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tv   Press Here  NBC  January 13, 2013 9:00am-9:30am PST

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>> accept months ago they sent 42 armed soldiers into my property. >> of course mcafee doesn't always tell the truth.armed sol. >> of course mcafee doesn't always tell the truth. here's what you didn't see after he returned to the united states last month threatening to hide under a desk, much to the alarm of the young production assistant assigned to properly him. >> if it's a difficult question, i will get down like this. so i will just be from here to here. that will be it. is that okay with you? thank you. she has no sense of humor. why is that? what is wrong with the world? young people no longer have senses of humor. >> then tried to convince cnbc anchors who couldn't see him, only hear him, he wasn't in miami. >> i wanted to ask whether this was standard. because when i get on, i'm going to say, you know, i'm very glad
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to be here. >> no one knows mcafee quite the way joshua davis does. long before mcafee became a person of interest in the murder of his neighbor, davis visited the software pioneer in the jungle, watched him play russian roulette twice. and he wrote a chilling piece called john mcafee's last stand. what caused you to be so curious about this man so early? i mean, we were all fascinated when he started to flee and was stressing up as a bettgerman tourist. but you figured out early he was somebody to take a look at. >> six months before that, the end of april, he was raided by the gang suppression unit of the belizean police force and charged with running a meth lab in the jungle. and i just thought no way. how is that possible? >> the software guy. >> the software guy, a guy who
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basically created the anti-virus industry is now in the jungle running a meth lab? and so i figured there had therehad to be more to it. so i went down there in june. >> call him on the phone and say -- >> i e-mailed him, said i'd like to come visit and hear your side of the story. >> and? >> he said that there was essentially a vast conspiracy against him, that he had not donated to a belizean politician, that they wanted him run out of the country. and they were trying to intimidate him. and in fact that he did have a lab, but it was not a meth lab and that it was actually a lab where he was looking for new antibiotics, natural antibiotics. >> and you believe that story? >> there's lots of evidence that that is the case, that he certainly started out in that place. he had a legitimate researcher working with him will, doing that type of work.
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but she left. she became very scared of him. >> at some point did you say to yourself maybe i'm in the wrong place, this is not -- my mother would say is this is not the people i should be hanging out? >> these particular pictures i did not take, but i was there in this environment certainly. and i had just been on a reporting assignment in libya before i went to visit him. and things in libya were very bad for me at the time. and i was in iraq, as well. and so i thought belize is a tropical place, i'll have a nice relaxing experience, i'll recover from libya. and lo and behold, assassins, pimps and prostitutes. >> how did this happen? in your piece, there's a line
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where you say the reason john mcafee was such a success was because he traded off his own parano paranoia. continue trandid that translateo his own life? >> he was scared. he thought the government was trying to kill him. i was staying at his property in the middle of the night. bang, bang, bang on the door and he's standing there with a gugud he says did you hear, somebody just fired a gun on the property and i didn't hear anything. but slowly i became more and more concerned that maybe there was like what do i know, maybe there is somebody trying to kill him. i finally hired a bed guard. when i left to investigate his claims, he said somebody was likely going to try to kill me. >> and it wasn't going to be
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him. >> no, he thought the belizean government would try to kill me, that i would be a target. and having just come out of the bad situation in libya, i decided, okay, i should really err on the side of safety and i hired the bodyguard and i found that it was actually very calm place and i was able to walk around, people were very nice to me. they said, no, you're totally safe. and i got rid of -- i let the bodyguard go. and found almost the opposite of what he said. >> so you spent a lot of time with him. you know him better than the people reading the papers, watching the television about him. he says all kinds of stuff that seems crazy and he contradicts himself. is the guy crazy or not? >> what i can stay is that his perception of reality is not my perception of reality. you know, when i went out to the mainland to find out if there was a massive drug running
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operation in this tiny little village that he was living in, i didn't see it. and when i went back to confront him essentially and say, look, what i saw is not what you told me i would see, he got kind of agitated and he had a gun strapped to his chest. he took the gun out, he says this is a gun, right? i'm like yeah. i'm getting nervous. he opens the chamber up, drops the bullets out, puts one in, spins it, pulls it to his head, there's five chamber, and he pull it is five times and says maybe your assumptions about reality are incorrect. and then he pulls the trigger one more time. >> for a total of six. >> for a total of five. there's five chambers. and he continues to pull it again and again and again. >> he tricked in you some ways. >> he says you are operating on an assumption about reality is wrong, it's the same thing with your research. >> we've all covered things that have frightened us, and i just have a minute or two left here, but even libya, even iraq,
