It’s nice to have a back door
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 14 years ago, in 2010, on the World Wide Web.
Here’s a sidebar from a recent story by Dave Winer about why he wants ports on his computers, and why freedom is more important to him than Apple style:
Reminds me of a story a Jamaican cab driver told as he was driving me from Montego Bay to Negril. This was a long time ago, when my Jamaican uncle was still alive and I was still a smoker. As we drove through a village, he pointed out the new cottages, and said they had been built by the Cubans. They have all the modern conveniences, running water, indoor plumbing, even electricity. But the people don’t want to live in them because Cuban-built houses don’t have back doors.
I asked why do they need back doors?
He laughed and said, when the police knock on the front door, it’s nice to have a back door.
— Dave Winer, Scripting News (2010-05-28): I don’t like wires but I do like ports
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These kind of vignettes make me smile but also have a sad quality to them. I wonder though: With all the political repression in Cuba, you’d think the Cubans would have back doors too!
Wonder how hard it is to install back doors. Could be an opportunity for a, um cottage industry there.