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.
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.
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.
In a Y (formerly known as post) on Y (formerly known as reddit) a Y (formerly known as user) “vaporeonpissdrinker69” has said that…
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.
Or we all could just still call it twitter and tweets, and be done with it
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).
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!
I hope this practice never dies.
(Also has “the artist formerly known as Prince vibes”.)
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…
SMH what is wrong with people.
I don’t understand, what’s ironic about it ? is the commenter a russian troll themself ?
Some people just need a punch in the face to understand why they shouldn’t use hate speech.
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.
Minecraft got in trouble when the Afrikaans translation had the n-word (in English) due to a malicious translator. CDPR had an issue with the Ukrainian translation making references to the ongoing war.
This sort of thing happens somewhat frequently. It’s the same reason how fake sign language interpreters can hold positions. It’s hard to verify the accuracy of a translation in a language you don’t speak. They have to trust that the translator did their job right.
Translations are usually just text strings. No reasonable project would allow translators to write code.
I mean honestly though, if there are code reviews, how hard would it be to just make a quick “translation review”, putting the stuff through a translator program, and verifying it’s not obvious bullshit? Especially for new/unknown contributors. Of course it’s additional work, again, but a sanity check should easily be possible.
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.
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?
Lol. You have to understand the context here. This is just translations. Actual code has many, many more eyes on it. An entire university was banned from submitting code to Linux, because of two dumbasses. They found and fixed genuine bugs. Built up lots of trust. Then violated that trust with actual use-after-free bugs submitted intentionally.
The submitted “patches” to the development branch was to prove it’s easy to get exploits into high profile open source projects. They ultimately proved the contrary. Making their “research” bunk. The code they submitted never made it past the development testing phase.
The context is that code made its way into shipped open source software.
The type doesn’t matter. It proves that there can be slip ups.
Move goal posts, though.
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 read the changes, and it seems to me it was a stupid child. Not even someone malicious, but just a stupid love being edgy.
If they could understand the situation, their heads would explode. But they can’t, that’s why.
