Washington Times Dec 20 2013

By John McAfee

In recent days, Target customers were shocked to learn that since late November hackers have managed to steal the names, credit and debit card numbers, expiration dates and security codes from as many as forty million Target customers. Target customers should be very concerned, but they shouldn’t be shocked because dozens of stores, companies and government agencies have been hacked in recent years opening millions of Americans to identity theft, fraud and the possibility that sensitive personal information will be misused.

In just the last two years, hackers have gotten into the computers of J.C. Penney, 7-Eleven, Nasdaq OMX Group, JetBlue, Dow Jones and others and made off with similar information on 160 million of their customers. The hackers who successfully targeted Target could cost the US economy an estimated 4 billion dollars and the potential total cost of all these security breaches could be many times that amount. It has been estimated, in fact, that the total cost of these thefts to the US economy could be the equivalent of 450,000 average wage earners working for a full year.

That is a lot of money down the drain in an economy still struggling to recover from recession and the sad thing about it is that it wouldn’t have happened if security experts at these companies had thought well enough ahead to anticipate the nature of the attacks on their systems and put security measures into effect to thwart the hackers.

Many of the measures taken by companies and government security experts are either designed without anticipating the nature of the next assault on the system they are charged with protecting or without fully realizing that human beings are fallible and too often give hackers the very openings they are trying to eliminate. Preparing for the last attack, like military organizations that train for the last war is of limited value as is a strategy that ignores the human factor.

We have the technology today which can be utilized to at least keep institutions one or two steps ahead of the hackers if put in place and managed with an eye to what individual customers will and won’t do to assist in protecting their own and the institution’s data.

For example, in today’s world, cardholders can be easily empowered to control how, when and where their credit and debit cards can be used. Smart phones are ubiquitous and Apps can be developed for these phones that would allow individual customers tremendous flexibility by allowing them to disable their cards when they are not in use and enable them just prior to a purchase. The individual cardholder could be given the power to control his or her transaction limits, the types of purchases that can be made on the card as well as where and when it can be used. With such a system in place, hackers couldn’t use whatever data they might get their hands on without hacking in to the phones of individual cardholders, a daunting and virtually impossible task.

We know too that even those charged with protecting computer security within government security agencies often use dated technology or like those in the private sector develop systems that ignore the frailty of the human beings who use them. The idea that someone like Edward Snowden could waltz into the NSA, gain access to virtually every secret stored there and walk out with it shocked the nation and the world, but it happened. We learn almost monthly that state sponsored hackers have broken into supposedly secure government data bases either because of a human breach or because the agency is several steps behind the hackers in employing technology to protect the nation’s secrets.

In a few cases the people charged with putting complex systems in place either disregard or don’t appreciate the importance of protecting the data they will be protecting. This happens rarely, but those who built the government’s Obamacare on line system did so without giving much thought at all to the fact that hackers might gain access to the system and thereby to sensitive information on tens or even hundreds of millions of Americans. The stories about successful hackers stealing data from Target or 7-Eleven will seem minor by comparison to those we could see next year as these same hackers go after the Obamacare system as the mother lode of data on individual Americans.

Within public and private sector institutions, the human element must be factored in from the beginning. Human beings with the best of intentions make mistakes that can compromise the privacy of others. Simple human curiosity is a trait often used by hackers. Hackers frequently use curiosity to gain access to an institution’s security system, For example, a major European corporation was hacked recently by placing a USB memory stick on the ground next the parked car of one of the corporation’s security employees who found it and picked it up. It was labelled “weight loss” and the employee, who the hackers knew was struggling with weight issues, took it back to her office and inserted it into the USB slot in her computer to see if it might contain information she could use. The hacker’s program immediately took control of the company’s security system and millions of dollars’ worth of data was stolen.

