atomicthumbsNov 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

Show threadRyan 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.
Show threadatomicthumbsNov 16, 2022
@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.
Show threadRyan Egesdahl Nov 17, 2022

@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
Show threadatomicthumbs
@deriamis @dave good luck; that guy's attitude on his base github page makes me think it may be harder than that
Nov 18, 2022 at 5:56amWeb
Show threadRyan Egesdahl Nov 18, 2022
@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.