# getting blind

## squirrelsoup

i am sorry for all those who might get offended by this post, but it is a real struggle for me. i suffer from schizophrenia, and i was attacked by a person i knew in real life, who installed spyware on my laptop for a few years.

he done some terrible things, that effected my personal life, however recently i saw him walking on the streets. now the trauma's get back.

yesterday all of a sudden my Gentoo XFCE desktop became, more red colored, everything seems red, which result in blurry sight and makes me sleepy.

Question: is there a possibility he is using some sort of software to make my eyes hurt?

i know he is capable of doing, because he tried to overheat my MacBook which started to get really warm, fans spin really loud, and a plastic smell came from it.

also, i had a lot of forum discussion about intrusion detection on Linux systems, however someone stated: "absence of evidence, is not evidence of absence" this does not make this situation easier.

last time he hacked my MacBook he did left some traces, for example he changed my root password, he left personal notes on my desktop, deleted my online game account, and etc.

please help me i am desperate.

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## John R. Graham

Just FYI, red light is perfectly safe. Ships and planes use red cockpit lighting to help keep pilot's night vision sharp. It can make thinks look blurry in the presence of other pure colors because it produces a different focal length than, for instance, blue light. Your eye has to choose which color to focus on.

The effect you're seeing can also be caused by a defective monitor cable, since the red, green, and blue signals travel on different wires within the cable. Try re-seating both ends off the cable or, if you have a spare, try swapping the cable out.

- John

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## eccerr0r

I've also had analog VGA cables that went bad (as well as a monitor), having a blue or green wire go bad will make things look magenta or yellowish with lots of red.  Note that if this happened, it should also affect your bootup screen preboot which more likely cannot be affected by hacks.

However you should be on the lookout for intrusion.  On Gentoo, you can run

equery check <<package>> 

to see if there are any modifications to each package.  Important packages to check are the base packages like baselayout, shadow, sysvinit/systemd, openrc, openssh, and there are more.  You could see if there's any modified files as a startpoint but no guarantee the saved checksums were not tampered and some files are normally changed during use.  You have to know your computer and OS.

As usual, you should reinstall the OS if you don't trust the computer.  Same applies for any OS/computer.

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## NeddySeagoon

squirrelsoup,

Its possible that you have lost the blue signal to the display, leaving only red and green.

If that's the case, whites will appear yellowish.

There is not a lot of blue light about in nature, so our eyes are not very sensitive to it.

White is 10% Blue, 60% Green and 30% Red.

Its also possible that your display has a colour temperature control and you have changed it accidentally.

Mine has seven presets and a slider to change it from 5000K to 10000K.

That's very warm (red) at 5000K to very cold (blue) at 10000K

Direct sunlight is about 4500K, tungsten filament lamps are about 3500K

The Deg K refers to the absolute temperature an ideal  'black body' radiator would need to be heated to to give off light the same colour. 

Some video drivers (e.g. nVidia control panel) offer controls to do the same thing in software.

Play with this colour wheel

Switch it to RGB mode, so it works the same as your display.

Red is at 9:00 o'clock.

Blue is at 4:00 o'clock.

Green is at 2:00 o'clock.

Drag the dot in the centre (white) to the outside of the wheel at those tree positions.

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## Tony0945

 *NeddySeasoon wrote:*   

> There is not a lot of blue light about in nature, so our eyes are not very sensitive to it.
> 
> White is 10% Blue, 60% Green and 30% Red. 

 Just an FYI aside: I recall from my college days, back in the Dark Ages, that the Sun's spectral emission peaks at the color of chlorophyll green (just past yellow) which is probably why plants evolved to to use chlorophyll to extract solar energy.Last edited by Tony0945 on Sun Feb 05, 2017 6:15 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## eccerr0r

I don't think this is an issue with DVI cables if this is turns out to be the case with the OP's system.  A bit off topic and a thread hijack, but anyone have DVI links broken?  Not sure how the monitor behaves, and since they're differential, having one of a pair bad would disable both of the pair...  I'm pretty sure DVI cables will not cause single color loss however.

When chlorophyll is green, it will reflect all green light - so all this energy is reflected away - so it collects only red and blue lights.  I think it's more of an aspect of humans having sensitivity to green light as humans depend on leaves of plants for food and cover, but that's just a guess.

As for red causing headaches, it's possible just because the screen is now too dark, stressing the eyes to try to collect more light for vision...

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## squirrelsoup

i tweaked somethings with the nvidia-settings that helped the colors set right, however changing the monitor to identical second monitor and replacing the cables did not work.

could it be that my system is compromised by this script kiddie, and how will i find out?

or is it a bug in XFCE?

is my video card broken?

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## eccerr0r

Is it reddish during preboot, like BIOS setup and during the kernel initialization?  If this is the case, look into hardware failure.

