Between posting saucy videos and juggling girlfriends, world's most interesting geek debuts D-Central, an anti-spying device I tell you, every year my job gets harder. Three times a week I am asked to extrude snarky observations about our tech-obsessed lives and the people responsible for same. Each day I have less and less to work with. Steve Jobs is sadly no longer with us. Ballmer is on his way out. Ellison is only interested in yachting. Gates is too busy giving all his money away. Carol Bartz is somewhere on the sidelines, muttering obscenities under her breath. The new crop of Google Glass-wearing pasty white guys who are running most of the high-tech world these days are suffering from a collective charisma bypass. Dirt is more interesting. Which is why I say thank god for John McAfee. Not only is the original developer of McAfee AntiVirus the most entertaining technology icon of all time [NSFW], he’s also planning to save us from the NSA. Over the weekend, the 68-year-old Hunter S. Thompson of high tech gave a talk at the C2SV Technology Conference and music fest, during which he revealed D-Central, a pocket-sized gizmo he says will prevent the spooks from tapping our phone calls, emails, text messages, and hallucinations. Per the San Jose Mercury News: It was a talk bound to appeal to the young audience, which broke into frequent applause. Among the group was his new 30-year-old wife, Janice Dyson. She said in a brief interview afterward with this newspaper that she is a former stripper. The couple met in Miami, where McAfee went after being deported from Guatemala. “I keep him grounded,” she said. Honey, you could attach 10-inch-thick steel cables to John McAfee’s legs and bolt him to Mt. Rushmore and you couldn’t keep him grounded. Will D-Central deliver? The story went on to offer a scosh more detail about D-Central, but not enough for anyone to figure out what it actually is: McAfee outlined what some might regard as a pie-in-the-sky plan to finish the first prototype of the D-Central in six months. He said the gadget is called D-Central because by communicating with smartphones, tablets and other devices, it will create decentralized, floating and moving local networks that can’t be penetrated by government spy agencies. The design is in place already for a version whose range will be three blocks in the city and a quarter mile in the country, he said. The device will be compatible with both Android and iPhones. Drama king If McAfee was just having us all on — or possibly battling an acid flashback — he’s going to some lengths to sell it. He’s built a website, called Future Tense Central, which offers a logo borrowed from Fandango, royalty-free theme music from the Casio collection, and a movie-trailer-like intro: In a world where information Privacy and freedom are at risk A new technology is arising D-Central There’s also a countdown clock, which stands at a little more than 174 days as I write this, and links to McAfee’s various social media accounts. I especially like McAfee’s Twitter account bio: “Eccentric millionaire and still alive.” In a little less than six months, we’re going to find out something; what exactly that something is, we don’t know. Or maybe he’s giving the NSA a sporting chance to figure out what it is and build in a backdoor. The great thing about McAfee is that he doesn’t have to ship product. He doesn’t have to turn a profit. He doesn’t have to meet market expectations. He doesn’t have to give a damn what anyone thinks of him. And he seems to be having the time of his life. If you don’t believe that, you need to watch his most recent NSFW video, in which he answers popular questions like “Were you really living with seven women in the jungles of Belize?” and “Did they all try to kill you?” McAfee’s answers: a) Yes, but usually not all at one time; b) less than 50 percent of the women tried to murder him, though who did seemed especially proud of that fact. He is, apparently, really good at dodging knives and bullets — guess that’s how he’s made it to nearly three score and 10. McAfee is a throwback to the early days of technology, which emerged from the nerd wing of the 1960s counterculture. If Abbie Hoffman or Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters were alive today, they’d be running startups in Silicon Valley, only they’d be a lot more fun than Google, Twitter, and Facebook. McAfee is the last Prankster standing. And if D-Central is more than just a gag, and he really can pull off something that would give the NSA fits? That would be the most awesome prank of all. Technology IndustrySecurity