It's really difficult to not assume malice with something like this. From the maintainer:
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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 a trap.
> Part of the justification for moving to Wayland over X11 is to make security vulnerabilities relating to one application spying on another more difficult to introduce.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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."
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
it looks like a serious "privacy violation" for English-only users. But for many ESL or non-English users out there, the "translation" is a must.
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.
English-only users need translation too, there are lots of web resources out there only in non-English languages. I found the Bergamot offline translation tool embedded into Firefox helps a lot for that these days.
> StarDict on Wayland doesn't have this problem, because Wayland prevents applications from being able to capture text from other applications by default.
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
My personal security tolerance means that I have multiple levels of firewalls and blockers: network, dns, device, and browser. It's also why I find myself scanning my DNS traffic (pihole), and running OpenSnitch.
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.
>This would normally not be much cause for concern; of course a dictionary program will include code to talk to dictionary-providing web sites.
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.
If I would be deciding, I would kick-ban StarDict immediately from the distribution, and scrutinize i) the maintainer for all the packages he has ever touched, ii) StarDict authors for allowing such a default behavior in their system.
This post caught my eyes immediately because I have been sort of benefiting from StarDict project. Although I do not use it directly. I have been using sdcv, a CLI tool that reads StarDict dictionary. It’s minimal and serves me well.
Somewhat related, I was quite surprised when I discovered that my Samsung phone was sharing ALL my clipboard with all my other Samsung devices, including passwords copied into the clipboard, and even preserving the history. I can't remember if the sharing was enabled by default or I opted in by accident. I assume it also goes through their servers to reach my other devices. I could disable the sharing, but still can't turn off the clipboard history, even switching to a different keyboard, the Samsung keyboard still captures the clipboard and saves the history, when I switch the keyboard to Samsung everything is there... I guess my next phone won't be Samsung.
I noticed this happening through KDE connect, where passwords copied on Linux show up in Android's clipboard history, is there a way to block passwords from being transported around like that without completely disabling clipboard sharing altogether?
The Wayland framing at the end strikes me as misleading. This gets it exactly right:
> 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.
It's extra misleading, because "Wayland" isn't a thing when it comes to policy like this. Unless a compositor implements some sort of user approve/deny UI when an app requests access to the clipboard, apps on Wayland can snoop on the clipboard just as easily as on X11. I haven't run GNOME or KDE in Wayland mode, so maybe they do implement something like that, but none of the wlroots-based compositors I've tried do.
47 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 61.6 ms ] threadhttps://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues
Luckily there are things like opensnitch that can block some of these issues:
https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch
> 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?
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.
- The clipboard can not be read by backgrounded applications
- Apps by default are unable to use HTTP
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.
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.
I know that there is a flag to disable the installation for "recommended" packages. I just think the default is a disservice here.
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.
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
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.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=806960
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are closed as WONTFIX.
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...
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.
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)
What year is it?
> 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.
A problem for those 178 people... But on a global scale this isn't really a concern.