Institutions must address the human element with the same thoroughness they put into the technological component of the security systems they devise to protect our privacy. Technological flaws, such as occurred with such glaring visibility in the Obamacare systems design and deployment are relatively rare, but human mistakes are common

If we don’t learn from our mistakes, what occurred at Target will become a daily threat to the privacy and financial security of every American.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/20/thwarting-hackers-by-keeping-it-human/#ixzz2o4l8jbGK

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That Republican-controlled committee wanted the McAfee Associates founder to “guide our oversight and review of” the implementation of the federal marketplace selling Obamacare insurance, according to an email obtained by CNBC.com.

The committee suggested that McAfee might discuss the technologically botched rollout with members of Congress.

McAfee made $100 million from the 2004 sale of his former company, which still sells the widely used McAfee antivirus software. He later began investing in the housing market and lost much of his fortune in the 2008 housing crash.

Last year, he made international headlines when he went on the lam in Central America after Greg Faull, his neighbor in Belize, was found dead from a bullet in his head sometime after confronting McAfee about his barking dogs. McAfee later was detained in Guatemala, and eventually deported to the U.S. without being charged in the murder, which he denies committing.

Last week, he was approached by a key congressional staffer, Sean Hayes, counsel with the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, about sharing his expertise in an inquiry into what has gone wrong with HealthCare.gov.

“This is the Committee of jurisdiction for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare),” Hayes wrote in an Oct. 14 email to McAfee’s lawyer, Francois Garcia. “For three years we have been monitoring the implementation of the law and have been trying to dig into what has happened with the Exchange rollout.”

“Given the failures of Healthcare.gov, and Mr. McAfee’s expertise, I was hoping he might be able to discuss his views with staff on the hill,” Hayes wrote. “It would be an informal discussion: we would take notes but these would not be for attribution, it would mainly guide our oversight and review of the program.”

“This would hopefully not be a heavy lift for him: what problems could lead to the compromise of personal identifying information? What could we be doing to prevent data or identify theft? What advice generally does he have?” Hayes wrote.

McAfee told CNBC that he was interested in speaking to the committee, whose majority membership is hostile to President Barack Obama’s signature health-care reform law.

HealthCare.gov opened for business Oct. 1 but has been plagued by a myriad of technological problems that have made it extremely difficult for people to both create accounts on the site and enroll in the insurance plans being sold there. The federal government set up the site to sell insurance to residents of the 36 states whose states are not operating their own marketplaces.

Emails that McAfee provided to CNBC show that arrangements were being made for him to fly to Washington from his home in Portland, Ore., last week at his own expense to speak with staffers after the committee declined his request to pay for his travel.

But last Wednesday, Hayes wrote back to Garcia, McAfee’s lawyer, saying “unfortunately with the schedule in the air it doesn’t look like we can do this right now—would a phone breifing [sic] be possible?”

At the time of that email, Congress was in the midst of intense negotiations to resolve the government shutdown.

Hayes declined to comment when questioned by CNBC. But a source on the committee said, “In an effort to better understand the technology concerns, we reached out to a few of the experts who have been featured in media reports on the health care exchange ‘glitches.’ … However, no interview was ever scheduled with McAfee.”

When asked if he thought it was odd for the House committee to want to talk to him about HealthCare.gov, McAfee said, “Not at all.”

“Earlier this year, I was in Canada because of the people who are doing the documentary [about his life] and the movie are located in Montreal and I’ve been in every major newspaper and magazine and they treat me like a technical god there,” McAfee said. “I do not know why. I think it has to do with the McAfee legacy.

McAfee told CNBC that he was interested in speaking to the committee, whose majority membership is hostile to President Barack Obama’s signature health-care reform law.

HealthCare.gov opened for business Oct. 1 but has been plagued by a myriad of technological problems that have made it extremely difficult for people to both create accounts on the site and enroll in the insurance plans being sold there. The federal government set up the site to sell insurance to residents of the 36 states whose states are not operating their own marketplaces.

Emails that McAfee provided to CNBC show that arrangements were being made for him to fly to Washington from his home in Portland, Ore., last week at his own expense to speak with staffers after the committee declined his request to pay for his travel.

But last Wednesday, Hayes wrote back to Garcia, McAfee’s lawyer, saying “unfortunately with the schedule in the air it doesn’t look like we can do this right now—would a phone breifing [sic] be possible?”

