StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers
lwn.net
lwn.net
Wouldn't be the first (or last) time a Debian maintainer has pulled the "you should read the descriptions of all (hundreds) of your packages (most installed as dependencies)" card in response to a bug report.
If someone started reading all the package descriptions and READMEs we're meant to be thoroughly familiar with when Trixie was released a few days ago, they'd still be reading them.
Intent or not, that developer is a risk to the project.
Note that clipboard data can be just about anything and is a valuable dataset, more so if the source of the data isn't aware of being a source, besides, there is no history so you won't even know what you've lost.
Select to translate is almost a standard feature for translation software. Not sure if the situation gets better now, but back then the software was written, using clipboard as temporary storage is a very robust and maybe the only way to implement such feature.
Trivia: It's likely sending Ctrl+C and reading clipboard to get the selected text. No easy cross-platform API for this lol.
Also note that the software is very old and poorly maintained.
Is the difference meaningful? It’s proof of a value set so different from the community’s as to merit the same response: expulsion.
> Is the difference meaningful? It’s proof of a value set so different from the community’s as to merit the same response: expulsion.
Is there a defined set of values that one must uphold, or at least believe in theoretically, to be a welcome member?
Yes, that's what core values mean. If they're not embraced by everyone, they cease to be core.
If X11 tolerates developers who think piping data unseen to remote servers is okay, the project as a whole ceases to be trustworthy.
> I'm not Christian, should I be expelled?
From a listserv? No. From, like, a religious group? Maybe.
If one is expected to go through all the documentation of both the main package and all dependency packages, and also through whatever specific configuration details to your case, just to be able to catch a specific IMPORTANT detail that's not clearly spelled out in the main package, that's malicious.
"A dependency we use captures your clipboard data and sends it to remote servers"
That sentence right there would kill their userbase, so they omit warning you about it. And on top of the "...user should have read the description..." non-apology, "just split the packages, bro".
That's malicious.
No, it wouldn't. People don't take privacy very seriously.
The overlap between Linux desktop users and digital privacy concerns is pretty large.
But it wouldn't kill their userbase because nobody reads the package descriptions anyway.
It could be that they were caught with their pants down and posted an ill-thought response, but I'd lean strongly towards malice with such a poor defense, it borders on confession. Clipboards are one of the most critical privacy/security features, you don't ever want to leak them unintentionally.
Did we already forget about the XZ Utils backdoor? There have to be multiple efforts to infiltrate backdoors in Linux going right now.
I agree a lot with this. You're supposed to trust your distributions packages. If you can't trust your distro, who can you trust? If you don't, find one you do trust, as that's a viable alternative. If none are trustworthy to you, then the only real option is to become your own package maintainer and have fun with Linux From Scratch.
I think it's just a cultural difference. Sogou, a super popular Chinese input program for Windows iOS and Android does the same with everything you type and nobody cares.
Just because Microsoft did it that doesn't make it a valid defense, in fact it shows the opposite (after all, they too did not have the best interests of their users at heart). The fact that the recipient of the data sits on the other side of the GFW and that clipboards can contain very interesting data you really should wonder about the intentions of the author, they do not get the benefit of the doubt. In fact, open source software that to all intents and purposes looks like it runs locally but pumps your (private) data out without your consent is a very large red flag to me: it gains access to data that otherwise likely would never be found in the wild. At a minimum this is a fairly serious GDPR violation.
People need to be on the lookout though, the xz incident showed that FOSS is indeed vulnerable.
Stuff like this can fly under the radar for a long time because lots of people will assume how it works without actually verifying that it really works like that.
> the same kind of problem was reported by Pavel Machek in 2009 and again by "niekt0" in 2015. The 2009 bug was solved by patching the application's default configuration to disable networked dictionaries. That appears to have worked for a time, but the YouDao plugin, which was added in 2016, does not respect the configuration option. The 2015 problem was not fixed until August 6 of this year (although the package was removed from Debian for unrelated reasons for a few months from 2020 to 2021). That fix just removed the stardict_dictdotcn.so plugin, which also sent translation requests to dict.cn and was later subsumed by the YouDao plugin, from the package.
This whole trend of adding a service to stuff that doesn't need a service is very annoying.
1. making "scanning" (the clipboard capturing feature opt-in, with a huge notification for the implications
2. disabling the English-Chinese online translation plugin by default
Will the existence or lack thereof excuse the absolute lack of security and privacy this package exhibits? And the lack of interest from the developer?