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that's got to be one of the most frightening things you've ever seen. >> absolutely. i realized then that i needed to leave. >> let me ask you, if i had the opportunity to put john mcafee in your chair and ask almost yes him questions, would it be worth my time? >> it would be entertaining. >> but would it journalistically be worth my time? >> absolutely. >> joshua davis, author of tremendous books. far more successful than i have the time to even say and so i highly recommend people take a look at your work. thank you for being with us. >> thank you. up next, a company you likely don't know has a billion and a quarter reasons why you should, when "press: here" continues.
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welcome back to "press: here." a company you likely have not heard of just raised $50 million in funding from some of silly con valley's top venture capitalists, giving the security company an estimated overall value of $1.25 billion. its ceo is david dewalt, one of president obama's national security and technology adviser, some say he might be the next ceo of intel. i don't know where to start. do you want to start with the next ceo of intel, an upcoming ipo? >> we're very excited. p we raised a great round. fire eye is a very unique company. i had a choice of a lot of different companies to take the ceo job fortunately and i love this little company. >> you were on the short list of a whole bunch. one agency has called you one of the absolute top executives in
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silicon valley. >> well, we've had a lot of opportunity. i was really proud to have served my time at mcafee and my time through intel, as well. and i it that, took a little time off. which was needed. although my golf game didn't get better. i don't understand. so i went back to working and found this little company, fire eye, which isn't so little anymore. over 100 million in bookings, over 100% growth. and now a value over a billion dollars, as well. and invented the next generation security engine. and what we're finding today, the anti-virus model that's out there today isn't working very well. and we're finding that there's a whole new model out there that this company has create that had is working. >> this is an interesting thing because the two biggest companies in the industry, semantic and mcafee, no relation to our -- well, a need relationship at best, they've had some serious challenges. signature based security doesn't really work. so they have some really
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challenges. intel came to the rescue with one. the other one, who knows. but the other companies that are trying something new, something different, a lot of ip chlt oos valuations. is the power all going to like the new players starting over? >> not really. there is a home for mcafee and semantic and all the anti-virus players. there's over 60 million bad pieces of malware viruses out there. and that model works for a lot of type of content. but today the attackers are so much more advanced and we're finding nation states very advance the criminal organizations, and now with a anonymous and others, and they're very advanced. and those models don't work for that type of attack. so the new attack is almost the norm now. and the new type of way of detecting and blocking that is using virtual machines and using cloud based intel againligence much more proactive nonsignature
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model. the idea is that a whole new type of architecture is emerge to go block the more advanced attacks. >> you had to be a little careful because you wanted to position yourself as the young up and comer against these titans, but you're in charge of the titan up until a just short time ago and sold to intel. so you can't say they got nothing. you've got to balance that a little bit. you are walk down a tight rope when you answered that question. >> well, i was and i wasn't. in a way i see there's places where that model doesn't work clearly and there's places where it does work. and the work that intel has done with mcafee is tremendous. putting security at a lower layer of the stack is the right direction. the lower you go, the more things you see, the more you can block. but that's largely on end points or pcs or macs or mobile. in fire eye, we focus on the network. the network has changed a lot. >> some blogs were talking about you were going to file to go
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public or that you had under the jobs act in this new fashion. where are you with that? >> well, that was just a rumor. we haven't filed the s-1 yet. the s-1 is the final document. but we're getting closer. there's things that i learned in the last ten years of being a public company ceo that you just have to do and do well to sustain yourself for a long period of time. what i wanted to do is get fire eye ready for a long term of growth t growth. the opportunity is tremendous and we have to take advantage of it. >> there's been increasing awareness of the nation state espionage piece of all this. saw recently something that said more than 90% of companies, i can believe more than that in the u.s. big value companies have been compromised one way or another. on the other hand, u.s. cyber weapons, pretty fancy.
