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.
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.
Their stupid ass logo looks too much like the old X11 logo. At least Xorg has a cirlcle thing. 😤
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Which is amazing that X isn’t being sued by Xorg. I guess they probably don’t have the same amount of money (although Twitter is probably going to be negative soon). It’s also not really competition, but they’re both tech companies. I could easily see Xorg winning that one.
Whoever has the most money automatically wins a lawsuit, because X could EASILY just get more lawyers to make more BAD faith arguments.
He didnt just set the brand recognition on fire, elon basically did everything someone would do if they wanted to intentionally run twitter into the ground.
Now spez needs to rename Reddit and make his idol proud.
In a Y (formerly known as post) on Y (formerly known as reddit) a Y (formerly known as user) “vaporeonpissdrinker69” has said that…
Ycombinator looks around nervously
Perfect tagline for that site: “Y tho”
…and they replace the alien with the fellow in the meme (who was a Pope apparently. Who knew.)
At least, vaporeon is compatible. In fact it is most compatible.
Maybe that was his plan for creating true free speech, by driving everyone away from twitter to mastodon…
A very 200iq plan, only cost him $44B
It cost him a lot more than that. He lost about 200 billion in stock value that he owned and among the companies he “runs” about a trillion was lost in total due to investers dumping stock after seeing his ineptitude on full display.
Truly someone who is willing to go beyond his earthy wealth for his ideas of free speech.
Or we all could just still call it twitter and tweets, and be done with it
I propose we just stop talking about it altogether.
No, It’s called X now. Elon willed it so, and I’m happy to oblige. Posts are called X-cretions (or X-crement, if they are shitposts).
Well, he is allegedly fond of the poop emoji.
Like we call meta Facebook and alphabet google. 💁🏻♀️
What Google/Facebook did, while a little silly, at least makes some sense because they’re segregating the product from the megacorp that owns the product. They maintain the benefits of having consistent branding while also separating out their corporate interests under a new name. In Google’s case, Google still exists as a subsidiary of Alphabet, while in Facebook’s case Facebook is not a separate company anymore but it still exists as just one of the platforms that Meta operates.
With X, the product itself was renamed, and in so doing the branding was destroyed. There’s no good reason to do this as far as I can tell.
Facebook is still Facebook and Google is still Google, and they’re owned by Meta and Alphabet, unlike X
No no, it’s not 'a tweet ’ anymore, it’s ‘an X(, formerly known as a tweet)’
“In an X(formerly known as a tweet) on X(formerly known as Twitter) …”
It just rolls off the tongue!
Real “Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim” energy
The first X is pronounced Æsh
I hope this practice never dies.
(Also has “the artist formerly known as Prince vibes”.)The Prince one is different, since he changed his name to something that can’t be even spelled.
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𝕏cretion/𝕏creted
The current branding gives more a placeholder asset feeling than a memorable identity. Sorry the twitter logo isn’t loading so we’ll show you an “X” in the meantime
Why read X posts when you can watch X videos
I thought it was xeets
xcretes
“In a xweet (…)”
I prefer “xeet”
They could just keep calling tweet, or tweet on X, maybe they just keep this shit to show how stupid the change is…
“in a recent Twix…”
On some news stories I’ve been seeing them refer to it as “the social media company X”
@fadingembers
So the company x social that existed before the muskrat bought twitter then, right?
@GnuLinuxDude
SMH what is wrong with people.
I mean… it’s likely just some Russian trolls fucking around
Ah yes I remember Russians that spread malware with node-ipc… oh wait, it was Ukrainians!
The irony of that statement.
Go back to your fucking cave
More irony. This is borderline comedic now. Cave man ugghh
I don’t understand, what’s ironic about it ? is the commenter a russian troll themself ?
Well, the original post is about some loser adding hate speech to Ubuntu.
Then this clown jumps in, and starts hate speech against Russian people.
He’s ok to throw some about, but the Ubuntu guy isn’t?
I mean, the irony and myopia is strong here.
Some people just need a punch in the face to understand why they shouldn’t use hate speech.
A punch in the face with a chair…
Some people need a high-five. With a billiard table. In the face.
Along with a nice thumbs up. With a thumb. Up their peehole.
OK what’s the deal with those m’s and w’s?? It looks like a standard seriffed BIOS/ROM font except for those.
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.
I would assume since it was a block of raw text in Ukrainian in a translation file, it would have passed more under the radar than something like a backdoor. I do not know how things are reviewed before being pushed to release though.
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.
Translations are not going to be analyzed as thoroughly as code, and this was still found quite quickly. Submitted code is analyzed much more thoroughly, often by multiple members or the project.
It is very concerning, absolutely. With that said, it’s entirely possible localization/translation reviews work differently than code reviews.
Not really, not only because of the language but also because the same scrutiny between code and content wouldn’t have to be the same. I also don’t expect core aspects of the distribution, e.g kernel, package manager, cryptography libraries, to be verified the same way than a random software, e.g Kdenlive. So… is it bad, absolutely. Does it mean everything should be questioned again? Probably not.
Well but they DID notice
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.
Ukrainian has enough speakers for there to be multiple translators, doesn’t it?
Clearly not enough active ones for each and every project out there.
But oPeN sOuRce iS sAfe.
This is just messed up and sad. Why do people do this stuff? Why do they have to act like assholes?
If you’re genuinely confused, it’s because a lot of people live broken lives and it brings them joy to bring others down.
I wish I was tbh, it’s sad that stuff like this happens and it’s very unfortunate… it bewilders me so much, to see someone go out their way to do shit like this but I guess when you’re full of hate you’ll do stupid shit like this
I read the changes, and it seems to me it was a stupid child. Not even someone malicious, but just a stupid love being edgy.
I see, honestly I HOPE it was some stupid child because if it was an adult with a functioning brain then idk what to say
If they could understand the situation, their heads would explode. But they can’t, that’s why.
yep, sadly that’s true
Kinda answered your own question there
Someone has been defacing OpenStreetMap with stuff like this for months as well. It’s pretty sad.
I contribute to OSM a lot and thankfully I haven’t ran into vandalism yet. I’ve always been kind of surprised it isn’t way more common. I guess maybe it is, just not around me.
Im amazed by peoples creativity.
I havent thought until now that such things like translations can be misused for hate speech.
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!
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And why companies usually don’t allow for community translations outside of mods, or indies taking “no responsibility” when releasing them when donated.
It’s a legal and PR risk.
There’s another case where the author doesn’t know enough English to know that making every toggle setting in the format of “Is (setting) ?” like “Does Close ADB when Closing Installer?” and “Is show helpers?” is wrong and insinuates that you ruined the meaning
No bias here
But why not release 23.10 but without the affected language pack? The Ukrainian translation can be released once the vandalism is fixed.
The commit in question if anyone’s interested: https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-desktop-provision/commit/6f4028057e55cebfc53cc45cb39831f7e6a176cb
I’m not sure why the author’s account is not clickable - has he deleted it?
submitted as part of a third party tool outside of the Ubuntu Archive
Not every git user is guaranteed to have an account. In this case, most translators probably don’t as it was automatically translated with weblate, which Ubuntu appears to have since removed.
Weird, I downloaded the Kubuntu 23.10 ISO yesterday. There wasn’t s link on the site but I changed the 23.04 link to 23.10 and it got in fine.
