are going to prosecute me or not. I want some privacy, to do the things that we, as human beings, need privacy for. And we’re losing that, we’re losing that to a great extent. And it’s not just the NSA by the way, that is spying on us, I mean the NSA was the one that was first to be outed by Edward Snowden, but I can guarantee that all other covert government agencies, of which there are more than 15, are doing the same things – the CIA, FBI, Military Intelligence. We know it’s happening, and that alarms me, truly alarms me, that’s not what we created government for. We didn’t create a government that could watch over us and keep us safe from ourselves, we created a government that could provide facilities to make life reasonable – roads, schools, all the things that governments should be doing. This is simply not correct, and so I needed to do something.

SS: Talk to me about ‘D-Central’. Is this something that can be globally engaged, or it’s more of a local thing?

JM: It can definitely be globally engaged, it’s a completely flexible and moving localized network, where every other unit within the quarter-mile is directly communicating with your unit. We have relays, we can relay things across the city, the state, the country or the entire planet. It will not replace the internet, certainly not at first, it is an augment to the internet, it’s a device without a screen, it’s an on\off switch, you can drop it in your pocket, it communicates with your smartphone. So, if you’re on the internet with the smartphone you can do whatever you’re doing. If you want to send someone a private message, something to your sweetheart, and you want to say something juicy, or to your business associate talking about a plan that you don’t want your competitors to know about, then you switch to the private network which is ours, and everything is absolutely secure. If you intercept the packet it has no name attached to it, or location either. There is no way to tell who was sending what to whom, and it is all encrypted, using an encryption technique that neither the NSA nor any other agency was involved in. It simply cannot be seen – if it can’t be seen then it can’t be hacked.

SS: From an observer’s point of view I can say American society is increasingly unhappy with what’s going on in their country and their government. Where do you stand?

JM: Well, this is America and I’m an American, I was born and raised here. I love my country. That does not mean I love the political process or the political evolution. Obviously, we cannot be happy, not in that our every move could be watched by someone in the government, that’s simply not acceptable, not in this country. And we look at the government excesses, the total waste of money, you know, hundred million dollars for piece of software like the Obamacare implementation, that appears to be useless. We’re hard working, you know, we work hard, we pay our taxes and many of us Americans are barely getting buy – paying our rent, paying our mortgage, paying our food, supporting our kids, sending them to school. And we see these excesses right in front of us, it’s such a waste. Who could be happy, seriously?

SS: What operating system do you use on your computer?

JM: I have a lot of computers - I use both Apple computers, MACs, I use every known brand and version of Windows. They are all the same to me, really. I mean nothing is completely secure, nothing is completely satisfactory, whether to use MAC or Windows, there is always something that people are complaining about, and that is the nature of life. I’m living for the MACs these days this because I’m getting older, I don’t want to continue to learn the new versions of Windows that are coming out, but that’s my personal preference and both are equal.

SS: You know Richard Stallman, who we spoke to not long ago, calls Apple and Microsoft software ‘malware’. I know that you’ve sold McAfee antivirus like 15 years ago, but it’s a pretty annoying thing like it keeps popping up on my computer all the time. Could it be used for spying, do you think? Or is it used for spying?

JM: Of course, any piece of software can be used for spying. You have no idea how simple it is for a program to put ‘a back door’ into a system. ‘Back door’, to explain it simply, is a way for the program or for anybody that has a special code to log on to the software and take control. This happens all the time. In fact, there are applications that you can buy for multiple variety of operating systems called ‘keystroke loggers’ that will watch every keystroke that is used in logs and then send that information to any address that you like. With that information you can get a person’s passwords, you can log into their e-mail, you can turn on the camera on a laptop if the case is open and see what’s happening in the room, and if it’s closed you can turn on the microphone and listen to what’s happening. This is trivial. People don’t understand how widespread this is, for example, if you use the Bank of America application on an individual phone you have to click ’yes’ to agree to the terms. Terms are going for pages and pages, nobody reads them; I do sometimes. If you read the terms it gives the Bank of America the right to turn on the camera on your phone anytime that it wishes, and you’ve given them global permissions that they don’t have to notify you. I know why they do it. I mean, if you empty your bank account and then say “That wasn’t me, someone stole my phone” They will all go, “Well, he certainly looks like you”. But still, it’s scary – if they can do it, anybody can do it. We have become lax in our vigilance of what we do, we have allowed people at the NSA and Bank of America, and probably thousands of others, to look and hear what we’re doing because we just don’t pay attention.

