It wasn't so long ago that the Nook was the key to Barnes & Noble's future. Now the bookseller is planning to back off of its efforts to sell its own e-reader, and is working on strengthening partnerships with tablet suppliers. [NYT]

It's not that Julian Assange isn't giving interviews—it's just that he's leading a busy life inside the Ecuadorian government's London embassy, and it's a question of fitting reporters in. [Ars Technica]

Kara Swisher leans into the backlash against Facebook COO's Sheryl Sandberg's new book. [AllThingsD]

In case you can't wait for the competing biopics currently in production, here's what it's like to go on a double-date with John McAfee. [PandoDaily]

(Photo: @TeslaRoadTrip)

What's an attention-whore to do when the press stops turning up? John McAfee had an idea: he gave two freelance journalists $2,900 in cash to follow him to the Caribbean and document his reunion with his 19-year-old girlfriend. [PandoDaily]

There may still be plenty of complex issues to be resolved before online gambling is legal in the U.S., but that isn't stopping tech companies from lining up at the regulatory gates. [NYT]

Kim Dotcom says Mega is "the Privacy Company." To that end, Mega is now accepting payment by bitcoin, and plans to offer secure email and chat services.  [Mashable]

After New York Times reporter John M. Broder wrote about the failings of the Tesla Model S during his road test along I-95, nine Model S owners attempted to create the trip. Four drivers completed the 353-mile leg between Rockville, Maryland and Groton, Connecticut, though of the five drivers who dropped out, none reported the battery failures that dogged Mr. Broder. [AllThingsD]

In the aftermath of Ecomom founder Jody Sherman's suicide—and word that the company is heading for liquidation—an argument that "'Killing It' Isn't Worth It." [TechCrunch]

(Screencap: KATU)

Crazy ol' John McAfee is still on the lam from police in Belize, but has managed to escape to the U.S.--a lucky turn of fate since he believes Hezbollah is after him. Now in an interview with a local news station, Mr. McAfee revealed that he's happily settled in Portland, where he plans to stay for awhile, perhaps in an effort to keep the dream of the '90s alive.

Sipping on coffee from a local beanery and donning a Burberry scarf, Mr. McAfee seems to be settling into his new West Coast life rather nicely, though his outfit could use a few more birds.

We do have one quibble, though. Could a friendly Portlander please let Mr. McAfee know that the blonde dye job is not doing him any favors in the "I'm not a murderer" department?

Even after Mr. McAfee successfully escaped Belize, ultimately landing in the U.S., he refused to go quietly into the good night, continuing to troll Belize officials—not to mention any such prudes disturbed by amorous photographs of a 67-year-old man and women perhaps 50 years his junior—from the platform of his blog.

Which is why it comes as no surprise that there's another movie treatment of Mr. McAfee's saga in the works: According to The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros has scooped up rights to Wired reporter Joshua Davis's article, John McAfee's Last Stand.

It's not the only McAfee movie in the works. As you'll recall, Mr. McAfee sold rights to his life story to an outfit called Impact Future Media. That tale, tentatively titled Running in the Background, wasn't even the first planned film-length telling of Mr. McAfee's future adventures, as Vice magazine has also indicated plans to produce a documentary of the Belizean adventure.

Neither of those films, of course, would seem likely to have the same resources behind them as the new Warner Bros entry, and the production company has reportedly slated John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, who teamed up on such films as I Love You Phillip Morris and Bad Santa, to write and direct.

Well, if a movie about Mr. McAfee is a thing that is happening, who do we like as the leather-skinned leading man? Here's hoping Nick Nolte has the inside track.

The black hat.

Despite believing his life to be in danger, John McAfee may have leaked digital data that revealed his location in the last days of 2012, recalling the misstep that led to his arrest in Guatemala last month.

Mr. McAfee, who rose to prominence developing antivirus software, has been on the run since November, when the Belizean police sought Mr. McAfee for questioning in the murder of his neighbor Gregory Faull. Over the weeks that followed, Mr. McAfee often said that he would be killed if captured.

