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.
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.
It wasn’t, by the way. Though it could have been flagged by the dumbest of online translators (or even anyone who could read Cyrillic, since some of it uses English loanwords, like “sex” and “gay”). It should never have made it in release, but I disagree with categorizing it as “hate speech”. I feel comfortable posting it here, even though it’s pretty crude and #3 in particular is very vulgar. If anyone’s curious, here are the Google Translate translations of the vandalized parts (except for one of them, fullInstallationSubtitle, which I think is too offensive to be repeated here. It references the Israel-Palestine war):
I mean yeah, I was speculating. But what you posted also seems easily detectable :D
That’s a lot of pant removal.
But anyway, it should be quite possible to automatically screen the translation for something this blatant.