SS: Oh my God, that Bank of America’s story is kind of crazy.

SS: That was going to be actually my second question because we talked about encryptions and it can hide you from government’s gaze, and that’s great. But it also creates all sorts of ways to help criminals. Where is the middle ground?

JM: I don’t think there is a middle ground. I think that you cannot pre-emptively restrict your freedoms because of the fear of how something might be used. Everything, that has ever been developed, has been used for a bad purpose. Baseball bats which are fun for, you know, baseball players to hit balls, you know, they’ve also been used to beat people to death. I mean, we just cannot restrict ourselves because something might be used in a wrong way. And if you look at what the device is, I mean privacy. Good Heavens! What is worth the price of losing your privacy? I can’t think of anything.

SS: You know, I’m thinking with all your enterprises, the anti-viruses, the antibiotics, now the ‘D-Central’…Is it like a Messiah syndrome because you want to save people, you want to save the world, or are you just a good businessman?

JM: I hope I do not have a Messiah complex. My interest really is not in the saving the world, I think that’s a vainglorious occupation. It’s simply, we don’t know what is right for the world. I’m curious and my curiosity is what drives me. I’ve got into the computer viruses field because the concept first came up and I read about it the next day in the paper and thought: “Wow, that’s fascinating!” and started thinking about it and wrote a program to combat it - that became a business. The same thing when I started Tribal Voice, there was no instant messaging, and e-mail was sort of tedious and time-consuming. So, I thought, “There’s got to be a better way” and came up with instant messaging. The same thing with all of my projects: I hear the concept, like the concept of ‘Quorum-sensing’ - “Wow, bacteria communicate with each other! How can that be used?” Not that I’m against helping humanity, I certainly want to help humanity, but it’s not what drives me, it really isn’t. It’s a curiosity. just to be frank.

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/d1021/20140110#1389351220
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/d1021/20131221#1387622315
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/d1021/20131207#1386413067
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/d1021/20131206#1386326452
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/d1021/20110417#1303045678

ドリアン・グレイの肖像 - Wikipedia

画家のバジルのモデルになったドリアン・グレイは大変な美青年である。ドリアンは、バジルの知人の警句家ヘンリー卿のさまざまな逆説的見識に共鳴しながら、悪徳を重ねる。ある天才女優と恋に落ちるが、彼女が本当の恋を知ったがゆえに舞台で恋する女を演じられなくなったため、ドリアンは彼女に興味を持てなくなる。そのことを本人に直言してしまうと、彼女は自殺らしき死に至る。
ドリアンは自分の美の衰えを恐れる。ところが、彼は老けずに美しいままである。そのかわり、彼が年齢や悪徳を重ねると、バジルの描いたドリアンの肖像画が、その分だけ醜くなっていく。

ドリアン・グレイの肖像 (新潮文庫)

舞台はロンドンのサロンと阿片窟。美貌の青年モデル、ドリアンは快楽主義者ヘンリー卿の感化で背徳の生活を享楽するが、彼の重ねる罪悪はすべてその肖像に現われ、いつしか醜い姿に変り果て、慚愧と焦燥に耐えかねた彼は自分の肖像にナイフを突き刺す……。快楽主義を実践し、堕落と悪行の末に破滅する美青年とその画像との二重生活が奏でる耽美と異端の一大交響楽。

ドリアン・グレイの肖像 (光文社古典新訳文庫)

「若さ！　若さ！　若さをのぞいたらこの世に何が残るというのだ！」美貌の青年ドリアンと彼に魅了される画家バジル。そしてドリアンを自分の色に染めようとする快楽主義者のヘンリー卿。卿に感化され、快楽に耽り堕落していくドリアンは、その肖像画だけが醜く変貌し、本人は美貌と若さを失うことはなかったが……。美貌を保つ肉体と醜く変貌する魂の対比。ワイルドの芸術観・道徳観が盛り込まれた代表作。

明治天皇御製　ま行

みなもとは　清くすめるを　濁江に　おちいる水の　をしくもあるかな

「人が生まれた時は、天真爛漫清浄無垢、神の如きものであるのに、次第に生長するに従って、いろいろな社会の悪風に染まり、荒波に揉まれ揉まれて、遂には その純真な美点を失うに至るのは誠に惜しいものである」

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/d1021/20140110#1389351226