Just before the holidays my son visited from school and at one point went to play a game on one of our PC's - but the game would not play. After a little investigation it turned out that the latest McAfee update "claims" that the game was infected with a virus, a trojan to be exact. The game is about 15 years old and has run for us that long without a problem. No problem I thought, just add the game to McAfee's exclusion list and we would be good to go. NOT!

McAfee now stores its exclusion list on its own servers and users cannot add exclusions locally anymore. In fact, you have to submit the EXE to McAfee and they say it takes about a month to get the EXE into the exclusion list. That was about 6 weeks ago and we are still waiting. Worse, when I contacted McAfee recently, the support tech didn't know how to check if they were even looking at the game!

This, like the cloud, is "progress" apparently. This, like the cloud is the latest "big thing".

Its baffling to me, and has been ever since the cloud concept reared its ugly head - why would people want to store vital data a million miles away on a server where you are now just one of millions, and likely not much of a priority???

The fact that we can "do" something technically is NO measure that we should do something. Indeed, imagine a world where no one stores data locally - you just saw the future and its pretty ugly. When the cloud goes down, the world goes down. And we did this for what good reason??? Because we can. Not that we should.