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StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers

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Re: StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers

#21

Post by shakna »

markasoftware wrote: post #17
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb question... Could you do a per-word bloom filter to do online spell checking without actually disclosing the words you're checking?

a bloom filter look up is by hash, and given the relatively small set of words in english, it would be pretty easy for the server to reverse the hash sent to it. Thus a bloom filter wouldn't be very private. 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-know…

You should be able to do a K-means type thing. Where your query is an entire group, and you grab the field from the chunk locally.

But you might still be able to use some frequency sampling to predict the words used, unless those chunks are very very carefully constructed.

Re: StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers

#22

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

Elucalidavah wrote: post #7

Querying a local dictionary on each clipboard seems okay; having a feature to request remote dictionaries is okay; making it easy to combine both is dubious but understandable (would be better off as a special flag); but having them combined by default? That's pretty much malicious.

[flagged]

Re: StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers

#23

Post by avhception »

While I have a lot of respect for the effort that goes into Debian, I always disliked this kind of "maximalism" from the package manager. Oh, the user wants "foo"? Let's install every software that might be even remotely useful somehow in combination with foo! Oh there is a network daemon in there? Fantastic, let's start it immediately!

I know that there is a flag to disable the installation for "recommended" packages. I just think the default is a disservice here.

Re: StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers

#24

Post by CGamesPlay »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #13
CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #12

> of course a dictionary program will include code to talk to dictionary-providing web sites. 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…

Dumb question... Could you do a per-word bloom filter to do online spell checking without actually disclosing the words you're checking?

Just want to mention that the feature in question here is for translation, not spell checking.

Re: StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers

#25

Post by fsflover »

pabs3 wrote: post #2

There are numerous privacy issues in distros, some known, most probably unknown, some examples from Debian: https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues Luckily there are things like opensnitch that can block some of these issues: https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch

Are you saying it's an ordinary behavior? There's nothing coming close in your links, especially in Debian.

Re: StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers

#26

Post by rfoo »

avhception wrote: post #23

While I have a lot of respect for the effort that goes into Debian, I always disliked this kind of "maximalism" from the package manager. Oh, the user wants "foo"? Let's install every software that might be even remotely useful somehow in combination with foo! Oh there is a network daemon in there? Fantastic, let's start it immediately! I know that there is a flag to disable the installation for "recommended" package…

For me it's my most used super long command line flag.

For a brief moment `--break-system-packages` surpassed it, then I discovered `pip` accepts abbrev flags so `--br` is enough, and sounds like bruh.

Re: StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers

#27

Post by fc417fc802 »

cdmckay wrote: post #14
charcircuit wrote: post #9

Meanwhile on Android: - The clipboard can not be read by backgrounded applications - Apps by default are unable to use HTTP

Meanwhile on Wayland: > StarDict on Wayland doesn't have this problem, because Wayland prevents applications from being able to capture text from other applications by default.

Seems irrelevant to me. I shouldn't need to defend against software provided by the official repositories. The entire point is for those to be trustworthy.

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.

Re: StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers

#28

Post by quesera »

TheDong wrote: post #16
userbinator wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> It's like coming across a key someone dropped on the road. You don't even know what it's for. There's a lot of keys that are self-identifying, even real keys. My key has "Apartment Name, Apartment Number" engraved into the head, and searching the apartment name on google brings it up in the first 5 results. Let's say you find the following plaintext on the network: "sk-xxx....". Do you know what it's for? What if i…

> My key has "Apartment Name, Apartment Number" engraved into the head

Hotels learned not to do such silly things several decades ago.

I'm surprised that your building management lacks such obvious wisdom.

Re: StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers

#29

Post by sugarpimpdorsey »

> In response, Xiao pointed out that the package description can be read by any user who chooses to install the software, and it does mention the scan feature.

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.

Re: StarDict sends X11 clipboard to remote servers

#30

Post by kazinator »

CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #12

> of course a dictionary program will include code to talk to dictionary-providing web sites. 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…

I's a generational thing. I would guess that someone who expects applications to phone home, on the off chance that they are actually otherwise local, is likely someone pretty young who hasn't lived in a world of locally installed software that doesn't talk to anything.

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.)

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