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really good stuff that's being hch- >> we're doing the same thing -- >> flame, some really impressive stuff that's come out in the middle east. my question is can fire eye or for that matter anyone else play at that kind of level against the nation state stuff? pretty smart guy says we lost, we can't stop it as a private security company. >> i don't believe we can stop everything, but certainly with fire eye the detection rates that we are very high and what we call the false positives, ones that we think aren't one and are one are very low. so we're finding most what's out there including moths st of the nation state type activities and what's amazing to me is the nation state research and the amount of espionage happening in the world is unbelievable. just unbelievable. >> you're on the president's advisory council. what are you telling him, what are you telling the government that it should do to help
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companies protect themselves against this? where does the role of government stop and company begin? >> well, here's kudos to the administration because they've been reaching out and creating partnerships with the private sector and we're beginning to work together in ways we've never done before. the government, intelligence agencies and the u.s. are trying to work together with silicon valley, work together with high tech communities to come up with a better way to solve it because when you look at the internet, there's no governance model really. it's global, capital list tick in nature. i can go out and buy 10,000 web domains tomorrow and attack your website. which is what happened some of the banks. there's cooperation required. >> do you think the government should set minimum levels that companies should reach or should there are more regulation or left to the shareholders and the companies themselves to worry about? >> i think a combination of the two. awareness and education for critical infrastructure, energy
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industries, important pats of our world, probably need more push to have a higher standard for security. but at the same time, education to the top executives is needed, too, so why we need that. the last thing you want to do is see an energy out annuage acros large state. >> somebody had said you were on the short list to be the next ceo of intel. i realize you just started the job you have. but some viewer will point out i never followed up on that question. >> well, it add to you wied to rumors. i love my job at fire eye. i'm not a candidate for intel. they've done a great job and they've named a couple succes r successors already. >> we wish you success with eventually a public offering and all you're doing. appreciate you being here. >> thank you. up next, yahoo! starts to
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turn itself around. we have photographic proof. head the flicker when "press: here" continues.
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welcome back to "press: here." as of wednesday, marissa mayer will have been ceo at yahoo! for since months. in that six months, yahoo! has not turned around, but clearly they found the steering wheel. the change at yahoo! is most noticeable with the photo sharing site flicker. yahoo! bought flicker back in 2005, a lifetime ago in internet time, and ceo after ceo largely ignored the service, allowing it to grow stale as competitors like instragram developed. but last month, yahoo! radically revised flicker, offering an iphone app for the first time
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incredibly late to the revolution, but with updated features like sharing and filters. >> i started thinking about the best decisions i'd ever made -- >> reporter: and mayer herself started using it, incredibly the first ceo at use yahoo! to actually use the product. bret wayne can take ever of that credit. he was working on the new flicker. wayne is the former ceo of aol japan, though his mother wanted him to be a doctor. how did that work out? >> well, i actually did become a doctor. you always have to do what your mother says, right? >> and then you moved on. >> i actually worked in your arena for a while, i worked in broadcast television. and then i got into interactive media and the web. >> quite the career. so get us inside of yahoo!. i feel good when i see flicker -- remember there was the internet drive, please do
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something with flicker, and you did. and it's great to see yahoo! doing something exciting. >> speaking for the flicker team, we're very excited about where we got to this year. i joined flicker back in may and the team had already been working really hard. we knew that mobile was the focus because we saw more and more people who had been photo enthusiasts moving from slrs to the smart phone. so we knew we had to be on that platform where the consumers were. a lot of hard work, a lot of of focus. and i think the app speaks itself. >> is iphone the most popular camera on flicker? >> with every release of the iphone that came out, we saw the iphone rapidly becoming the most popular camera. version by version. from 3 to 4, 4s, 5. >> marissa mayer hasn't posted a lot, but she has. scott thompson never used