At the time of that email, Congress was in the midst of intense negotiations to resolve the government shutdown.

Hayes declined to comment when questioned by CNBC. But a source on the committee said, “In an effort to better understand the technology concerns, we reached out to a few of the experts who have been featured in media reports on the health care exchange ‘glitches.’ … However, no interview was ever scheduled with McAfee.”

When asked if he thought it was odd for the House committee to want to talk to him about HealthCare.gov, McAfee said, “Not at all.”

“Earlier this year, I was in Canada because of the people who are doing the documentary [about his life] and the movie are located in Montreal and I’ve been in every major newspaper and magazine and they treat me like a technical god there,” McAfee said. “I do not know why. I think it has to do with the McAfee legacy.

“What happened in Belize in terms of all the things that have happened to me in my life, it’s a very small part of it,” he said.

McAfee said he would have told Congress to effectively start from scratch on the HealthCare.gov website.

“I promise you this cannot be fixed without at least scrapping the front-end processing, which is more than half of the systems,” he said. “Seriously, if it were me and I were running this and I had been asleep in a hospital for two years and woke up to this mess, I would say OK, throw it out and start over. But start over in the right way.”

HealthCare.gov wasn’t too ambitious an idea, McAfee added, but the government has overpaid for it.

“It’s not that it’s an ambitious program—it’s that it’s an ambitious program considering the hallways that people have to march down in order to implement, and these hallways are the way you have to do things in the government, that are defined in these massive books of regulation or rules that you have to adhere to in order to compete in a government contract,” he said.

McAfee was scornful of CGI Federal, the American subsidiary of CGI Group, a Canadian company that received a contract initially worth nearly $100 million to act as the primary contractor in building HealthCare.gov.

“It sounds a little bit absurd,” McAfee said. “The Canadians are not well known for being high technologists compared to the Americans.”

“You know we have a number of high-technology companies here in America,” he said. “You know Silicon Valley has nothing but such entities that are competent, efficient and certainly more experienced than the Canadian companies. And I’m not putting the Canadians down at all. I’m just saying that the technology tends to aggregate in certain parts of the world. And so it would seem very strange for an American government to seek outside help in developing a complex system. And yet that’s what they did. I don’t know why, but it’s bizarre.”

“If you Google CGI, you’ll find that they were in serious trouble with the Canadian government with health-care systems that were not delivered on time and were nonfunctional. So you would have thought that someone would have looked at that past history and said, ‘I don’t think that we can go with them.’ I mean, I wouldn’t have chosen them.”

—By CNBC’s Jeff Pohlman and Dan Mangan. Follow them on Twitter@_DanMangan and @cnbcinvestigate.

ORIGINAL SOURCE CNBC

BY WHO IS WEB?©

Do you love to laugh?…. you know, that outrageous, uncontrollable laughter, because something is so funny you have no other choice?  The rolling on the floor, glad you’re not old enough to worry about an ‘accident’, make it stop….my belly hurts, laughter?  It’s one of my favorite things to do, and I love being around funny people.  Laughter is purifying for the soul, and should be done on a regular basis to keep our psyche’s well lubricated. As the the youngest of 5 educated, well mannered, loud, funny and creative children (my mom made me say that), I had no choice but to find my niche early on.  Art?  Loved it always…. my Grandfather was an artist, so it runs in the genes, and I’m one of the lucky ones to whom it comes fairly naturally.  That doesn’t mean I think I’m Picasso, it just means that I am  capable….anyone who has tried any art medium knows what I’m talking about.  I still paint regularly, and find it one of the most relaxing and gratifying things I do.  Sports?

