(Photo: Yahoo Sports)

What does it take to join the Illuminati, a secret society of power players that Internet conspiracy theorists believe are looking to take over the world?

Being super rich and famous helps--just look at Queen Beyonce, who supposedly flashed the Illuminati sign (a triangle) during her Super Bowl halftime performance. Other rumored illuminati members are Bey's hubby Jay-Z and their child Blue Ivy, Barack Obama, Angelina Jolie and Adele. It's an elite crew primarily comprised of music legends, so it's no surprise that many aspiring musicians wish to ascend the Illuminati ranks. It's highly discouraged, however, to shoot someone in order to do so.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that a June trial has been set for 27-year-old Wafeeq Sabir El-Amin, who is accused of shooting his friend in the head because he believed he had to commit a human sacrifice in order to join the Illuminati and become famous. "You are my sacrifice,” El-Amin reportedly said before shooting his friend in the head.

An attorney told the judge that Mr. El-Amin was obsessed with "a book about the role of the Illuminati in hip-hop music and especially in the career of rap star 50 Cent." Aren't we all?

The victim, miraculously, survived, which we think means he gets first dibs at the Illuminati throne.

(flickr/mjtmail)

Firms specializing in technology security make it their business to scare potential customers, but that doesn't make an Internet Identity (IID) report predicting cyber doom in 2014, highlighted today by Ray Kurzweil's Accelerating Intelligence, any less spooky.

According to IID, looming cybersecurity threats in 2013--more mobile malware, increasingly aggressive hacktivism, attacks on the cloud--are "well-anticipated and mundane."

Those "mundane" threats are nothing next to the bleak wasteland of death and destruction IID expects in 2014:

[By] 2014 significant new methods of cybercrime will emerge. These new threats include the utilization of Internet connected devices to actually carry out physical crimes, including murders and cybercriminals leveraging mobile device Near Field Communications (NFC) to wreak havoc with banking and e-commerce. IID also expects the industry to combat such threats with new platforms for sharing intelligence across researchers, commercial enterprises and government agencies.

IID elaborated on "Murder By Internet Connected Devices" with scenarios that sound pretty plausible. They predicted that criminals could use pacemakers with remote connections, control systems on Internet-connected vehicles or even connected machines that control IV drips to potentially carry out long-distance, untraceable crimes.

It sounds like hyperbole, but pacemakers (for example) are already hackable, and as Forbes noted in this early December post about the reality of compromised medical equipment, Homeland has already used a hacked pacemaker as a plot device.

IID also warned about the dangers of NFC-enabled smart phones. NFC, or near-field communication, allows information exchange between compatible devices. It's pretty common on phones now but may one day even permit cars to talk to each other. Paul Ferguson, the company's vice president of Threat Intelligence, says NFC could be "a gold mine for cybercriminals and we have already seen evidence that they are working to leverage these apps to siphon money."

Additional threats IID believes may manifest in 2014 include an increase in state-sponsored malware, like Stuxnet, Flame and Duqu, a successful cyberattack on a power grid and an "exploit of a significant military assault system like drones."

Not directly mentioned but already in the wild: hackers already taking advantage of poorly-secured supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems which have easily cracked web administration pages. At the moment SCADA vulnerabilities might just cause discomfort and disruption, but in 2014's creepy killer web scenario, compromising a large-scale heating and cooling system might just be round one in an all-out infrastructure attack on a regional, even a national scale.

In posting a link to the Kurzweil write-up about IID's dire warnings, Quartz's Christopher Mims sounded the necessary note of caution needed after reading hints of a looming cyber-pocalypse:

Cybercriminals will straight-up kill you, says firm that profits massively by hyping threat. kurzweilai.net/murder-by-inte…

— Christopher Mims (@mims) January 4, 2013

Duly noted. However, if IID is correct, we've only got a year.

Cower and whimper accordingly.

This guy, but with shoe polish on his face. (Photo: Long Island Press)

Just when you thought the story of antivirus king John McAfee--who's wanted for questioning by Belizean police for the murder of his neighbor Gregory Faull--couldn't get any stranger, dude goes and starts a blog about how he's managed to evade police by posing as a dolphin carving peddler who sticks tampons up his nose.

In a blog called Who is McAfee?, which suspiciously resembles a marketing ploy for the upcoming graphic novel about his life The Hinterland, Mr. McAfee spares no details in describing exactly what it's like to be on the run from authorities in Central America. He writes of how he altered his appearance to avoid arrest by dying his hair and beard, darkening his skin with shoe polish and stuffing a "shaved down tampon deep into my right nostril and [dying] the tip dark brown – giving my nose an awkward, lopsided, disgusting appearance." Whatever works? And instead of going into hiding in some underground bunker like a normalfugitive, Mr. McAfee has adopted some not-exactly-subtle personalities, perhaps as a "screw you" to police forces that are pulling out all the stops to track him down:

On subsequent days using different disguises, I did the same general thing, one day selling tamales and burritos that I had purchased wholesale from a real vendor, on another pretending to be a drunk German tourist with a partially bandaged face and wearing speedo swimming trunks and a distasteful, oversized Hawaiian shirt and yelling loudly at anyone who would listen – “Leck mich um ausch!”. At 67 years of age it was quite a spectacle.

For the uninitiated, Google translates "Leck mich um ausch" to "Lick me to Auschwitz." (A reader wrote in to tell us that a more accurate translation might be, "Lick my ass.")

Mr. McAfee has also put the spotlight on a 20-year-old woman named Samantha, who in addition to keeping him clothed and fed, has also used her womanly wiles to keep him out of jail:

She has also helped me evade detection by grabbing me and kissing me, in public, in a fashion that causes passerby’s to feel embarrassment at the thought of staring and by creating emotional scenes that cause the curious to momentarily forget what they were looking for.  She is acutely aware of her surroundings and is as street smart as a sober hobo.

