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.
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!