this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 192 points 1 year ago (17 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Now spez needs to rename Reddit and make his idol proud.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

In a Y (formerly known as post) on Y (formerly known as reddit) a Y (formerly known as user) "vaporeonpissdrinker69" has said that...

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Or we all could just still call it twitter and tweets, and be done with it

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

I propose we just stop talking about it altogether.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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).

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No no, it's not 'a tweet ' anymore, it's 'an X(, formerly known as a tweet)'

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

"In an X(formerly known as a tweet) on X(formerly known as Twitter) ..."

It just rolls off the tongue!

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I hope this practice never dies.
(Also has "the artist formerly known as Prince vibes".)

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Why read X posts when you can watch X videos

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 year ago (2 children)

SMH what is wrong with people.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I mean… it’s likely just some Russian trolls fucking around

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some people just need a punch in the face to understand why they shouldn't use hate speech.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

A punch in the face with a chair…

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago

Redneck, or pirate, or leet speak language options are there to let developers test the translations without them having to be bilingual.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

OK what's the deal with those m's and w's?? It looks like a standard seriffed BIOS/ROM font except for those.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

That is weird. Didn’t even notice til I read this.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago (15 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Quite hard. We had Open Source'ish LLMs for only around six months, if they are even up to the task of verifying a translation is another issue and if they are up to Debian's Open Source guidelines yet another. This is obviously going to be the long term solution, but the tech for that has simply not been around for very long.

And of course once you have translation tools good enough for the task, you might just skip the human translator altogether and just use machine translations.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I more meant that if something contains "fucking kill all ukrainians and trans people", which it sounds like this was something like that, that should be possible to see even with bad translation tools.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (5 children)

This is just messed up and sad. Why do people do this stuff? Why do they have to act like assholes?

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you're genuinely confused, it's because a lot of people live broken lives and it brings them joy to bring others down.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Someone has been defacing OpenStreetMap with stuff like this for months as well. It's pretty sad.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Im amazed by peoples creativity.

I havent thought until now that such things like translations can be misused for hate speech.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

But why not release 23.10 but without the affected language pack? The Ukrainian translation can be released once the vandalism is fixed.

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