At least try to keep up with the main concern: "sending potentially private or security impacting information in plaintext across the internet".
"Does not exist blah blah"
That has to be one of the most inane replies I've read in a while.
Yeah this is the world we now live in.
Maybe incentivized? $1000? $10000? Would be interesting to hear from the developer himself.
We truly live in an utopia!
(but malware authors usually cover their tracks better)
malice & typical CCP behavior IMHO. The responses from the maintainer are unacceptable and he should have his privileges stripped
You can literally do both in the EU with informed consent.
Informed consent is (1) always going to be specific and (2) ends when the legal base for procession is no longer supported.
That requires a complete re-thinking of your moral framework if you are not familiar with the concept.
Just like for some people gay marriage is inconceivable and results in them being ready to man the barricades and for others it doesn't even move the needle. And then there is abortion and bodily autonomy. Large swathes of humanity are not going to be able to understand the remainder when it comes to those subjects, they all arrive at their own conclusions through a mixture of tradition, religion, philosophy and cultural exposure (media, mostly) as well as peer pressure.
I've long ago decided that the only party that will hopefully be able to get all of those right using an objective frame of reference will be born a few thousand years from now, assuming humanity will make it that far.
I’m saying that on a practical level the difference is unobservable. Part of your right to life, in this formulation, is your right to sign it away.
The terminality of a right to life makes it a poor comparison to privacy, which has no comparably-irreversible end state like death.
To you.
Security illiteracy? Yes. Malicious intent? Probably no.
Does being security illiterate equal malicious? Debatable.
I think the bar for trust in terms of evil intent is on the floor.
When you use Debian, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
People who handwave that away or say it's not as bad as something else either have an agenda or are ignorant about the history of Debian.
Fundamentally, always-online, home-phoning features are the norm, and it should be up to OS distributions to manage security postures such as allowlists for network access. Think something along the lines of "StarDict wants to connect to dict.cn. Allow/Deny?".
They can, but framing this as a mere disagreement is disingenuous: One approach might slightly inconvenience someone, while the other (as was taken here) inflicts irreparable damage.
> Fundamentally, always-online, home-phoning features are the norm,
No. Although common on certain platforms, they are not a fundamental norm in software, nor should they be.
In particular, we're talking about Debian here.
That is what opensnitch provides, as do some other detection tools.
how many times does everyone need to be totally compromised by some shitty software before people start to care?
innocent individuals each days are suffering hacks and malicious interactions. people are losing their livelihoods. companies are getting shutdown... what more need to happen?? :S
LLMs are only going to make this worse. We're going to see a plethora of vibe coded slop everywhere.
I have been told to "RTFM!" countless times in many places. Some of them were legitimately the correct answer in that context, in hindsight. Some were knee-jerk reactions like this.
Debian's discussion culture might be a little edgy sometimes, but this has nothing to do with Debian.
In other words might have appreciated the explanation.
Sure, if you read the description and the list of plugins and correctly guess how this plugin is implemented, then you can deduce some of it.
The problem in this case is that the package modifies generated files belonging to another package. Making it about conffiles is bad phrasing by the bug submitter.
It might help set things apart from say ubuntu, which doesn't engender the same amount of trust such as opt-in.
That used to be viable back in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I first used Debian. It would take an afternoon of going through all the packages in dselect (does anyone here still remember dselect?) and marking the ones you wanted to install, and around the same amount of time going through every option on the kernel's menuconfig to precisely tailor the kernel to your specific hardware configuration (things were much less dynamic back then).
Nowadays, there are simply too many packages and kernel configuration options to go through (also, does anyone still use dselect?).
Another option might be to reduce the amount of software one is "blindly"^1 using and relying upon
For example, I have been making own Linux distribution, not following Linux from Scratch (although that is a useful reference)
This is for both learning but also reliability and robustness purposes (where "robustness" includes ability to recover quickly from losing everything)
IME starting from scratch gives a better appreciation for the "inconveniences" that maintainers must endure
"Inconvenience" may be putting it mildly
Certainly, the inconvenience varies depending on the software
Some software builds even on the most deficient/broken installations
Other software is absurdly difficult to compile, often due to minor oversights, sometimes due to obivous carelessness
The wild inconsistencies from one project to another is itself part of the inconvenience
The ease with which software can be compiled by me, and presumably anyone else, on any computer, including underpowered ones, with minimal dependencies, is among the factors I consider when choosing whether to rely on any particular software
1. Here "blindly" means the user has zero curiosity about where it comes from or how it works
No comment on this particular software or the Debian maintainer
I have up on X11 many years ago
I never liked that Debian maintainers make subjective, opinionated changes to other peoples' software, especially since it seems like the majority of Debian users do not compile from source
I wouldn't say that is just a given, if I've apt-get installed a dictionary I might expect that is the whole thing on my machine. It's not like we haven't had dictionaries in physical books for centuries... It seems like stardict is very much an online thing, which I suppose could be legit, but the whole thing does seem like a trap.
