…and that the best way to make platforms proof against malware is to engineer them so that malware has an impossible task.

Anti-Malware staffers hate that perspective; they would prefer that we consider computer viruses to be as inevitable as human ones – or, rather, they would prefer that nobody remind the public that computers, unlike human beings, can be re-engineered to be virus-resistant, or even impervious.

They make a living selling software vaccines and revising them every few weeks; fixing the problem at source would spoil it for everyone.

However: back to the weird industry, it’s also populated by weird people:

Secrets, Schemes, and Lots of Guns: Inside John McAfee’s Heart of Darkness

It’s not too unusual for eccentric gringos to wind up in Central America and slowly turn stranger—”Rich white men who come to Belize and act strangely are kind of a type,” one local journalist told me. But this one’s story is more peculiar than most. John McAfee is a founding father of the anti-virus software industry, an inveterate self-promoter who built an improbable web security empire on the principles of trust and reliability, then poured his start-up fortune into a series of sprawling commune-like retreats, presenting himself in the public eye as a paragon of engaged, passionate living: “Success, for me,” he has said, “is being able to wake up in the morning and feel like a 12 year old.” But down in Belize, McAfee the enlightened Peter Pan seems to have refashioned himself into a kind of final-reel Scarface.

It’s worth the read.