Subliminal Messages in Xscreensaver "Phosphor"
 

I've been running RedHat 8 very happily for several months now and one of my favorite screensavers is Phosphor. I have it pointed to /usr/games/fortune so all the material there scrolls by. Yesterday afternoon, I thought I saw a flash from the center of the screen and so I started to watch very closely. White words were flashing on almost fast enough to be subliminal. There were things like "They're...Reading...Your...Mail, Question, Resistance Is Futile.." and so on. I thought it was pretty cool and I just wondered if anyone else has seen this. If so, where would I look for the text file? Please tell me I'm not hallucinating. Thanks.

Have you been eating any mushrooms which are blackish in color? :D :D :D

lol ill check it out eh?

Phosper Screen Save - Text File
 

I'm running SuSE 9.0 Pro and love this screen saver.

I point it at a text file but 'it' doesn't seem to have the proper permissions for the screen saver to use it.

So the screen saver 'works' it just displays "filename . . . permission . . . denied" rather than the text in the file.

Ideas?

-:>Kevin

I should add something to my original post.

The messages I saw only lasted for about half an hour. And it's never happened before then or since. Ordinarily, I'd be thinking "virus", but that seems unlikely. For now, I'll just leave things in a state of "mu" until I can find a way to recreate the event.

I too had a hard time getting Phosphor to run just what I wanted. There was a lot of trial and error involved with a lot of dead end "file permission" items. I maintain stillness and wait for the answer to surface.

HueyMouse

Well... they are reading your mail, so what's the problem exactly?

:D

I found out where the messages were coming from. There's a program called xsublib that live down amongst the screensaver. It can be invoked with arguments defining the amount of time the message will be on your screen, its location and so forth. The man page tells all. My program tends to fire up on its own. Glad it wasn't the mushrooms!