Month: June 2021

John McAfee, the pioneer of anti-virus software is reported dead by commiting suicide in a Spain prison. Is he dead? Probably not. Based on John’s past adventures, the chance of death by suicide is extremely low.

A quick history recap, McAfee escaped Belize when the police wanted him for questioning about the death of his neighbor. Suspecting the Belize government at the time would most likely murder him, he dissapeared and got out of Belize. He ended up in prison and faked a heart attack. This just is who McAfee is.

The report of John McAfees death lasts substance, namely a picture of the body, which of course can be faked, but is a lot more substantive than the jail saying he killed himself.

If you ever spent much time talking to John, he’s the type who confronts governments and won’t back down, so allegedly committing suicide because he was being extradited doesn’t hold up to his personal character.

So is John McAfee dead or alive? Right now, we really don’t know. At this point he is schrodingers McAfee, both possibly dead and possibly alive simultaneously.

This will be updated as more data comes available.

Do we need a new encryption? Why do we need a new cryptography? Those are the two questions I’ve asked the creator of Krypton-320 a 320 bit Java based symmetrical encryption repeatedly for months.

Creator notaidan, believes that we do need a new cryptography, many of his answers over the months to questions are privacy driven. In the early days of krypton formerly uwucrypt, i asked why not just use AES? Notaidan pointed to that AES is government approved and we need protection from the government. While he didn’t say it nor does he believe he implied it, this argument inherently states that AES must be insecure , which no one knows of for the government to approve it. We whole heartedly disagree here, since anyone can read the code of AES that’s been available for decades.

So why krypton cryptography? Could it be that notaidan is 14 per his github site and just wants to create for the fun of it? No, he believes it is stronger than aes-256 because it is 320 bits. He has rewritten it about ten times. Whenever a bug is found, he doesn’t just patch the bug, he rewrites it entirely.

So is krypton encryption something we should use? That’s where uncertainty lies. With the codebase being rewritten all the time, it’s hard to analyze it and decide okay this is secure or insecure. What was said about Krypton earlier this week, no longer applies, so trying to form an opinion about it, is simply not doable at this time.

Is the Java libraries used safe? It uses secure random, big integer, scanner, and one other. All of these are well known, secure, libraries so yes there is no problem there. The only thing left is for some of the cryptography community to decide if the latest krypton-320 bit encryption is indeed better than AES and more secure as it is being touted. This will be updated as information becomes available.