Mastodawn

atomicthumbs Nov 15, 2022

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

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Ryan Egesdahl

Nov 16, 2022

@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.

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Random832 Nov 16, 2022

@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.

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Ryan Egesdahl

@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.