I do sometimes wish I had the power of uninvention – that I was able to uninvent certain things which must have seemed like good ideas at the time, but turned out to have too many drawbacks, or which just personally inconvenience or annoy me   A few are just too obvious to mention, like nuclear weapons, so I would concentrate on those things that personally irritate me.I am not naturally a technophobe.  Quite the opposite really: I love new gadgets to play with, but once I had disposed of umbrellas and mobile telephones I think I would uninvent USB flash drives, and only allow them to be re-invented once I was no longer working in an IT department.

I’ll admit the things can be handy, but what a nightmare for anybody with any responsibility for IT systems and, more importantly, data.  Imagine a company with 1000 computer users, and at least half of them have some sort of USB flash drive, most of them with 1GB capacity and some as large as 16GB.

The company goes to great lengths to make sure its data and comercially sensitive information is kept safe – putting it on servers where access is determined by usernames and passwords, where individuals can only get at areas of the server they need to get at, and everything behind expensive firewalls, not to mention all the physical security measure…  and then there is half a terabyte of storage space, distributed widely in 500 individual chunks, with none of that protection.  Potentially 500GB of data with no controls.

And if any of it gets into the wrong hands, or gets lost, who is going to get the blame?   So the IT department can purchase lots of encrypted devices, keep all sorts of registers to keep track of them, and generally make themselves deeply unpopular – especially if they decide to get draconian with the rebels who prefer to carry on using their own devices.

All hypothetical of course, but I could easily lose sleep just thinking about the worst-case scenarios. Uninvention would be the easy way out.  Are there any more things that are crying out for uninvention, even if only for entirely selfish reasons?