Additionally, a typical spell checker feature is to provide alternative, correct, spellings, rather than just telling you whether a word is correctly spelled.
I bet there's some cool way to do this with zero-knowledge or homomorphic cryptography though!
But you might still be able to use some frequency sampling to predict the words used, unless those chunks are very very carefully constructed.
The code for which would almost certainly be larger than a fully local dictionary for any human language.
I personally don't use that one, for me the red underline is enough.
The typical use of a Bloom filter is to have it locally as a prefilter, not to send hashes to the server.
For the first case, sending a hash would prevent the server from learning a password that is not in the dictionary, something like password5 would hash to gibberish.
For the second, the server needs to know what to actually send back. I believe Google's malicious website check works (or used to) by truncating a hash an then just sending the answer for some 128 or so websites and have the browser figure out which of them the user wanted to visit. That creates some deniability over witch website you actually visited and should be also usable to prevent the server from learnering what you actually looked up.
So yes, I think you could design a more secure Protokoll. Though general security disclaimer the people trying to read your letters probably spend more time attacking than I spend writing this post.
People in your coffee shop on the same WiFi could read it.
I get some people don't realize that's how TCP/IP works and the firesheep stuff all happened 15 years ago. But a bit worrying to see a frequent HN contributor challenging that.
That's why we now push for Https everywhere.
The first makes such attacks widely known events, browsers report by default, and it s provable. It’s very rare.
The second allows apps to only trust specific certs or CAs, ignoring system root of trust.
I just want to clarify HTTPS in practice is quite secure.
WEP has been deprecated for over 2 decades.
I see them in 2025 in captive portals, public libraries, and when traveling abroad.
If we search for the author's bio, that seems to check out. They are a well-credentialed CS person; obviously they know that dictionary programs such as translation pop ups can have offline dictionaries, and mentions that. But they are a person of their time with an according set of "of courses".
Today, an application being locally installed and works with offline data is like a a statement of quaint chivalry, promulgated by a few remaining Don Quixotes of computing. (It saddens me to say. So much that this analogy brings me insufficient amusement.)
[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Statistics [2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/help/faq-how-many-english-wo... [3]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Copyrights
> Today, an application being locally installed and works with offline data is like a a statement of quaint chivalry, promulgated by a few remaining Don Quixotes of computing.
But a dictionary package has no valid reason to be online.
... Is it? Dictionary apps have been working like this for more than twenty years. Babylon Pro of which stardict is pretty much a clone was doing this with already millions of users in the year 2000! Kindles work like that!
~> wc -cl /usr/share/dict/words
235976 2493885 /usr/share/dict/words
I may not be on top of the latest trends, but at least I understand how computers work and what they can actually do.
Maybe to download a dictionary, but not to provide the same services that the dictionary program provides locally.
Samsung’s privacy policy is the same for phones and TVs.
This entire article should be, Chinese translation program sends clipboard data to it's own website and chinese translation services, but on http.
> Or maybe StarDict would have started asking for special permissions to let it work on Wayland, and users would have accepted those defaults the same way they currently do.
Yes, that’s what it would do. Its installer might even configure that special permission automatically, without user intervention.
Malware’s gonna mal. Wayland might help defend against some things, but it’s not going to defend against packages installed as part of the distro.
But the other concern is part of the systemic problem. Consider that the data that was transmitted was sent in the clear!
> StarDict ... while running on X11, using Debian's default configuration, it will send a user's text selections over unencrypted HTTP to two remote servers.
> Any user who did read the description of the package, and who knew what the YouDao plugin would do, might nevertheless expect the resulting communication to at least be encrypted. But the plugin actually reaches out to its backend servers — dict.youdao.com and dict.cn — over unsecured HTTP. So, not only are these servers sent any text the user selects, but anyone who can view traffic anywhere along its path can see the same thing.