We suppose galavanting around Central America in costume with a 20-year-old who adores you is preferable to choking on your own vomit in a Belize jail. But blogging about your escapades is inadvisable when wanting to stay hidden: Now Belizean police know that if they want to find Mr. McAfee, they needn't look any further than the dude in blackface with a tampon up his nose.

(Photo: PC Mag)

John McAfee, creator of the anti-virus software your parents run on their desktop computer, is wanted by Belizean police for the alleged murder of his neighbor, fellow American expat Gregory Faull. Now he's on the lam, hiding from law enforcement who he claims will kill him if he's brought in for questioning. Perhaps his paranoia can be chalked up to his documented penchant for bath salts and other psychoactive drugs?

Wired nabbed an exclusive interview with Mr. McAfee from an unknown hiding place in Belize. He maintains his innocence--alluding to the fact that perhaps whoever killed Mr. Faull had meant to kill him instead--and elaborates on just how he managed to escape the clutches of the police. The whole thing sounds like an early-aughts drug movie starring Johnny Depp:

As Belizean police combed the property of expat antivirus pioneer John McAfee Sunday afternoon, McAfee was closer than they could have known. He’d seen them coming, and says he hid — burying himself in the sand with a cardboard box over his head so he could breathe. “It was extraordinarily uncomfortable,” he says, in an exclusive interview with Wired. “But they will kill me if they find me.”

Mr. McAfee also claims that following several complaints from neighbors about his barking pack of security dogs, the Belizean police subsequently poisoned the animals to death.

Still, Mr. McAfee has no intention of leaving Belize. "It’s the nicest place on earth," he told Wired. Except for that whole "the police want to kill you" thing.

Mr. McAfee.

The long, strange trip that is John McAfee's life has taken yet another unfortunate turn. Gizmodo reports that the colorful founder of the namesake antivirus company is now wanted for questioning in connection with a murder in Belize. Anyone who's ever seen an episode of any legal drama knows that doesn't bode well.

Suddenly, we're a lot less nostalgic for the Valley's countercultural days of yore.

Here's what we know so far: On Saturday, American expat Gregory Faull was killed.  Belize's Gang Suppression Unit have trained their sights on Mr. McAfee--who reportedly brags on the regular about his criminal connections. What's more, just last week, Mr. Faull complained of Mr. McAfee's gunfire and "roguish behavior."

If that's not sordid enough, Gizmodo has uncovered evidence that Mr. McAfee might have been experimenting with bath salts and other heavy-duty drugs.

The news comes on the heels of a lengthy piece that serves as a pretty good introduction to the bizarro, isolated life Mr. McAfee was living. It reads like a pulp novel you'd buy from a drugstore in some God-forsaken North Dakota town. For example:

 "Everyone who has tried to rob me, kill me, works for me now," he declared. This was not just good hacker logic, he explained, but a kind of public service. "None of these people are responsible, because they can't work. At some point, you've got to stop living for yourself. We as Americans have ripped off the world. We get to throw food away. It's insane."

It's easy to imagine how the people of Belize might have looked askance at that line of reasoning. Perhaps he should have been a little more sensitive, because God knows he could probably use a few local friends right now. This isn't even Mr. McAfee's first brush with the Gang Suppression Unit, who raided his compound back in May.

Hey, America: If running off to South America didn't solve everything for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, it's damn sure not going to work for you.

Brian Wong and Quora Friends (Photo: twitter.com)

Quora is the site where headsdown homebodies ask other sheltered types questions like, “What are some things I’d be shocked to learn about the outside world?” But now that Quora is over three years old, it seems as if they’re finally going into the real heavy stuff.

A question posed under the topic "Murder," asked, "What does it feel like to murder someone?" Some inmates from San Quentin State Prison opened themselves up, providing deeply personal answers that offered up something rare on Quora: a glimpse of life far, far away from the tech bubble.

Tommy Winfrey, an San Quentin inmate currently serving a sentence of 25 years to life for second degree murder with gun enhancement described his feelings about his crime:

Without a doubt this is probably the most personal question I think I could ever answer. This is a question I have been asking myself for a very long time now, and just coming to grips with the answers I have found. To say my answer is complex, and that I am going to have difficulties expressing exactly how I have felt, and still feel about murdering someone is an understatement.

I guess the beginning would be the best place to start. When I took another man’s life I was just nineteen years old. Looking back now, I can honestly say I felt immense peer pressure to go through with the murder. I felt like I would be seen as a weak punk if I let another man get over on me. I was a drug dealer, and I felt I had a reputation to uphold. I can see all this now, but at the time I could see none of this. I realize now I was in a very bad place in life back then. I was in the midst of a serious drug addiction. I felt worthless and unworthy of love, so in return I placed little value on my life or on the life of anyone else. All of these feelings combined, made feel so powerless in life, I lashed out....

Of course, inmates are not allowed to use the Internet. But a select few of the prisoners at San Quentin are enrolled in a program called The Last Mile, which trains them with the goal of eventual placement in a paid internship somewhere in Silicon Valley, and as part of the program, they've been answering questions on the Q&A site. (Earlier this year, Betabeat introduced you to Phil, one of the most popular prisoners on Quora.) The've gathered somewhat of a following--VC darling, former Digger, and the current CEO of rewards site Kiip, Brian Wong visited with the group last December (picture is above).

We look forward to Quora finding the right experts to explore other terrifying and fascinating questions that keep us up at night. Looks like they've already tackled "what it feels like to die."

*According to a 2010 IPO filing.