I tell you, every year my job gets harder. Three times a week I am asked to extrude snarky observations about our tech-obsessed lives and the people responsible for same. Each day I have less and less to work with.
Steve Jobs is sadly no longer with us. Ballmer is on his way out. Ellison is only interested in yachting. Gates is too busy giving all his money away. Carol Bartz is somewhere on the sidelines, muttering obscenities under her breath. The new crop of Google Glass-wearing pasty white guys who are running most of the high-tech world these days are suffering from a collective charisma bypass. Dirt is more interesting.
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Which is why I say thank god for John McAfee. Not only is the original developer of McAfee AntiVirus the most entertaining technology icon of all time [NSFW], he's also planning to save us from the NSA.
Over the weekend, the 68-year-old Hunter S. Thompson of high tech gave a talk at the C2SV Technology Conference and music fest, during which he revealed D-Central, a pocket-sized gizmo he says will prevent the spooks from tapping our phone calls, emails, text messages, and hallucinations. Per the San Jose Mercury News:
It was a talk bound to appeal to the young audience, which broke into frequent applause. Among the group was his new 30-year-old wife, Janice Dyson. She said in a brief interview afterward with this newspaper that she is a former stripper. The couple met in Miami, where McAfee went after being deported from Guatemala.
"I keep him grounded," she said.
Honey, you could attach 10-inch-thick steel cables to John McAfee's legs and bolt him to Mt. Rushmore and you couldn't keep him grounded.
Will D-Central deliver?
The story went on to offer a scosh more detail about D-Central, but not enough for anyone to figure out what it actually is:
McAfee outlined what some might regard as a pie-in-the-sky plan to finish the first prototype of the D-Central in six months. He said the gadget is called D-Central because by communicating with smartphones, tablets and other devices, it will create decentralized, floating and moving local networks that can't be penetrated by government spy agencies.
The design is in place already for a version whose range will be three blocks in the city and a quarter mile in the country, he said. The device will be compatible with both Android and iPhones.