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diff --git a/article/free-software-education-in-china-and-covid-19.html b/article/free-software-education-in-china-and-covid-19.html index d17d648..8c72493 100644 --- a/article/free-software-education-in-china-and-covid-19.html +++ b/article/free-software-education-in-china-and-covid-19.html @@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ </p> <p> - 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 proccess to setup QEMU running a Windows 7 virtural machine---mdash;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. + 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 proccess to setup QEMU running a Windows 7 virtural 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. </p> <p> @@ -65,11 +65,11 @@ </p> <p> - The answer is that China 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---mdash;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---mdash;they lose not only privacy and computing freedom, they lose their lives, which costs them their oppurtunity to persue 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. + The answer is that China 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 oppurtunity to persue 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. </p> <p> - 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), 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---mdash;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). + 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), 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). </p> <p> |