John McAfee, the controversial programmer and head of McAfee security, has announced details of his new company and its first product, a small piece of hardware called D-Central.
At a rare public appearance at the C2SV conference in San Jose, McAfee outlined the new piece of kit, to be made by ‘Future Tense’, which is a device that can be dropped into a bag or pocket and create a localized wireless network designed to exist on a ‘lower scale’ than the Internet.
D-Central can either be set in a private mode, which provides encryption for all users but leaves them mutually identifiable, or a public mode, allowing users to make files available to the public while still maintaining anonymity.
"The NSA helped create every single encryption algorithm that we use, and therefore can get access to anything they want," McAfee told the conference.
"I’m 68 years old and if you can just give me any small amount of information about yourself, I promise you within three days, I can turn on the camera on your computer at home and watch you do whatever you’re doing."
He claimed that users could request any file, which would then automatically download once a user with that file joined the network.
"If you’re on a college campus, you’ll probably get responses within a quarter of a second," he said.
With no unique identifier for the devices, the recipient would not know who had provided the file, and the sender wouldn’t know who received it.
"We have the design in place … I would say we are six months out from the first prototype," he claimed.
In 2012 the anti-virus pioneer, who founded McAfee Associates in 1987 before leaving the company in 1994, fled his home in Belize after police attempted to interview him following the murder of an American national.
After making it to nearby Guatemala, he was arrested and eventually deported to the US.
