You can't currently download Ubuntu 23.10 | Hacker News Reader

You can't currently download Ubuntu 23.10

omgubuntu.co.uk

The patch that deletes the offending translation file: https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-desktop-provision/pull/1...

One of the commits that added the offensive language: https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-desktop-provision/commit...

It seems like the vandal made a test edit three weeks ago, perhaps to see if anyone was paying attention: https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-desktop-provision/commit.... This is followed up with two, more extensive edits made a few days ago.

I kinda wish they’d just reverted the commits rather than nuking the entire translation. Perhaps a Ukrainian speaker could help them get the translation back into a good shape?

Offline warning: "Your pants aren't off yet"

I can't vouch for the rest of them and a couple seemed to be veering into anti-Semitic territory, but that one got a neckbeardy chuckle out of me.

> "minimalInstallationTitle": "Класичний гейський секс"

Google Translate: "Classic Gay Sex"

> "minimalInstallationSubtitle": "Лише найнеобхідніше, обрізані єлдаки і єврейська порнографія.",

Google Translate: "Just the bare essentials, circumcised eldaks and Jewish pornography."

Right.

What did they mean by this?

Antisemitism, I think

TIL what eldak means

I assume it was supposed to start with a 'y', otherwise I have no idea

Not saying I condone it, but seeing how lifeless and sterile (no pun intended...!) most software has become, and how quick people have gotten to take offense at everything, I almost wish "spicy" stuff like this would show up more often.

Why? Software can be fun without being... this. Easter eggs and humor, that's good stuff but a distribution full of slurs like some 13yo edgelord wrote it? I just don't see the appeal. There's already a bunch of random distros which are basically just themed (see https://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/ or https://biebian.sourceforge.net/) and joke distros like Suicide Linux or AmogOS

> Easter eggs and humor

I prefer humour. I increasingly find much 'humor' rather lifeless due to a misplaced desire not to cause anybody any offence whatsoever.

When people feel frustrated because they can no longer laugh at some communities without people calling them out, they should take a moment to pause and reflect.

There is always room for self-deprecating humor.

I get where you’re coming from. Everything is maximal brand safety all the time, that a bit of vandalism can provide respite.

Often enough we are funny because we 'dont mean it like this or that' but without context it's often more bullying than fun.

Have we forgotten the RedHat Redneck localization that used to be in the installer ?

I miss jive.exe myself

Wow, I have to say it’s quite funny: https://web.archive.org/web/20120307132029/http://www.ninesy...

From the manual (https://web.archive.org/web/20080119120948/http://www.redhat...): “The ‘Redneck’ language entry represents a dialect of American English spoken by Red Hat Software's Donnie Barnes, and was used as a test case during the addition of internationalization support to the installation program. It is included solely for entertainment value (and to illustrate how difficult it is actually talking to Donnie).”

My personal favorite is the "Bush hid the facts" easter egg/bug. Was it a bug or an easter egg disguised as a bug? Given how MSFT does not like to break old functionality maybe the easter egg creator knew this when adding it? A easter egg to survive the generations.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts

Oh come on, as riddled with pitfalls as Unicode decoding is, you think it's an easter egg when the string "this app can break" or "hhhh hhh hhh hhhhh" can also trigger the bug?

It probably nothing more than a bug but I like to believe so just give me this illusion dammit! :)

Noticing vandalism and fixing it is not the same as taking offence. Wanna get offensive stuff for some immature humour? Install fortune-...-off packages. Nobody is stopping you from experiencing it. But putting insults where other informative text should be is just stupid.

i assume they can prevent who ever added this nonsense from ever "contributing" again, at least under the same name.

'eldak' is a (rude) slang word for dick—this is the plural (i.e. dicks). Otherwise, Google's got the translation correct here.

Seeing this slip through makes me worry that something more serious could slip through too, e.g., swapping "Allow" and "Deny" on some security-sensitive prompt.

yeah, I get that there'll naturally be fewer people able to double check some languages, but it sounds like online translators would have caught this. Words that wouldn't stand out so clearly might slip by a lot easier even if someone went through the trouble to copy/paste the text into babelfish.com

I'd like to think that bad/naughty/wrong translations of phrases might be hard to catch with automated testing, but changes that would actually leave an install broken or vulnerable would be more likely to be detected... I hope...

Seems more like random Palestinian and Hebrew centric obscenity. Maybe it _is_ anti-Semitic, but seems too weird and purposeless to me.

