- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
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.
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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.
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. 💁🏻♀️
Facebook is still Facebook and Google is still Google, and they’re owned by Meta and Alphabet, unlike X
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.
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!
The first X is pronounced Æsh
Real “Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim” energy
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
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𝕏cretion/𝕏creted
I thought it was xeets
xcretes
“In a xweet (…)”
“In a xhit (…)”
I prefer “xeet”
Why read X posts when you can watch X videos
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
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…”
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.
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.
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.
It is very concerning, absolutely. With that said, it’s entirely possible localization/translation reviews work differently than code reviews.
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.
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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
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!
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.
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.
