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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Lock screens are harder than they first appear: www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/toolkits.html (Which, you'll note, mentions this exact failure case in the "Transfer Grabs?" section.) There's some X-specific stuff in there, but there's a lot of general issues in there, and with just a bit of imagination most or all of the X-specific issues can be seen as general issues as well.

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Sadly, he also is fighting against the only solution to this issue.

There has been work to solve this by registering the session, compositor, and screen locker each with the session manager.

If the screen locker (which now can use any toolkit) crashes, the session manager can try to restart it. If it fails again, it just displays "your unlocker has crashed. To unlock this session, open a tty, login, and type `loginctl session-unlock`"

This solves all the issues, but he (and many others) have been fighting against systemd for a while (which fixes this, and so many other issues, which no competing project ever handled)

Fair warning: Jamie doesn't appreciate the discourse this crowd brings to his site. Visit this URL without a referrer for the best results.

No idea why you wouldn't just make it clear the site will open an inappropriate image when linked from HN

DON'T OPEN THAT LINK

Yes hopefully the commenter will edit in time to remove the http:// prefix so that it is not clickable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11135200

>sirsar: JWZ used to detect the hacker news referrer and redirect all links that originated on hacker news to goatse. Now it's only slightly less graphic

Sorry. Pity. It's actually crammed full of good stuff, which is why I linked it. It's a classic easy-looking problem that gets really hard when you get down in the weeds.

Not that it's somehow my place to say it, but I appreciate the spirit of your apology; you too are among the victims who deserve no blame.

Now that the link has been changed, I have no idea what you are talking about.

See the problem is that they don't have to be. An architecture where the screenshield must be a client to the display server like any other application is terrible design and largely an X-ism rather than something fundamental.

N.B. jwz does not like being linked to from HN. Open the link in a new tab.

With treatement like that, I’d prefer to avoid this person and all their content.

That's exactly what he wants from the horde on this site. To not visit his site :)

Your loss. Jamie Zawinski probably helped write a lot of the software you're using right now, and has observed the internet almost since its birth.

Do you know why he has such an aversion to HN?

No -- I don't know him personally -- but I would guess that he thinks it's a pile of amoral greed-heads and ignorant children.

amoral greed-heads and ignorant children.

Basically HN is him when he worked for Netscape and he doesn't like the reminder...

No, because HN is the people he worked for - the people who use him winning the startup lottery to explain away all the losers of that lottery and keep feeding young, impressionable people to the startup destruction machine.

Pretty much that, I reckon. He’s warned anyone who would listen not to work as hard as he did while at Netscape. But at the same time, he did win the startup lottery, so there’s that.

Well, he isn't exactly wrong. But redirecting like that is pretty immature in itself.

I agree. He could just redirect to a blank page but this puts him in a really bad light. I wouldn't care except I frequently browse HN at work when I'm getting settled in in the morning.

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