Why You Can't Currently Download Ubuntu 23.10 - OMG! Ubuntu
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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's a

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.

  • Hildegarde@lemmy.world
    59·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • Azzu@lemm.ee
      141·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • lloram239@feddit.de
        12·
        11 months ago

        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.

        • Azzu@lemm.ee
          91·
          11 months ago

          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.