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-.Dd January 1, 1970
-.Dt freeswcovid socpol
-.Os Runxi Yu
-.Sh NAME
-.Nm freeswcovid
-.Nd On Free Software, Education in China and the COVID-19 Pandemic
-.Sh DESCRIPTION
-.Pp
-I am a secondary school student from Shanghai, China. This email
-discusses the problems I discovered in the Chinese educational system,
-in terms of students' right to freedom in computing and options to
-control the COVID-19 pandemic from the standpoint of a person living in
-China.
-.Pp
-When COVID-19 broke out in 2020, students were required to watch lecture
-videos produced by the city's education department for twenty minutes,
-then join the Tencent Meetings room to discuss in their own class for
-10--15 minutes.
-.Pp
-Watching the videos wasn't an issue for me. Our apartment has cable TV,
-where the videos are broadcast; there was also a website that played the
-livestream without JavaScript. However, Tencent Meetings presented a
-problem to me.
-.Pp
-At the time, I run Arch Linux. (Currently, I run Hyperbola
-GNU/Linux-libre, a Free Software-only distribution, which would have
-made this even harder.) Tencnet Meetings, claiming to support "all
-operating systems and platforms", only supports Windows and macOS. (I
-wonder how they passed the resolution to display that statement, I
-believe that they have many programmers who use GNU/Linux.) (As of
-October 2021, a classmate noted that there is a "Linux versuon".)
-School required Tencent Meetings, therefore I went through a hard
-process to setup QEMU running a Windows 7 virtual machine---I believed
-that 7 would be slightly better than 10 in terms of privacy, though as
-always with nonfree software, I can't really know for sure. It was
-slightly unstable, which is an annoyance, for example the connection
-from the Windows audio server to pulseaudio would stop working from time
-to time, but it was acceptable. Though my setup was okay (in the
-perspective of my school), it left me in a psycological crisis about
-education and freedom. More on that later.
-.Pp
-Offline classes resumed in May 2020, as most of China has minimal cases
-of COVID-19. This freed me from using a proprietary
-non-privacy-respecting bloated piece of software in a virtual machine,
-but it did not free me from teachers' requirement to use WeChat (think
-of it as the equiv of WhatsApp in China), Xiaoheiban (A proprietary
-classroom information distribution system), or other pieces of nonfree
-software.
-.Pp
-Similar to the beliefs stated in the GNU Education project, I believe
-that schools and educaion are a means of sharing information and
-knowledge. I understand that meeting software and lesson management
-software are used as means of distributing knowledge, rather than the
-knowledge being distributed themselves. However, I believe this doesn't
-lead to the argument that the mandate of proprietary software usage is
-just, for three reasons as below.
-.Bl -enum
-.It
-There are always going to be curious students who wonder how the
-trchnology works. Proprietary software denies them this right.
-.It
-The usage of proprietary software when young may implant dependence
-on it in the future.
-.It
-Education is a right and a responsility. Mandating nonfree software
-in education adds unjust responsibilities on students.
-.El
-.Pp
-Point 1 and 2 are explained well in the Education section of the GNU
-website, therefore I am not going to focus on them. Focusing on the
-third point:
-.Pp
-Under laws of almost all countries, citizens have the right to an
-education. Traditionally, this involves going to school, meeting
-teachers and classmates, listening to classes, taking notes, passing
-exams (I have strong opinions that exam systems ought to change to
-better represent individual talents, but this is out of scope of this
-memo.) and finishing homework. Students loose a slight bit of their time
-and freedom of movement (as in, it's not easy to move to a house 100
-miles away from school), in exchange for being educated.
-.Pp
-However, with schools requiring the use of nonfree software, in effect
-students are required to give up their privacy, and digital freedom,
-both crucial rights in modern society, as the effect of needing to use
-nonfree software. The right to education has effectively turned into an
-exchange for other basic rights. This is not acceptable.
-.Pp
-Furthermore, in countries like China, 9 years of education is mandatory
-for children. I understand this law as a means to the goal of creating a
-knowledgeble and educated society, which is good. However, when
-mandatory edication mandates nonfree software, it deduces to "children
-are required to use nonfree software". So, being a child here is pretty
-unlucky, because there goes your right to privacy, your independence,
-and your freedom, because of a law that's supposed to help society.
-.Pp
-We need to stop using nonfree software in education.
-.Pp
-In th beginning of this email, I mentioned COVID-19. You might be
-wondering how the Chinese government fully put the pandemic under
-control in just 5 months, which is seemingly impossible if all you know
-is how the US dealt with this situation.
-.Pp
-The answer is that the Chinese government is implementing strict contact
-tracing. This is extremely easy because of the prevaliance of
-survillance. Many would argue that this is a benefit of survillance,
-which I believe to be true. However, no comparisons were given between
-losing privacy and increasing the risk or infection. Briefly inspecting
-this idea in my head, it's really hard to think about---privacy and
-freedom is important in the long term, at the cost of many lives in the
-pandemic. The lives of these dead are gone---they lose not only privacy
-and computing freedom, they lose their lives, which costs them their
-opportunity to pursue their dreams in this world, and they have no
-freedom of choice, speech, etc as they aren't alive. Once again, this
-is hard to wrap my mind around, therefore I would especially like to
-invite the community to discuss this.
-.Pp
-The contact tracing system used is not Free Software. At first I didn't
-understand why (except for the explanation that they want to profit from
-harming citizens which is hopefully just a hypothetical
-"explanation"), but I noticed that the authenticity and accuracy of
-the system may be affected if users are allowed to modify their
-software. This seems to be the core of some problems with regards to
-software freedom---here, the user is not running software to complete
-their tasks. Rather, it's the government's way to maintain public
-safety, therefore I believe that whether users should be able to modify
-software in these conditions is up to discussion. Back to the point,
-since a green-code proof from the system is needed to get in a lot of
-places, a person basically needs to use proprietary software to live a
-normal life (to get into coffee shops, for example).
-.Pp
-In the US and other countries, things aren't that good either. For one,
-the pandemic isn't controlled well. As a consequence, a lot of places
-require negative COVID tests to do stuff.
-.Lk https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2021-08/msg00008.html A thread on the LibrePlanet mailing list
-discusses this issue, as a lot of these tests require nonfree software
-on users' phones. Note that this thread spans several months long, as
-it is a hot discussion, so look in the september and october archives
-too. The thread explains the implications clearly, thus I am not
-discussing it here.
-.Pp
-Additionally, I heard that some US courts require Zoom for online cases,
-therefore it seems that a person' right to judicial justice comes at
-the cost of digital freedom. I can't confirm this, but if that's true,
-I'm truly disappointed at the judicial system, even though I'm not a
-US citizen.
-.Pp
-I am looking forward to a freer society, or at least one where the above
-problems get solved.