To tell the truth, by 5th grade, field hockey had permanently indented my shins enough times for me to know that a lifetime of sanctioned injuries was not being approved by me.  And please don’t ask me to sing…you’ll regret it for days (I’ve been told), although if your repertoire consists primarily of summer camp songs, I’ll be happy to bang along on the piano for you.  The point is, like most every other human, I had to find my way, and what I found was that no matter the situation;  how silly, or how grave, laughter was sort of a guarantee that I would come out the other side.   We had one of those homes that was always full……at any given time kids of different ages (I’m 12 years younger than my oldest sibling), doing various activities, could be found in any number of the favorite hangouts in and around the house.  But dinner time was different …..we all came together.  And despite my mom’s insistence on proper grammar, manners and some form of etiquette, sitting around that table never failed to provide a belly full of laughs along with good food.  My oldest brother and one of his best friends would crack jokes, or have funny dialogues between themselves that had everyone at the table in stitches,  especially my father (a serious business man…..with a wicked sense of humor).   So laughter was important, but making someone laugh…..now that was gold.  Humor is a universal language that can calm the masses……and make your face ache.  It’s also pretty easy to find some sort of humor in almost any situation.   They were lessons I learned early.  Giggle lots, crack-up often, chuckle, guffaw, or snort if you must…….and if you can make others laugh-then by all means, have at it……but just laugh.

But wait a minute, this is McAfee Weekly, not WEB weekly..LOL  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯    I just thought I’d share a piece of me that may give some insight into why I don’t take all this too seriously.  John McAfee is a joker….an admitted prankster, who loves to make people laugh…..and who, I’ve found out, has quite a laugh himself.  It’s one of those chuckles that comes from the tips of his toes, rolling up to his belly and bursting out as side-splitting laughter ……which then, by infectious nature alone, cracks me up too.  And when he’s trying to pull my leg, those years spent as the ‘little one who didn’t get the joke’ (but who laughed anyway) come in handy, and I can hear – ever so slightly – the change in tone that let’s me know I’m about to be punk’d.  But have no fear…….this attempted victim of the punk has had some experience being the punk-er, and just can’t let it go to waste.   It was last week.  Having veered off in several directions already, we were trying to get back to the subject at hand, and see if we had missed anything.  I said I would compile it all, and let him know if I had any other questions.  In a completely normal voice, John agreed, but added  ”And then, we never talked about why I feel it’s extremely important, when you leave your lover, to kill them and eat them.” one, t…. “Okay, go for it” I threw in.  He continued “that’s something we didn’t talk about, so we can save that for next time if you’d like.”  ”Oh, I’d love to hear about it” I said, not missing a beat.  I got back a stunned “Pardon?”

I repeated myself, adding I might know some good reasons for doing it too.  It was really hard not to laugh.  This time his voice changed quite a bit “I’m joking.  You know I’m Joking, right?”  Well, that was it for me, and I burst into laughter…… but John was still silent.  ”Of course I know you’re joking” I managed to get out between the chuckles that didn’t want to stop.  ”OK, alright” he said relieved.  I told him I was a smart ass from way back, appreciated all kinds of humor (except if someone gets hurt…that’s never funny), and wasn’t shocked by anything he had said to me.  He laughed, and said “that’s good”, but that momentary doubt had brought back memories of the countless MSM ‘reporters’ who’d recently failed miserably at recognizing his humor.

The following week, we picked up right where we left off….talking about how dense and robotic so many of the “reporters” he spoke to had been.  And it wasn’t the first time he’d found them to be that way…… I was sure he would mention a couple of reporters whose stories we knew from following wim……. maybe a good example, but not what I was hoping to talk about.  He asked if I had ever read the article in the Village Voice, about the legal battle between Yoga Master, Bikram Choudhury and his former student Greg Gumucio?  As much as I like to read, I had to admit that piece hadn’t made it to the ‘must read’ list…… really, who? I hadn’t forgotten that John spent years in Colorado deeply ensconced in the Yoga world, but really didn’t know any details.  That time of his life is on my list, I just didn’t think we were going there today.  And we weren’t…..he just wanted to make sure the background was clear.  Greg Gumucio had been a favored student of Bikram Choudhury, who is world known, and teaches ‘hot’ yoga.  Their relationship the article says, was very close, and for years Greg followed the master’s every word…..even getting a divorce at his insistence.