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## squirrelsoup

the bios setup seems like it always been, however the grub menu + loading gentoo kernel modules screen seems red-ish

i did #qcheck and noticed:

```
Checking x11-libs/gdk-pixbuf-2.36.2 ...

 MD5-DIGEST: /usr/lib32/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders.cache

 MTIME: /usr/lib64/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders.cache

  * 464 out of 466 files are good

Checking x11-libs/gtk+-2.24.31-r1 ...

 MD5-DIGEST: /usr/lib32/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/immodules.cache

 MTIME: /usr/lib64/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/immodules.cache

  * 1446 out of 1448 files are good

Checking x11-libs/gtk+-3.22.5 ...

 MD5-DIGEST: /usr/lib64/gtk-3.0/3.0.0/immodules.cache

  * 1648 out of 1649 files are good

```

does that mean anything?

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## NeddySeagoon

squirrelsoup,

nvidia-settings supports colour profiles and gives a screen where you can play with the gamma curves.

By default, RGB are all the same and are a straight line from bottom left to top right.

Set them back that way and don't 'footer'.

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## squirrelsoup

NeddySeagoon,

they already where set that way, i also did a reset default on gamma and color correction on nvidia-settings, but the red-ish light is giving me headaches

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## khayyam

 *squirrelsoup wrote:*   

> i did #qcheck and noticed:
> 
> ```
> Checking x11-libs/gdk-pixbuf-2.36.2 ...
> 
> ...

 

squirrelsoup ... all those files would be expected to change as they are cache files, so nothing unusual there.

I don't think anyone would get particularly offended by such posts, but the internet (specifically our little corner) might not provide the best feedback on such questions (ie, someone state of mind, or how that mind functions), generally we are inclined to focus on what is presented (ie, the reasoning involved) and not on perception (ie, your particular state of mind), and the colour (no pun intended) your schizophrenia may bring to it. That is why we might state "absence of evidence, is not evidence of absence", because we take it as a technical question, and to say otherwise is to impose evidence where there might not be any. You might take that statement another way, the fact that you've had trouble in the past (ie, with overheating) doesn't mean that the issues you encounter now necessarily have the same cause ... often our causal attributions are based on false assumptions, and in order to think clearly these we need to take care not to conflate such assumptions with fact. That is easier said than done (regardless of our mental state) because the human brain is a pattern recognition machine, and we often fill in the gaps (until such a time as evidence is presented). So, "absence of evidence" can mean two things here, it can mean the presumption of of cause isn't there, or that there isn't enough evidence to provide such a cause ... in short, the problem remains an open one (and we often have to live with that lack of certainty). Keep that in mind when asking, essentially technical, questions (ie, "have I been hacked ... or not") we will be prone to looking at the evidence (or lack thereof) and not at your perception (ie, "filling in the gaps"), and that can be mistaken for "offence" (or dismissiveness, etc). In this case I would be inclined to think you (or your perception) is mistaken, and that there is some other (perhaps more consistent) reason behind the symptoms your experiencing, that doesn't rule out the presence of some tampering, it is simply a presumption based on the evidence (or Okhams razor), and not a sign of my dismissing your causal attribution (ie, simply because schizophrenia is mentioned). You'll get that a lot, because our little corner of the internet is, more often than not, technical.

best ... khay

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## squirrelsoup

hayyam,

i am amazed by your speech  :Surprised: 

as long as i don't come with facts, it is just my brain filling in the gaps, and it is not a reality. so then it must be a technical problem.

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## NeddySeagoon

squirrelsoup,

Is your display connected with a 15 pin D shaped connector or a different connector entirely?

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## squirrelsoup

NeddySeagoon,

the connector seems to have 18 pins that look like: | and 1 pin that looks like: -

i tried another cable and another monitor that did not help

could it be that red blue green is switched in xfce somehow

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## khayyam

 *squirrelsoup wrote:*   

> [...] as long as i don't come with facts, it is just my brain filling in the gaps, and it is not a reality. so then it must be a technical problem.

 

squirrelsoup ... that is not what I was saying ... but ok, have it your way.

best ... khay

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## NeddySeagoon

squirrelsoup,

That's a Digital cable, not an Analogue one, Digital either works or not, unlike Analogue.

Can you post an image of your red screen?   

Did you do the colour wheel test I suggested?

Were any colours missing.?

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## grumblebear

Perhaps this one again:

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=603858

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## eccerr0r

Possible, but that would not explain the boot screen color corruption...

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## squirrelsoup

 *grumblebear wrote:*   

> Perhaps this one again:
> 
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=603858

 

hope it gets fixed upstream

*edit*

is it smart security-wise to downgrade llvm + mesa to see it goes away?

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## NeddySeagoon

squirrelsoup,

If the problem in apparent in the BIOS screen, the Post Screen, or the the Grub screen,  downgrading llvm and mesa will change nothing.

Neither are used until you have booted, so there is no need to change them to determine that its not Linux software.

They are certainly used by Xorg but I'm not sure about the console.

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## squirrelsoup

agree neddy,

however the problem solved its fine now  :Smile: 

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## NeddySeagoon

squirrelsoup,

I'm pleased to hear its fixed.

Please share what you did so we can all learn from your experience.

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