> The stardict has "Scan" function, when user enable this function, after user select some text, it will trigger stardict do translate for this selected text... Why the user selects some confidential data to query dictionary?
"Sir, we have intel, the enemy is having translation server errors."
Hey, an area I finally know something about. It depends on what you're trying to do.
The slimmed down version of a Finnish dictionary I provide in `tsk` [1] weighs in at around 30 MB, for about 250,000 Finnish words. It's small enough that I embed the whole dictionary directly into the binary and reconstruct the prefix search on the fly every time the user starts the app.
However, the much larger database which contains things like lemmatization and etymology information easily balloons up to many, many gigabytes in size. My problem domain is providing Truly Instant Lookup, keystroke by keystroke, so I can't really get around this level of memoization. The work to figure all this out was sufficient that I decided to make future versions a paid product instead [2].
Most other use cases would just call out to a server, because it's silly to think most people are going to download a giant database for that use case alone. A hybrid approach could also make a lot of sense, eg cache the most common 10,000 words locally and call out for the next 1.5 million, which are statistically extremely rare.
[1]: https://github.com/hiandrewquinn/tsk
[2]: https://taskusanakirja.com/ (offline for now until I get Digicert to certify my downloads wholesome for Windows resale)
I know that there is a flag to disable the installation for "recommended" packages. I just think the default is a disservice here.
For a brief moment `--break-system-packages` surpassed it, then I discovered `pip` accepts abbrev flags so `--br` is enough, and sounds like bruh.
You can avoid that clusterfuck using `uv tool install`. E.g. `uv tool install pre-commit`.
First of all, "Recommends" is reserved for packages which enhance the functionality of the package you're installing. Without these the package will not break, but some very useful functionality might be disabled.
The package-class you're talking about is "suggests", IOW, "these packages might also be useful for you, wanna look?" section. These are not installed by default already.
On the other hand, apt and aptitude provides previews before doing something. You don't have to accept them. In aptitude's case, you can fine tune before the final commit, even.
There's a tension. Minimalism vs. user utility. Somebody told in Debian 13 release comments that "Debian will never be a end-user friendly distro". Now, you're saying that packages shouldn't install recommends by default.
What should Debian be? "An IKEAesque DIY distro", or "A more user friendly, yet very stable and vanilla distro". I vote for the latter, personally. Plus, as I told before, advanced users are free to use what they want to change.
If you want to change the default, the configuration files are at /etc/apt/conf.d/. If you want to disable feature for once, it's --no-install-recommends.
And that's perfectly fine, it just means I don't align with Debian on this one. And that freedom is what Linux is all about, I guess. So it seems it's working as intended :)
Edit: And I totally get that users might often want that kind of maximalism. It's just not for me. Although starting network daemons by default might sometimes be a bridge too far, or the case described in the article here.
...and this is what Debian Testing is actually for. To catch these types of issues.
Of course, people are free to select what they resonates with them. I'm not against more DIY distributions (I'm also contemplating using a LFS VM to explore things even further, but time is an issue), and I'm not against your personal choices. I just wanted to note the tension, and share my observations about Debian.
> On the other hand, apt and aptitude provides previews before doing something. You don't have to accept them. In aptitude's case, you can fine tune before the final commit, even.
You can't expect the average user to understand the entire dependency tree and read the description of dozens of random packages that the average program pulls in. RTFM is not a valid excuse for bad defaults.
Let me rephrase:
1. Installation of recommended packages is a good default for the average user, because it provides functionality they expect.
2. If the user is not happy with what's happening, changing defaults are not hard.
In the case of StarDict, as I noted elsewhere, I think the developer's answer is fishy, or ill-informed at least.
All the people I know care what their software does.
As they get familiar with their systems, they get interested in what makes the particular package or software tick. Then, the digging starts. At that point they are already pretty proficient with their package managers, and start to learn their systems inside out. At that point they're not beginners since they can do targeted tinkering.
Except very rare circumstances, I didn't see anyone to dive to the deep end directly.
Libraries does matter. =)
However, like you, I do have a problem with maintainers abusing the Recommends: field to further their own world domination plans. There is no valid reason that installing an archive tool should mandate a specific init system (looking at you, file-roller and gnome team in general).
https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues
Luckily there are things like opensnitch that can block some of these issues:
Debian does not mandate anything about privacy in its Policy Manual (which are the standards for selecting and packaging software that maintainers must adhere to): https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/search.html?q=priva...
