I've discovered that currently, as of Ubuntu 22.10, Ubuntu distributes a package called "fortunes-off" that is full of homophobia, Hitler quotes, virulent misogyny, racism, and more, for the "fortunes" program

All the text in it is ROT13'd so it doesn't show up on searches. Text pulled from the .deb available live on Universe: https://packages.ubuntu.com/kinetic/fortunes-off

Ubuntu – Details of package fortunes-off in kinetic

These fortunes were originally part of the standard fortune package, to be printed with fortune -o, until this poor lady split them out and categorized them in 1995. It used to be easier to configure your computer to randomly print a swastika or passage from Mein Kampf on login. https://github.com/Distrotech/fortune-mod/blob/master/Offensive
fortune-mod/Offensive at master · Distrotech/fortune-mod

ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/games/amusements/fortune/fortune-mod-9708.tar.gz - fortune-mod/Offensive at master · Distrotech/fortune-mod

GitHub
An update: the package has been removed from debian, has been or will be removed from Ubuntu, and has been removed from Arch.
@atomicthumbs and now someone will have to weed all the translations.

@atomicthumbs "the original author(s) of the
fortune distribution state that "racist, mysogynist [sic] (sexist), or
homophobic ideas" should never be included in the fortune database.

This was not the case when the database came into my possession"

Now I want to know when/how those were added, I thought they were always there.

@cdr @atomicthumbs I'm gonna blame ESR even though it's probably not his fault
@vikxin @atomicthumbs I can't say I wasn't thinking it, but 95 would have been before he got ahold of the jargon file, right?
@cdr @atomicthumbs I believe so yes, I think that was a few years later.

@vikxin @atomicthumbs archive.org has a good selection of old versions of debian

https://archive.org/details/debian_1.1 has the fortunes/fortunes-o files before the re-sorting mentioned above, way less Hitler than the current .deb

Debian 1.1 : Debian Project : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Obtained here (Contains both i386 binaries and sources.) Debian Linux Distribution Release 1.1 Now Available To: [email protected] Subject:...

Internet Archive
@cdr @atomicthumbs it might be worthwhile to try and find when they were added to try and, you know, blacklist some shitheads. But I have better things to do, personally.
@vikxin @cdr @atomicthumbs My best guess at the origin of at least the pile of Nazi crap is https://bugs.debian.org/95588 since most of it seems to be in the 'atheism' file. I ran out of stomach for investigating the history in detail though.
#95588 - please add 'atheism' to fortunes - Debian Bug report logs

@vikxin @atomicthumbs I still doubt it'll have been recent enough to show up in source control, with more work at least I'll be able to know when, and how suddenly it came in.
@atomicthumbs "in America, even Nazi rethoric is a protected form of speech" 🤦‍♂️
@atomicthumbs It’s a goddamned fungus, the fash
@atomicthumbs it is at the same time shocking and also wholly unsurprising that these exist.
however, ubuntu and upstream debian still having them is very disconcerting
@atomicthumbs Interestingly, popcon suggests it's not a very popular package at all:
@atomicthumbs it's deeply strange to me the way that we, as a society, bucket sexual content and swear words alongside literal genocide as "offensive", as though they're morally equivalent 🙃
@atomicthumbs which comes to me as not a big surprise hearing how the owner of Ubuntu manages his company
@atomicthumbs arch is worse they ship a modded fork which undoes the seperarion. I've filed an issue about it here https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/76593
FS#76593 : fortune-mod is problematic and illegal

Flyspray, a Bug Tracking System written in PHP.

@atomicthumbs it looks like arch will be building without the hate speech from now
@atomicthumbs arch has pushed out fortune-mod 3.14.1-2 which builds fortune-mod with the "offensive" bit(the flag refers to it as offensive should be -DNO_HATESPEECH)
@atomicthumbs @dave In fairness, most of what is found in the fortune database is scraped from old Usenet and bulletin board posts. I seriously doubt much thought went into how they were categorized because it was just a large collection of text that has slowly grown over time. The ROT13 is how you mark the content as offensive, so I doubt anyone really noticed the problem.
@atomicthumbs @dave It’s a bit much to be surprised by any of this or frame the problem as some kind of oversight by a particular distro packager because they likely didn’t know, and focusing of only that misses the real problem. We need to do a bit more than just drop the awful stuff. The ROT13 decode functionality needs to be dropped as well.

@deriamis @atomicthumbs @dave

None of the particular examples shown above are present in the package as it existed in Debian 2.2 "potato" circa 2000. This isn't "ancient", it's ongoing, or at least was at some point in the past couple decades.

@Random832 @atomicthumbs @dave Yep, that’s part of what I was saying. I don’t think many people realized what was happening because of the obfuscation. The decision to allow obfuscated text was bad, and it needs to be reversed.
@deriamis @dave They were intentionally and fully categorized in 1995 by someone who wanted them out but was prevented from removing them by the culture at the time.
@atomicthumbs @dave Yeah, *that* is bad. I was mainly pointing out that “nobody can see it anyway because ROT13,” was the reason for making it optional and is why we’re here today.

@atomicthumbs @dave I've followed up on this and have submitted a PR to the upstream repository to make both offensive content and content obfuscation opt-in. That should make it very obvious to anyone building and/or packaging what gets built and installed. It will be much easier to ask for changes from then on.

https://github.com/shlomif/fortune-mod/pull/73

Disable offensive cookies and ROT13 by default by deriamis · Pull Request #73 · shlomif/fortune-mod

Fair warning: this commit is a bit on the philosophical side. We currently build and install offensive cookies by default. This is a problem because those cookies are obfuscated, meaning that syste...

GitHub
@deriamis @dave good luck; that guy's attitude on his base github page makes me think it may be harder than that
@atomicthumbs @dave I’ll do my best to make a convincing case. If that doesn’t work, I’ll take it on as a project and try to convince downstream packagers to stop using it.

@atomicthumbs let it be noted that easily 95% of the packages Ubuntu distributes are taken, unreviewed, from Debian, who is considered a trusted upstream. Most of the time, this is a sane default.

Most of the time.

Now that I am aware, I have taken action to remove the content from Ubuntu releases going forward:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fortune-mod/+bug/1996682
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fortune-mod/1:1.99.1-7.1ubuntu1

I haven't decided whether to have the battle in Debian about removal. There are more pro-fascists in Debian than there ought to be.

Bug #1996682 “racist, misogynist, homophobic, fascist content in...” : Bugs : fortune-mod package : Ubuntu

"I've discovered that currently, as of Ubuntu 22.10, Ubuntu distributes a package called "fortunes-off" that is full of homophobia, Hitler quotes, virulent misogyny, racism, and more, for the "fortunes" program" https://mastodon.social/@.../109349931159589086 This kind of content is not consistent with Ubuntu values and should not be distributed as part of Ubuntu, regardless of whether it is hidden by a content warning and made opt-in. Like many packages in the Ubuntu archive, this package...

Launchpad
@vorlon Thank you for taking action for Ubuntu, and best of wishes if you do bring this up with Debian.
@atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs oh good to know. distribution this package is a criminal offence in germany in austria. I'll let universities know to stop hosting this trash
@atomicthumbs So Ubuntu is now illegal in Germany?

@atomicthumbs

Thankfully, it looks like fortune doesn't get installed by default - at least not on mine. I wonder if they're going to also pull the Italian and Spanish offensive packages from the repo.

@atomicthumbs well there's another good reason not to use Ubuntu
(My original set of reasons were 1. It bloats incredibly quickly and 2. The Amazon search kerfuffle)