OPERATING SYSTEMSOS Linux

Why you can't download Ubuntu 23.10 and why it's an attack on all of Free Software.

The Ukrainian translation of Ubuntu’s installer was vandalized by a malcontented user with bigotry in their heart. Regardless of their motivations, the defacement of open source translations are an attack on the very spirit free software.

FOSS is an ad-hoc institution that relies on the good faith contributions of community members. Enshrined at the heart of our movement are the principals of equity in computing and digital autonomy. There’s no room for racial hatred or bigotry as these stand in stark and ugly contrast to our higher ideals. That’s why I consider this an attack on all of Free Software, and it’s one we must defend against with zeal and vigor.

Find more details here: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ubuntu-discovers-hate-speech-in-release-2310-how-to-upgrade/
Official Canonical response: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/announcement-ubuntu-desktop-23-10-release-image-is-being-updated-to-resolve-a-malicious-translation-incident/39365

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ubuntu

26 thoughts on “Why you can't download Ubuntu 23.10 and why it's an attack on all of Free Software.

  • I didn't join the community because of the altruism and philosophies, but it is something that has grown on me and why I choose to stay. Thanks for putting to words something I was thinking regarding this.

  • Perhaps this video is fraudulent too? In philosopy it is difficult to describe what's real and not.

  • In March of 2023, I bought a Dell XPS 13 Plus with Canonical Ubuntu. In less than six months it updated itself to broken. I attempted a system restore, but it failed claiming a shim problem. I tried downloading a recovery image from Dell website. That too, failed. I installed debian12 and have been running since.

  • I was all scared conical had done something bad from the title. Like a paywall.
    😮
    Thank goodness I was wrong.
    But yeah, still a super crappy thing for the bad actor to do. 😢

  • Stuff Like this will scared people away from Linux but not me….

  • time for ubuntu to close source or vet contributors to its code

  • Absolutely! I can't stand the people that go out of their way to mess with a hard workin community that are slaving to make sure we get the absolute best software.

  • Time to "Blockchain" up the contributor chain.

    Verify:
    The path to contributor.
    The contributors environment.

    Use multi-person validation of all public facing content contributions via RANDOMLY assigned pairing of reviewers.

  • Seems like you could just have GPT catch it moving forward.

  • I thought ukraine spoke russian. their writing looks like russian to me.

  • He's talking about trust in 2023 is really missing the point. Security first!

  • Why not create a team to check the product and then distribute it to the public that prevents these attacks to a certain point

  • Apparently some conspiracy theorist on X named InfowarsOS claimed that Canonical itself planted the hate speech as an excuse to ban unauthorized/custom remasters as well force the CUBIC project to shut down…

  • I'm not a huge fan of canonical, but I need to give credit where it's due. Their response, as well as their time to action to address the issue.

  • This was just stupid vandalism. Malware authors including state sponsored actors would love to open an intentional zero day security hole in a major distribution.

  • Well said acts of this nature have the potential to really mess with 100s of people it's not good, I guess someone is going to be reviewing all translations going forward

  • It seems like the relied on a vendor to provide the translations, and the vendor messed up by letting the bad translation through. I don't blame Canonical for this getting through. So far as I know, the vendor had been fine up until now, so they had no reason to double check the translations. That's what hiring a vendor is supposed to do.

    More generally, you need to rely on other people to do good work for you. We don't expect Mark Shuttleworth to personally examine every line of code and translation that goes into an Ubuntu release. He relies on directors and they rely on managers and they rely on individual contributors.

  • Don't blow it up to this kind of scale. It was a troll, a dixkhead who got through. The translation included jabs at a country…. Boohoo…. Correct, rinse and repeat. Why make even more fuss about it ???

  • somehow ubuntu 22.10 LTS will not boot at all on my system. I mean try or install option will not run, only ubuntu (safe graphics) runs. it does not like my rtx 3080 smh. trust in people, never.

  • A shame. Only solution I could imagine is a required trust level for submitters and verified accounts. Will slow down development and make good people's lives harder.

  • Literally you just proved the opposite of what you said. "This is awful & evil & corrosive & toxic & evil & [several more minutes of pathos]. Oh but the person could have actually used this as a method to cause harm if they had chosen to, so now we're unfortunately forced to actually fix the problem"

  • This was just a case of poor oversight from Canonical. There is a good reason why I don't trust torrents and I prefer to take a good look at mirror sites.

  • Never feed the trolls. You are basically glorifying and spotlighting a trolls work while shaming the company who was their victim that made the effort to repair the trolls damage.

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