While Mr. McAfee has successfully escaped to the United States, he told Betabeat in a telephone conversation yesterday that he still fears for his life, and that there are parties that would like to "take him out."

In a blog post yesterday, Mr. McAfee claimed to offer evidence that the Belize government, the Zeta drug cartel and the terrorist organization Hezbollah were working together to smuggle weapons into the United States.

“I’m not an idiot,” he told us. “I have exposed a major plot involving the Zetas and Hezbollah and Belize at highest level, and all three would probably like to take me out.”

Given those concerns, Mr. McAfee told us he is keeping a low profile and plans to "disappear" into the Midwest.

Nonetheless, Mr. McAfee may have let his whereabouts slip on December 30, when a blogger who has been critical of the antivirus pioneer claimed to have tracked Mr. McAfee's to Las Vegas.

The blogger, who writes under the name Acapulco Kevin, said in an email to Betabeat that he once worked for Mr. McAfee and has known Mr. McAfee for 20 years.

In an introductory post to his blog last month, he explained that "first and foremost I am writing this blog because I believe John McAfee is guilty of murder, being a pedophile, drug addict and fleeing Belize to avoid prosecution."

Last week, Acapulco Kevin posted an email exchange with Mr. McAfee, and claimed that he'd traced the header in Mr. McAfee’s Yahoo address, indicating that Mr. McAfee was in Sin City on December 30:

Well I just got an Email from John McAfee and he is in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada!!!
The software genius uses Yahoo! email and is too dumb to use a proxy so I looked up his Email Header information and here's what we have:

Mr. McAfee denied the assertion, asking Betabeat, “Do you think I’m foolish enough, sir, to let people get my real IP address? I’m nowhere near Vegas, I don’t like it particularly much there.”

Betabeat can't confirm that the above screenshot hasn't been doctored, though we were able to reach Mr. McAfee through the email address the blogger said he used to track Mr. McAfee.

If Acapulco Kevin is correct, it wouldn’t be the first time Mr. McAfee's whereabouts were betrayed by his digital footprint. Vice revealed the location of Mr. McAfee's hideout in Guatemala when the magazine failed to scrub data from a published photo, perhaps leading to his arrest in subsequent days.

For his part, Mr. McAfee has often been less than credible as a source. In the case of the Vice slip, Mr. McAfee briefly claimed that he'd intentionally leaked false coordinates for the purpose of throwing authorities off his scent, and newsrooms are littered with journalists betrayed by Mr. McAfee.

Meanwhile, it's unclear that Mr. McAfee is actually in danger. He told Betabeat that the Belizean government was "running scared" after his latest blog post, and that three police officials that he has criticized in the aftermath of his supposed exposé.

It is true that Belize's top cop David Henderson announced his retirement yesterday, the journalist at 7 News Belize who reported that story told Betabeat that the police commissioner stepped down because "he is past retirement and he presided over the most murderous year in Belize's history."

"I realize that in McAfee's solipsistic fantasies—everything is about him," reporter Jules Vasquez said in an email. "Coming from that completely baseless position—It would be hard to explain how completely irrelevant he is and has been to any decision made in Belize."

Update (January 5): After the publication of this post, Mr. McAfee emailed to reiterate he was not in Las Vegas on the night in question.

"I have not been in Vegas in years," he said. "On The day in question I was in Jackson Tennessee staying with John Pool and Kathy Pickett.  There were eleven witnesses. The blog in question is a hoax.  Anyone who checked his sources would know this.  The person blogging never worked for me or even met me."

We will continue to update this post as we learn more.

The black hat.

The law of diminishing returns: it's the bane of bath salts enthusiasts and fabulist storytellers the world over. Sure, that first hit was good; but it takes an increasingly potent dosage to deliver a thrill that approaches your very first time.