The Village Voice said : “Yet their friendship began to strain in 2000.  That’s when Gumucio met John McAfee, a software billionaire turned yoga teacher, and visited his Colorado estate.  The pair immediately clicked.  Soon, McAfee was inviting him to teach at a retreat, spending several days in nature practicing yoga in complete silence.  By the time it was over, Gumucio decided he wanted to teach multiple forms of yoga, incorporating McAfee’s ‘kriya’ method, which focuses on the spine.”  

This was disturbing news to Choudhury, who felt a sting of betrayal at seeing his protege take on a new mentor, and said “You cannot be a fucking prostitute.  You can’t have your feet in two holes.”

On the other hand, JM’s direct quote to Rebecca is very different … “Greg was one of my students when I began the relational yoga studio in Woodland Park, and I believe he was also a student of Bikram at the time.  He was a good student, I remember.  I wouldn’t say it was a particularly close relationship.  He came up to the lodge quite often; he came to do the breath-work classes and the hatha yoga, but I had a lot of students at the time, and I wasn’t close with any of them.”  

JM also remembers being slightly shocked when Greg reveal his intention to change course, and leave Bakrim,  saying “You might want to rethink following me….. I don’t know where I’m going, and when I get bored of it all, I’m leaving.”  When I laughed at the statement he had just made, he agreed it may have sounded funny, but it was true.  The yoga had started out because he was bored and it was fun.

Of John, Gumucio is quoted as saying “He taught me many things.  Really, he is a genius and brilliant” .

Eventually Greg G. did open his own yoga studios, and in the beginning at least, Choudhury did not react.  Then, Gumucio’s business directly interfered with Bikram’s income….. two of his studios were closed as a direct result of the competition from Greg.  A series of cease and desist letters and threats of lawsuits ensued, culminating into one of the biggest lawsuits in US history.  And no wonder, yoga sales are predicted to reach 8.3 billion by 2016, so this ‘don’t take a slice of my pie’ attitude should be expected (sadly).

And in Belize, JM hadn’t given either man a thought until one night in July 2012, shortly after 11 pm, the phone rang, and a woman, a reporter for the Village Voice who identified herself as Rebecca Moss, wanted a quote from him about the lawsuit.  In less than 30 seconds, he had provided her with everything he could…”I’m sorry I can’t help you, I didn’t know about the lawsuit”.  And that would have been the end of it, but apparently she wanted more.  ”What are you doing now?” she asked.    Hmmm…. it was after 11, he didn’t know her, or how she got his number …… “Observational Yoga” he replied, then waited for her to laugh.  ”It’s fun…really a good time” he continued.  Still no laughter….could she really think he was serious?  And JM, too quick to let an opportunity like this slip away, ran with it.  ”The benefits are amazing.   First of all, it’s great for the economy.  And for the environment…..not as many gyms are needed,

saving vast amounts of  energy.  Everyone can go watch, and feel the profound impact of Observational Yoga”.   I sat listening with my mouth open….good for the economy usually means jobs, but one center per town contradicts that right off the bat…??? John kept going  ”By simply watching, the body goes through a physiological change, and reaps the benefits as though it had done the physical work.  She kept asking questions….”how much does it cost?”  ”what is the typical age range?”  How she didn’t catch on here is beyond me.  ”Well, our largest age group is 18-25.  For some reason, the older generation just doesn’t trust it”  John continued…..” And we are growing all the time, with franchise opportunities on the horizon.”  How was he not laughing hysterically?  ”The most exciting part of this has been our studies into other fields.  Observational weight training, self-help, even an Observational driving school.  We believe that eventually, all things will be learned and ailments cured through osmosis, the basic principle of Observational ‘anything’… well, almost every human activity”.  ”Almost?” she said, falling hook, line and sinker, “so it doesn’t work for everything?”  Shocked by her continued belief, JM just kept going

(he does admit to feeling a little bad)  ”We have concluded that actions requiring very small or limited movement do not work.  For a whole week we had students Observing concert pianists, but not one of them could play at the end of the study.  We had no choice but to determine that due to limited quantum movements, small actions could not be learned through osmosis, and would not be deemed Observational.”  He ended with the pièce de résistance, “This will make my roll at McAfee (Anti-virus) look like nothing in comparison.”  He didn’t tell me how long he laughed for, but I can imagine it was a long time.

