John McAfee's D-Central Aims to Thwart Government Spying Efforts

During an interview at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center this past weekend, antivirus software founder John McAfee touted a new invention that he's planning to launch as soon as possible. It's called D-Central, and based on that name alone, and the fact that it's goal is to enhance your privacy, it's probably easy to surmise that it's simply a creative way to say "decentralize".

A hardware product, little is known about D-Central at this point, but given its goals, it's easy to speculate on its final design. It's likely to plug into your ISP's router and perhaps act as a router or switch itself, automatically decentralizing all (or maybe just some) of your traffic so as to make it untraceable - at least in theory.

Because the networks that D-Central can create are dynamic, efforts by the NSA, or agencies like it, to track things down would be made much more difficult, if not impossible. Of course, that means just one thing: The governments won't be happy. True criminals would have an easier time hiding, for example. McAfee's thoughts? "Of course it will be used for nefarious purposes, just like the telephone is used for nefarious purposes." The difference is that phone conversations can be pin-pointed, whereas the traffic D-Central would pass through can't be. You might imagine, though, that most criminals using a phone for communications likely aren't sticking to the same one for too long.

When D-Central is released, it'll cost about $100. Due to its design of rerouting your traffic, it's likely to reduce net performance to a certain degree, but for some, that will be more than worth it for the enhanced security and privacy. McAfee vows that if the US bans such a device - which wouldn't be surprising - he'll continue to sell it elsewhere. As far as he's concerned, D-Central is becoming a reality, and it's as simple as that.