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How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus

John Mcafee
Comedy
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this comedy video2 months2013–2024 score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN mostly cites it as a notorious piece of McAfee lore, usually jokingly, whenever John McAfee or antivirus uninstallation comes up.

A bizarre, tongue-in-cheek video in which John McAfee himself supposedly shows how to uninstall McAfee antivirus. It is known for its NSFW sex and drug references.

“At least he's got a sense of humor.” (HN, 2021)

2 recommendations · 4 citations · 3 jokes · Comedy

9 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@specproc Sep 2024 Recommends
on HN thread Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host
For anyone in the thread that's not seen "How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus" by John McAfee, you are very, very welcome [0]. Content warning: it was made in his Alpha-PHP era, and contains a lot of sex and drug references. It's mostly sex and drugs IIRC. [0] [this video]
Wild McAfee video with sex and drug references, NSFW.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@rubatuga Sep 2018 Cites it
on HN thread Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information
I’ve seen this happen with YouTube, specifically this video: [this video] I had watched it many many years ago, and I suddenly remembered about it while at my friends apartment, (which is in the same building). Now I searched it up on my friends computer which was logged into his gmail account. We watched it and laughed. However, an hour later, I was on my iPhone at home when it appeared in my related videos. [link] I refreshed and it was gone...
Anecdote of the video resurfacing via a friend's account.
@austhrow743 Sep 2020 Cites it
on HN thread McAfee S-1
He already has the top YouTube result for "how to uninstall McAfee" [this video] If he's already doing something, and like you say its a certainty that he'll continue, is that really a risk?
@2cb Feb 2021 Cites it
on HN thread New malware found on 30k Macs has security pros stumped
Read more
This attitude from users is a very real problem, but I'd argue it's platform agnostic. For instance there were headlines around the internet not too long ago stating Android is more secure than iOS based on claims made by Zerodium. Any Android user who read that may well have the same attitude you've described from iOS users. And it's potentially far more dangerous on Android because it allows you to sideload apps. You can even extend it to Windows. Your average user will buy a laptop preinstalled with McAfee [1] and think "no need to worry about viruses now because I've got an antivirus." Don't get me wrong I agree it's perfectly reasonable to be critical of Apple when it's warranted, but we don't yet know if it is in this case. It's entirely possible (and fairly likely) this malware was delivered as a trojan using pop ups the user had to interact with. If that's the case you can't blame Apple for user error, especially when trojans exist for every single OS that allow the user to install software from the internet. > most users perform two types of installs: relatively safe ones through the App Store, or venturing out into the wild west of the internet and bringing home a random binary that hopefully does what it says. This seems to imply any software installed from the App Store is safe while anything from outside the App Store is dangerous. Isn't the implication that App Store downloads must automatically be safe falling into the same trap you're criticising here? Quotes

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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