The rest as they say, is history.  By the time the article was printed, in the Denver Westword blog, the author was (barely) entertaining the possibility that it had been a hoax.  Her headline:

John McAfee: Anti-virus king turned relational yoga inventor talks latest endeavor (or prank?)

The question mark alone shows her reluctance to discount what JM had said, quite possibly wondering if she had just broken one of the biggest stories of the decade. The wild fire effect was in full swing, and articles mimicking Rebecca’s started popping up.  It’s amusing to read, that despite the lingering doubt, completely discounting the article, more specifically JM, was not something many people would do.  We really have to talk MSM.

so this is really a THING now, eh?

observational yoga: software entrepreneur & murder suspect john mcafee’s contribution to yoga

ummmmm….NEVER was a murder suspect

Turns out “observational yoga” is a thing…

It’s all Yoga Baby FB

No wonder the media conjures up images of sheep; those links are just a small smattering of the stories that merely regurgitated the original one, or quoted it outright, then gave an opinion (sic) or had a comment stream.  It’s frustrating enough to see the same thing printed over and over again, without anyone checking on the validity of what was written.  I can only imagine what it feels like when you’re the subject of the nonsense, often spinning out of control.  I’ve concluded that’s probably a good thing we  both love to laugh, and share a cheeky side (is it the British heritage?)……prompting me to say to John, “bless your pointed little head”, and thank you.

©WEB~2013

BY WHO IS WEB?©

Some people love living a life full of changes…..often celebrating the opportunities, while others dread the mere mention of any deviation from their comfortable routine…..often  living in fear of it.  Most of us are somewhere in the middle…..we may not want too many changes, but we’re fully aware they happen, and have learned to roll with them. Most changes are already in ‘full swing’ by the time we find out about them anyway, so stress and worry are futile.  However, I also know some changes are cool …….like this one :

Starting Monday (6/17), McAfee Weekly will be a regular on whoismcafee.com, in addition to remaining on wimawiw, in it’s original format.  It’s an exciting addition to the wild trip I’ve been on for the last 7 months, so I hope you’ll check it out to see what else I might be doing. *wink,wink*  And this Monday is going to be freaking huge.  People from all over the World will want to tune in….and especially the original wim followers.  We’ve been waiting for this, hoping that somewhere, somehow, someone would be able to convince him to do this…..and they have.  John McAfee finally comes clean and answers the hard questions.  You don’t want to miss this.

©WEB~2013

This afternoon my compound in Orange Walk  was burned to the ground , my sources confirm that barrow was livid over the fact that my employees were acquitted of all charges last month and that an investment group was about to purchase the property ( sale was supposed to close over the next few days).  Another source at the US embassy called me to confirm that the fires were not accidental…..

Chanel 5 Belize News

PORTLAND, Ore. — John McAfee slides out suddenly from behind a glass door.

It’s a sun-splashed morning in the eclectic neighborhood where he now lives, and the  former software mogul-turned-international fugitive needs a caffeine fix. Now.

“I have some stories and things to tell you, sir,” he says, rapping his right hand against a coffee table while nervously shifting his feet. “Do you have time for the truth?”

In his first extensive interview since he returned to U.S. soil in December, an animated McAfee agreed to meet a USA TODAY reporter at a nondescript apartment building in southeast Portland last week. For four hours, he explained his innocence, engaged in self-deprecation and eviscerated the news media for what he called exploitation.

“People ask me how did it feel to kill a man, and I can honestly tell them I wouldn’t know because I never have,” he says, gazing through piercing green eyes. McAfee is wearing a black hoodie, jeans and flip flops.

READ MORE

USA TODAY PART TWO

The night air was thick with humidity as the officers searched the upscale home for evidence, detaining three employees of the owner and combing the grounds for their ultimate trophy: the owner himself. But as the hours dragged on and with success no closer than when they had arrived, the task force shoved off from the beach and departed without their prize.

Read full article