John Mcafee
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2013–2024
4:25 · 13M views · Jun 19, 2013
A bizarre, tongue-in-cheek video in which John McAfee himself supposedly shows how to uninstall McAfee antivirus. It is known for its NSFW sex and drug references.
HN mostly cites it as a notorious piece of McAfee lore, usually jokingly, whenever John McAfee or antivirus uninstallation comes up.
9 comments from Hacker News
For anyone in the thread that's not seen "How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus" by John McAfee, you are very, very welcome [0]. Content warning: it was made in his Alpha-PHP era, and contains a lot of sex and drug references. It's mostly sex and drugs IIRC. [0] this video
I loved McAfee's video on How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus: this video At least he's got a sense of humor.
This attitude from users is a very real problem, but I'd argue it's platform agnostic. For instance there were headlines around the internet not too long ago stating Android is more secure than iOS based on claims made by Zerodium. Any Android user who read that may well have the same attitude you've described from iOS users. And it's potentially far more dangerous on Android because it allows you to sideload apps. You can even extend it to Windows. Your average user will buy a laptop preinstalled with McAfee [1] and think "no need to worry about viruses now because I've got an antivirus." Don't get me wrong I agree it's perfectly reasonable to be critical of Apple when it's warranted, but we don't yet know if it is in this case. It's entirely possible (and fairly likely) this malware was delivered as a trojan using pop ups the user had to interact with. If that's the case you can't blame Apple for user error, especially when trojans exist for every single OS that allow the user to install software from the internet. > most users perform two types of installs: relatively safe ones through the App Store, or venturing out into the wild west of the internet and bringing home a random binary that hopefully does what it says. This seems to imply any software installed from the App Store is safe while anything from outside the App Store is dangerous. Isn't the implication that App Store downloads must automatically be safe falling into the same trap you're criticising here? Quotes
I’ve seen this happen with YouTube, specifically this video: this video I had watched it many many years ago, and I suddenly remembered about it while at my friends apartment, (which is in the same building). Now I searched it up on my friends computer which was logged into his gmail account. We watched it and laughed. However, an hour later, I was on my iPhone at home when it appeared in my related videos. [LINK] I refreshed and it was gone...
A lot of times, the antivirus is part of the crapware that comes with a new windows computer. After a month of free tryal, it start shiwing scarry reminders. And as John reminds us, it may be difficult to uninstall this video