There's also no insistence on privacy in the Debian Social Contract or DFSG (not that these would be appropriate places for it, they're mainly about licensing)
Don't they change the Firefox defaults for more privacy?
There is a culture of valuing privacy though, including patching out privacy issues. Especially since a lot of Debian folks are from Europe, with corresponding GDPR knowledge.
I know that the lintian warnings pointing out privacy issues in HTML documentation do get a lot of patches.
Also, opensnitch is packaged as a mitigation.
You are right about the policy problem, Debian really needs to do something about that.
There is at least a privacy policy for Debian services.
There is nothing in that list anything like as bad as this. The next worst is Chromium which is no surprise.
stardict --install en_US hi_IN ta_IN
For a trilingual person, just 100MB of storage. Problem solved no?
Edit: it's a full dictionary with all sorts of information. Example entry:
ABANDONED A*ban"doned, a.
1. Forsaken, deserted. "Your abandoned streams." Thomson.
2. Self-abandoned, or given up to vice; extremely wicked, or sinning without restraint; irreclaimably wicked ; as, an abandoned villain.
Syn. -- Profligate; dissolute; corrupt; vicious; depraved; reprobate; wicked; unprincipled; graceless; vile. -- Abandoned, Profligate, Reprobate. These adjectives agree in expressing the idea of great personal depravity. Profligate has reference to open and shameless immoralities, either in private life or political conduct; as, a profligate court, a profligate ministry. Abandoned is stronger, and has reference to the searing of conscience and hardening of heart produced by a man's giving himself wholly up to iniquity; as, a man of abandoned character. Reprobate describes the condition of one who has become insensible to reproof, and who is morally abandoned and lost beyond hope of recovery. God gave them over to a reprobate mind. Rom. i. 28.
It's just poor design to make something require a network connection when it could work offline locally.
CVE-2015-3774
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-3774
https://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2015/Aug/...
You had to three-finger press to trigger it, though. Similarly, it used unencrypted HTTP. I reported it and it was fixed to use TLS.
The dev defending this unencrypted behavior is really wild, though.
Also, accessing GitHub from within mainland China works, so TLS is not completely banned.
StarDict on Wayland has a different issue, it causes a segfault.
Sat, 02 Aug 2025: Bug#1003710: stardict crash in gnome with message Segmentation fault
https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.o...
Meanwhile, the other 99% of applications don't need unlimited permissions.
Personally I think the X11/Wayland distinction is moot, given this appears to be an explicit feature of StarDict, and it seems more likely it just hasn't been ported to Wayland yet.
You also underestimate how many programs make use of functionality that could be abused in some way. And unless you lock all those interfaces down it's all security theater. Who cares if the display protocol disallows copy paste snooping when there are a million different ways to get the the memory of other processes or the files that they store sensitive information in. And such a locked down ecosystem is antithetical to free and open computing.
I don't use my computer to be secure, I use it to get shit done and and to have fun. I'm not going to accept approaches to security that interfere with that any more than I will accept the same in real life. There aren't any bars over my windows because we have functioning police to deter criminals. I don't need lab tests done for all the food I buy because we have regulations that ensure food sold is generally safe to eat. I go outside without body armor and weapons even though someone could theoretically kill me. 100% security is always a tradeoff for quality of life.
Now if the article meant to say Wayland applications are unable to capture arbitrary text via mechanisms other than then the copy paste protocol I would say fair enough, but it sounds like the problem application is using the normal X11 copy paste protocol. so I don't see how that statement is relevant.
Whether malicious or not, to me isn't the point. The point is that I, as an individual deserve the illusion of control over my data and communication. I have neither the time, nor inclination to read all release notes. Furthermore, as someone who has spent enough time writing code - I recognize that humans make mistakes and don't always update them with salient details. All the automation in the world, and AI (yes, I've tried AI for release notes) just doesn't help.
If there's anything we can learn from it - don't use obsolete software.
I think lots of windows antivirus come with features like this? Perhaps with vast crystalized kno eledge nowadays we can afford to create OSS system level package that offers some level of protection.
I might actually do it, any down side?
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=806960
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are closed as WONTFIX.
That's not an excuse for why it wasn't dealt with until now but what you are suggesting didn't happen.