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flicker and you think why the heck not. why wouldn't the ceos have used those products. and i think that speaks to marissa's understanding of what being a ceo of a u consumer company is. >> i can't speak for the ceos, but all of us at yahoo! want to be hands on with our products. because being really focused on consumers and what they need, you have to use the proper tublgt like you would expect a customer to use it. and it's a tough challenge. because you want to build a beautiful experiences, you wouldn't to reduction friction, make it easy for people to actually get stuff done. we're focused on people's daily habits and making it easy is what's driving us. >> some people would say you're late to the show. instragram which facebook now owns has 100 million users plus. why bother? you're's already
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been a winner. so why not put it on something else. >> flicker has been in the digital photography game for a very long time. and the fact that maybe some of our product releases haven't necessarily kept up with the market, that's fair. but we've never abandoned the platform and never disregarded our community. we've been very focused particularly in the last 12 months of comi doing release af release on the web and mobile. we're doing work on the website all the time. so we are moving and we are investing and growing. and we have a very solid community and a huge ecosystem. we work with apple, a doudobe. so a lot of people on the platform and we're really moving forward. >> i think one of the interesting challenges at yahoo! is that it's a big company, not
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as big as google, but it's a big company and it has these little bits within it. some have languished. how has marissa changed the atmosphere? >> it's been a very exciting time. she's certainly brought a lot of vigor and a lot of consumer focus. and i think we look at all the products that we have and we look at our audiences and our engagements, we have to do better. we have to give consumer what is they want, we have to be part of their every day lives. so i think if you look across the board, there's a lot of enthusiasm. >> it was once written flicker has the opportunity to become the next flicker. >> right. >> i thought it was a pretty good line. you don't make money for the company, though, do you? are you a revenue stream?
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>> i can't talk about our revenue figure but we are focused on both satisfying our consumers and also our advertisers. flicker has a paid subscription product which is something that makes it different from some other propducts out there and te subscription business is solid. people are happy to pay for some of the features that we provide. >> and it's quite interesting because just before christmas, there was a big fuss over instragram because basically it's ad funded as opposed to having the subscription model. so there was a lot of discussion as to whether it would share photos without permission. advertisers backed away from it quickly, but it highlighted the discomfort that there is with these kind of ad driven models. so maybe there's an opportunity for pushing that subscription model harder. >> we actually i think it was from 2011, there's a blog post on our flicker blog about how we have taken great pains over the years to really are respect what
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photographers want, whether that's through privacy controls, whether that's through distribution controls, i want to share it here, i don't want to share it there, but we also implemented the platform many years ago, so we leawle believe that photographers have rights and it's up to the photographer. sometimes they want to put their photograph out in front of even. great. sometimes you just want to show to your mom. that's fine, too. >> we'll stop through. c you there. congratulations on a great iphone app. tech journalists are just glad to see something excite building yahoo!. >> and your mom will be very proud, i'm sure. we'll be back in just a minute.
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that's our show for this week. i'm scott mcgrew.
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thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.
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hello and welcome. we hope you're having a great new year. today we have our exclusive interview we did a while back with the late actress, an interview you'll only see here. ♪ we begin today on the latest on immigration reform. we know a lot has been happening on capitol hill. here to kind of fill us in on what's been happening, what we can expect to happen, is an immigration attorney who has been helping a lot of nonprofits in the area and has her own law practice. welcome back to the show. >> thank you. good morning. >> tell us first of all about opening your own practice because we know that you helped a lot of

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