Fortunately, global media icon John McAfee appears to understand this phenomenon. (We're not saying that Mr. McAfee is necessarily pioneering a new form of reality entertainment, but we're not saying he isn't, either.) In his latest missive, posted under the title "A Clear and Present Danger," he claims to have hired 29 "pillow talk masters" to spy on Belize officials, and in so doing uncovered links between the Central American nation and the terrorist organization Hezbollah.

Ever since Mr. McAfee's first titillating blog posts after the murder of his neighbor Greg Faull, the story spun by the antivirus pioneer has never failed to get weirder. In the first chapters of the saga, he told tales of clever disguises and held forth on his experiences in sex tourism. In what seemed like his pièce de résistance, two Vice journalists embedded with Mr. McAfee, published a photo of the fugitive that outed his hiding place.

Which seemed to beg the question, would Mr. McAfee do next to maintain our interest. Well, here's a summary of Mr. McAfee's latest bid for our attention:

• After Belize police raided Mr. McAfee's home in April, he purchased 75 cheap laptops, loaded them with keystroke monitoring software, and gifted them to various Belize officials.
• He hired 23 women and 6 men as operatives, and sicced them on Belize's two national phone companies. "These men and women were given simple training on how to access and load software on someone's computer while they slept, or ate, or made long phone calls etc. It's dead simple if you're sleeping with someone ..."
• "Eight of the women became so accomplished that they ended up living with me."
• Throughout the operation, he emailed the Belize prime minister Dean Barrow, asking for an apology for the police raid. "A simple apology, in the early stages at least, would have stopped this whole affair."
• With no apology forthcoming, Mr. McAfee says he dug into Belize's National Security and Immigration ministries, which he alleges were knee-deep in a human-trafficking schema.
• A surprising number of the new arrivals to Belize, Mr. McAfee says, were Lebanese men.
• It should be noted here that for our man behind the curtain, it's a thin line between spymaster and pimp. A phone call with an operative posted to Mr. McAfee's site begins with, "How is my favorite tart today?" and ends at, "Why don't you come home, because I miss your ass anyway." (The recording is appended to the bottom of this post.)
• Frankly, after listening to that, we got a little distracted from the allegation that started all this. “Belize is clearly the central player in a larger network whose goal is to infiltrate the U.S. with individuals having links to terrorist organizations,” claims Mr. McAfee.
• The scheme involves the Zeta drug cartel, which, ominously, may be helping Hezbollah transport "something similar, in weight and size," to the drug packages the cartel slips into the U.S.
• Luckily for us, Mr. McAfee managed to infiltrate a Hezbollah camp.

Lucky, because he's promised to write about it at a later date.

(Photo: Digital Trends)

Online privacy pundits might not want to venture over to China any time soon; the country just passed a law requiring citizens to identify themselves when signing up for internet and mobile access. [Bloomberg]

Another Snapchat scandal! Turns out both Snapchat and Facebook's new Poke app store your videos sent over the services locally, meaning it's possible to save videos sent to you without the sender ever knowing. [BuzzFeed]

It appears those ads at the top of Wikipedia are paying off: the Wikimedia Foundation has raised $25 million so far in its 2012 fundraiser. [The Next Web]

Someone wants to make a stage show in Las Vegas based on Portal. [The Daily Dot]

John McAfee is at it again. [Wired]

Like Romeo and Juliet. (Photo: Robert King/Vice)

American treasure John McAfee has officially returned to U.S. soil following his dramatic escape from Belize, and has immediately begun doing what he does best: messin' with tech reporters.

In an interview on CNBC's Squawk Box this morning, Mr. McAfee appeared grizzled in a navy blue blazer, swirling a piece of candy--perhaps a Nicorette product?--haphazardly around in his mouth as he deigned to answer questions from Andrew Ross Sorkin.

His responses were as delightfully insane as they usually are. Come, journey with us through the mind of brainy paranoiac and ephebophilia enthusiast John McAfee.

