Why You Can't Currently Download Ubuntu 23.10 - OMG! Ubuntu
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Today, Ubuntu 23.10 is available to download — or rather it was. If you're only just waking up/getting around to downloading Ubuntu 23.10 you'll have

If you’re confused why you can’t currently download Ubuntu 23.10 despite the fact it’s been released (and blogs like mine are telling you it’s out) there is a reason.

[From Twitter]: “We have identified hate speech from a malicious contributor in some of our translations submitted as part of a third party tool outside of the Ubuntu Archive. The Ubuntu 23.10 image has been taken down and a new version will be available once the correct translations have been restored.”

Now, I’m not 100% certain but from poking around the Ubuntu Desktop Installer GitHub — I know, I’m nosey — appears to have been (sadly) the Ukrainian translation file that was hijacked. I ran the text through a translator and …Honestly, I wish I hadn’t.

It’s a broad range of offensive sentences touching on politics, sexuality, and current events. Though shocking, none of it is particularly coherent in scope. It seems to be written to be provocative for provocations sake – the sort of stuff people post on X to farm likes from far-right bots.

  • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml
    4·
    1 year ago

    As an aside remark, it’s really funny how everyone has to elaborate what the fuck they’re talking about when they talk about Twitter.

    In a post on X (formerly Twitter) Ubuntu explains the situation

    could have just been written as

    In a tweet, Ubuntu explains the situation

    but the epic genius elon decided to destroy all brand recognition. Truly incredible thing to witness. Twitter literally got its own branded terms into common lexicon and he just set it all on fire.

  • quackers@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    1·
    1 year ago

    Nobody is even slightly concerned that this made it to release? if they can shove in hate speech without anyone noticing, cant be much harder to slowly introduce a backdoor over several commits.

    • java@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m sure more people know C or Python than Ukrainian at Canonical. It looks like this particular change has been authorized by a third-party localization project, though I’m not sure the whole process works.

    • sim642@lemm.ee
      0·
      1 year ago

      Most translations are contributed by external users for languages that the project developers don’t speak themselves, so they can’t always check everything unless there’s multiple active translators for one language.

    • intrepid@lemmy.ca
      1·
      1 year ago

      Honestly, I’m more surprised that it wasn’t caught by some review process. We normies may not consider it. But with 8 billion individuals on this planet, the chances of this happening is near 100%, without sufficient safeguards in place. If this is what happens to something as obvious as translation, imagine how compromised all those cryptic open source code must be!