Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

Post by Chu4eeno » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 9:21 AM UTC

weare138 wrote: post #24

_0xdd wrote: post #16

One of the comments that struck me on the lwn.net site is the (albeit small) possibility that someone in Russia could be running the software and unintentionally land themselves in hot water if someone discovers these images on their computer. I'm sure that's not the intended consequence, but I could be problematic.

The issue with that claim is xsnow already displayed the Ukrainian flag regardless. And it's in no way a critical app most people would even have installed to begin with. I had no idea it was even still being maintained.

Post by NooneAtAll3 » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 9:52 AM UTC

LtWorf wrote: post #111

kstrauser wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's well documented that Russia is kidnapping its citizens off the streets to send them on an invasion of a sovereign country, but I hadn't heard that they're honoring nazis now. I'm not sure I believe that.

They aren't talking about Russia…

Post by trollbridge » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 3:59 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #81

trollbridge wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In rural Oklahoma, it is entirely acceptable to have “anyone of colour” portrayed in something like a screensaver. I don’t know much about Iran, but depictions of women seem common in advertising there.

Most women whom one would display inspirational quotes wouldn't be displayed in a head scarf as they would come from a range of cultures most of which don't have the same restrictions. I think that the point is that political moral and cultural norms aren't neutral and many are just morally deficient and free software shouldn't be in the business of pretending that Nazis and Jews are 2 different groups with equally v…

Post by port11 » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 7:37 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #55

JdeBP wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The naïveté of that position is that the users are not informed ahead of time that there's a random chance of a political protest popping up on their screen, so do not get to make an informed choice before it is perhaps too late. It's not mentioned in the doco. It's obfuscated in the source code as an 'extra tree' in an array of xpmtrees. The commit that added this had the commit message 'willem'.

So 3% of the pop uses Linux. I shouldn't be surprised that 3% of those use Debian. I WOULD be surprised to find that more than 1 in 10k has EVER used xsnow 1 in 1M running it continually. Note this is actually wildly overstated. I have not even touched on the settings which would show flags. Then we have to imagine they run xsnow all the time and somehow don't notice the dangerous political stuff OR run it for the fi…

Post by cloudie78 » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 8:02 PM UTC

JdeBP wrote: post #44

cloudie78 wrote: post #10

So next time something like this slips through and it runs rm -rf /* ? Then what? Shit like this erodes trust.

I wonder how many people immediately thought about whether similar things had been snuck into xfishtank and xpenguins.