On whether or not he really does bath salts:

Child, please!  "I have the resources to do good drugs," Mr. McAfee said, sounding slightly miffed that he would ever do a drug manufactured in a midwestern trailer.

On his affinity for hoaxes:

"I love elaborate hoaxes but not ones that result in my detention in Guatemalan jails." C'mon now.

But then, Mr. Mcafee added, "I did a hoax on bath salts once," negating his prior claim that he likes only fancy drugs.

On how much money he actually has:

"I have no clue what I am worth, probably around $5 million." :(

On what he'll do to make money after this whole hooplah dies down:

"I'll do something... I'll shine shoes." A noble profession!

CNBC also reported that Mr. McAfee's girlfriend has escaped Belize, but did not clarify whether it meant the 20-year-old or the 17-year-old. Godspeed, Sam and Amy!

Is that disbelief we see peeking through his face? (Photo: screencap)

Antivirus pioneer/international fugitive John McAfee is back on American soil, holed up in a Miami hotel. He's chucked the Vice guys, but that doesn't mean the dog-and-pony show is over. Witness this recent interview with ABC News, in which he admits that his supposed heart attack was "of course" part of an elaborate deception to get out of the country. Duh!

He continued laying it on thick for the ABC News reporter making his very best Serious Business face:

"What's a better story, millionaire mad man on the run. You [the media] saved my ass. Because you paid attention to the story. As long as you are reporting, it is hard to whack somebody that the world is watching."

Oh, but now the story takes another turn: Mr. McAfee says all his assets were in Belize (uh, didn't anyone tell him about the Caymans?) so his flight left him broke as a joke. But so far he's getting by with a little help from his friends:

After he arrived on South Beach, he said, a mysterious "Canadian friend" ordered another man he'd never met to drop off a wad of fresh $5 bills that McAfee later displayed to ABC News, pulling them from his coat pocket.

So let's refresh: He's owns to playing up the crazy and faking sick, then proceeds to wave around $5 bills dropped off by a stranger at the behest of an unnamed Canadian.

Serious question: Is John McAfee just fucking with us at this point? His history of playing the media isn't exactly a secret, and this New York Times article makes a pretty good refresher. We're starting to wonder whether this is some sustained stunt to prove a point about bloggers.

Mr. McAfee's true face? (Photo: Wikipedia)

McAfee and Vice editor in chief Rocco Castoro. (Vice.)

They most recent chapter in the fantastical tale of John McAfee's escape from Belize is coming to a close, as the software pioneer was released from a Guatemalan detention center and is being expelled from the country.

Mr. McAfee, who has been on the run from Belize police since the murder of his next door neighbor last month, will be boarding an American Airlines flight bound for Miami later this afternoon, Mr. McAfee said today in an interview with Bloomberg Television's Cory Johnson.

"I'm being expelled, I will have to leave today" he told Bloomberg. "I'll be leaving on the 3:40 flight for Miami on American Airlines, and I have no choice in the matter, however, I'm perfectly happy with the decision."

Mr. McAfee's flight back to the United States may be the most ordinary event in the month-long drama, which has seen Mr. McAfee concoct strange disguises, carry on a never-ending string of media interviews from hiding, and blog at length about his ordeals and about the humanitarian conditions in Belize.

In a recent twist, Mr. McAfee accused Vice magazine, which had two journalists embedded with the fugitive, of intentionally exposing his location so they could get exclusive video of his arrest.

When asked whether he thought the Belize government would continue to seek him for questioning, Mr. McAfee fell back on a familiar refrain, averring that the police in the Central American nation intended to harm him.

"I've offered to talk to the police numerous times on the phone," he said. "This is not an issue of talking about a murder. It's a matter of putting my hands on the person."

Nor did he miss the chance his deportation offered to funnel traffic back to his blog: "If you go to my blog at whoismcafee.com, it's all described there, there's 4 million words of text and a few pretty pictures."

With that, Mr. McAfee bid Mr. Johnson adieu. "But sir, the officers are here with guns and I must leave."