I admit I might be missing something in this case, but it seems like anything involving ethnicity + rudeness is automatically labelled hate-speech nowadays.

It's not purposeless. This would be used by pro-Russian propaganda to point and say "see, Ukraine is full of nazis, that's why we have to go in and kill everybody".

This is Russian propaganda at work.

Looks like these were translations provide through a third-party platform. Pretty tricky to review when you've handed off the responsibility.

I wonder how Weblate actually manages quality control in practice? This seems like a pretty bad advertisement for the platform.

If anyone is interested in the contents, it's anti-Semitism (related to the current world events) added in the Ukrainian translation https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-desktop-provision/commit...

Seems more like random Palestinian and Hebrew centric obscenity. Maybe it _is_ anti-Semitic, but seems too weird and purposeless to me.

Summary: Last-minute strings patch, it'll be up soon

I sure hope it'll be called 23.10.1.

For you can't have two versions with the same version number. That'd be more offensive than the translation.

maybe not more offensive, but bad.

Ubuntu’s backwards-date versioning system is offensive enough on its own.

Why? It sorts so nicely!

But what about the 2100 problem?!?

100.3 or whatever

Ubuntu wouldn't be the first product to change their versioning system for releases. I don't think we need to get too worried about what will happen in 76 years from now.

yeah just rebaseline it for something big and different.

Ubuntu NT 1.1

UnbuNTu

What do you mean backwards-date? It's how someone would do it naturally. Like when we say one thousand, we do 1000, not 0001, most significant to least significant. I suppose we use mostly little-endian computers, so perhaps you'd expect to see it as 01.32 to correspond, but that would seem quite confusing to everyone, wouldn't it? A point-release would be 1.01.32? And the tenth point-release (god forbid) would be 01.01.32? I suppose we could put it at the end and get 01.32.1 but that then has it go up and down all over the place.

I think what they picked is quite natural: most-sig to least-sig. 23.10.1 has year.month.point-release

What with the difficulty of manually verifying translations of numerous languages that you don't understand ...

I can't help but wonder if tooling could at least help check the degree of difference between previous releases and the current release.

> I can't help but wonder if tooling could at least help check the degree of difference between previous releases and the current release.

Or run the translated text through Google Translate (or similar) and have someone do a quick sanity check?

> (or similar)

Have made experiences with DeepL

If you were willing to do that, why not just start there in the first place?

Subpar results; it's harder to translate than to check a translation.

Sometimes they really mess things up when there’s little context.

A few basic examples: “file” in English is both a verb and a noun, but other languages have different words for each. The machine translator will just guess at presenting you the noun or verb.

Other languages have genders for everything, so if a computer is male, but a standalone sentence doesn’t know that, the translator has to take a guess. If it guesses wrong, the sentence will be confusing to the user that thinks it’s about something other than a computer.

That’s just scratching the surface.

This recently was an issue for zip files in UK Windows (or something) being translated as "post code files"

Reminds me of a mistake in Spanish in a TomTom device I have around: "AP" stands for autopista (motorway) but it reads "AP" aloud as apartado postal (PO box).

Have had some satnav apps when set in French translate “dr” in an Anglo street name as “docteur” instead of reading it as “drive”.

Just because I set the language to something foreign, it doesn’t mean I’m in that country with its street naming conventions.

Have the machine translation more as a sanity check than the actual translation: you don't want to blindly trust what the machine produces if it's in a language you don't understand. But going the other way for quality control can eliminate the most egregious cases like this.

Sounds like more fine tuning is necessary. At this point in time with LLMs, I'm really surprised at how auto-translation is still so not natural. I mean, I get why it is that way, but at the same time, it's no less shocking how bad it is.

You can't compare if they are new strings.

It's a VERY time-consuming process to do a thorough review of localization materials. I've spent multiple working days on single massive commits when working with an unreliable translation provider. I can absolutely believe that someone glanced at the diff (linked elsewhere in this HN thread) at thought "that looks good enough". It wasn't a very large diff, and didn't do anything that reviewers will be keyed for (bizarre punctuation, formatting errors, incorrect captured variable references, etc).

Offensive localization strings is not a threat I'd considered when I did my work. I doubt the reviewers of this repo thought it was a concern.

All the endless babbling about code reviews, yet here we are.

I'm glad they're doing the right thing and postponing release. If you really want it I assume you can download an RC or something.

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