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0(compatible;MSIE 5.00;Windows 98)
Yea, because, how else am I going to run shady poorly maintained dictionary software that ignores system settings from a hostile country? What kind of world are we living in with X11?!
The software could just as well hook into your downloads folder and transparently "translate" any downloaded text or PDF file for you. In which case the method by which pixels arrive on your screen would not be relevant.
How is this an X11 vs Wayland issue and not a distribution hygiene issue? Why is this package even a part of the distribution? In the desire to force one desktop system to stop existing, for whatever reason, I think they've missed the broader point.
It's not really a bug if it's an advertised feature you don't like, so security team cannot do much in theory.
correct which is why wayland is only one piece in improving security, you still need proper sandboxing
Of course, you can't safety just run malware in flatpak.
Personally, if I was using (or a maintainer of) a dictionary tool which autoreads the clipboard (or any dictionary tool), I'd be checking what it is doing and considering whether it is what I would want to use.
What year is it?
For my use case I was more interested in the data than the application and so never installed it and am unable to comment on how usable it is, but will include a link if you want to look. https://sourceforge.net/projects/artha/
A problem for those 178 people... But on a global scale this isn't really a concern.
But Linux doesn't have a per-program firewall.
... and even if it did, there's no way to do popups/questions from the kernel,
... and even if there was, most programs would just run curl or wget or openssl. That would mean a popup for each and every connection attempt through those programs.
But unfortunately, IMHO, dbus is a much bigger privacy risk than not having a per-app firewall - it broadcasts everything that happens in the computer to any program that would listen. I hate programs communicating to each other without my consent even more than I hate programs connecting to the internet without my consent.
It is funny to read this considering all the rage when say Siri does this.
On Windoes, I remember some translation programs go extreme, they hijack all GDI calls and scan for all strings on GUIs trying to translate and replace them inline. Local dictionary were pretty limited so many of them use online services. What happens when user input something "sensitive" on the GUI?
Well they goes straight to the translation service.
With the GDI hijacking programs you usually download them for specific languages with the knowledge they're internet connected.
stardict is a Chinese software and the bug you listed says it "leaks" data to stardict.cn which is one of its official website.
https://stardict-4.sourceforge.net/index_en.php
Btw looks like the stardict.cn is dead today
> with the knowledge they're internet connected
Yeah that's pretty much the whole argument.
I do agree that programs should not send data in an arbitrary way. Clear text over public network is not OK
As an ESL user, I vehemently disagree. You're only going to need translations as long as you keep relying on translations. Like it or not but English is the lingua franca of the computing age and you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't learn it.
Yes, so to learn English, ppl need some kind of "translator" tool, no?
The most comprehensive one (but very old) out there is stardict.
Once you know the basics (which a translator won't teach you) the most effective way to become proficient is practice, which is the opposite of relying on a tool to translate things for you.
- The clipboard can not be read by backgrounded applications
- Apps by default are unable to use HTTP
Also Wayland breaks a lot of stuff. It's certainly a move in the right direction on the whole but I wouldn't blindly interpret something like this as a win.
> That does mean that it breaks StarDict's scan feature, though.
Better does not necessarily mean good though, that Mac approach of block by default but allow users to enable these things for specific apps on settings would be a great improvement.
In the X11 case, I can uninstall the app and install one that uses an offline dictionary and gives me a scan feature. That very much is a way to "block" it. Wanting a scan feature is not wrong. It's my computer. I want it. In the Wayland case, I cannot do _anything_ about it. The X11 situation is thus obviously better.
It's not like "define current selection" is some niche feature either. It's a default feature in macOs, iOS and Android.
You either do it the macos way or the windows/x11 way. You cannot half-ass something in between. That is just security theatre and is utterly retarded. Every wayland release until it makes a macos-style permission system (I dont care whether the default is accept or deny) is pure cancer. And every distro/DE that pushes wayland onto you until that point is also cancer.
</rant>
I think in a similar way to how xz attack required integration via systemd to exist, this is really more about defaults and integrations (which the last message from the maintainer acknowledges and seems to be fixing). https://xkcd.com/2044/ is as always an ever-present problem.
Still doesn't prevent an ad library from bundling libcurl and doing HTTP calls manually, of course, but it's a sane default.
Android already provides a way to sandbox apps from one another, so if people don't want social media apps talking with other apps they can already separate them.
What?
Part of the fun of free software is that it might do terrible things. Debian is not a distro that promises you a walled garden run by an iron-fisted tyrant who beats programmers into submission so they'll respect your privacy
Nothing in Debian will install StarDict invisibly. Only you install StarDict. Only you run StarDict.
Wayland is not a panacea. If you want StarDict to translate everything you highlight/clip, you will tell Wayland to let StarDict do that. If Wayland can't do that, it's bad, paternalistic software. There is Android and iOS for idiots who want to be bossed around by their device and have no real freedom.
The real problem are these HTTP lookups by default, which is the fault of the packager, and Debian as a whole for not prodding them into fixing it.
This bug was already reported and fixed as CVE-2009-2260. Then StarDict was kicked out of Debian, and when it came back, so did this bug. The most recent re-reporting of this bug (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=806960 raised in 2015) was fixed a few days ago by removing the dict.cn plugin, 2 days after Vincent Lefevre raised this issue on oss-security-list. He also raised CVE-2025-55014 for another dictionary plugin that sends HTTP requests, which has also been fixed by removing that plugin.
Both plugins should be removed from Trixie as of today, and more appropriately, all the "network dictionaries" are now in their own package (stardict-plugin-network-dictionary), not installed by default (stardict-plugin suggests rather than recommends it):
Changelog: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/stardict/-/blob/debian/trixi...
stardict (3.0.7+git20220909+dfsg-8) unstable; urgency=medium
* remove stardict_youdaodict.so plugin from stardict-plugin package, Closes: #1110370
* split network-dictionary plugin to a new binary package stardict-plugin-network-dictionary
* add d/NEWS.Debian
-- xiao sheng wen <atzlinux@sina.com> Mon, 11 Aug 2025 10:46:11 +0800
stardict (3.0.7+git20220909+dfsg-7) unstable; urgency=medium
* d/stardict-plugin.install:not install stardict_dictdotcn.so, Closes: #806960
* d/rules:Added --disable-dictdotcn option, dictdotcn is not provid server now
-- xiao sheng wen <atzlinux@sina.com> Wed, 06 Aug 2025 14:09:39 +0800
Package: stardict-plugin-network-dictionary
Description: [...]
*Warning*
* The query word will send through the network use plain-text in this plugin!
* Please do *NOT* selects any confidential data to query dictionary
* When enable "Scan" function on stardict, the selected text will sended on the net at once.
Package: stardict-plugin
Suggests: [...]
stardict-plugin-network-dictionary (= ${binary:Version}),Yeah you lost me here
If you want to give someone else control over what you can and can't do with your machine, iOS is over there -->
Why should I expect that merely installing a dictionary will silently opt me in to sending everything in my clipboard to some third party?
You don't need some strawman tyrant to want it to require a user opt-in if that's what you really want to do
You can want software to be well behaved, and in most cases it is. But if you want some level of assurance that the software is behaved as you'd like it, some requirement in law that the software is not allowed to exist unless it meets your requirements, or the platform it runs on is neutered so it literally can't do the thing you don't want it to do -- that's where the tyrant comes in.
Not having to check your cereal for razor blades is also a freedom
That's not what Debian is doing. Debian is asking for volunteers to package the world's free software, also written by volunteers. They have their own checklists, your "dodgy behaviour" concerns aren't on it. Confirming the software meets your expectations depends on you evaluating it. If it doesn't, you can then volunteer your time to write them a bug report, which they might or might not accept and fix.
Unless there is a omnipotent tyrant, there will be the possibility that you encounter terrible behaviours, and the possibility that those who could fix them, don't. You can try advocating to the maintainer that they should fix it, you can even try leading a campaign against the maintainer. If they still disagree, you can fix it yourself, with the source they gave you, and you can publicise your fixed version, which people might adopt over the other version if enough people agree with you. That is the fun!
RPi Foundation hires a cop and brags about how cop used RPis to spy on people. People got upset. RPi Foundation acts clueless and says vegetarians and vegans were upset because they posted a picture of meat.
Now Debian is less concerned with their core tenets and more concerned with winning popularity contests, as can be evidenced by their dropping of i386 support, for instance.
Instead of seeing an issue like this and raising an alarm, examining how this possibly happened, and discussing ways of making sure it doesn't happen again, they're like, "eh, so what?"
Debian, which for ages was the last big holdout of Linuxes becoming corporate, seems to have a bleak future.