Ubuntu V23.10 Was Injected With 'Hate Speech' From Third-party

Ubuntu V23.10 Was Injected With 'Hate Speech' From Third-party.

Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions, mostly because it is run by a business, decided to pull its Desktop release 23.10 after they discovered its Ukrainian translations contained hate speech.

Anti-Semitic, homophobic and xenophobic text were injected via a third-party, that the project relies upon for translations.

"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 project wrote on X.

A community contributor submitted offensive Ukrainian translations to a public, third party online service that we use to provide language support for the Ubuntu Desktop installer. Around three hours after the release of Ubuntu 23.10 this fact was brought to our attention and we immediately removed the affected images. The Ubuntu team explained on Discourse.

The impacted images were Ubuntu Desktop 23.10 and Ubuntu Budgie 23.10.

The Ubuntu Desktop Legacy ISO was not affected. So users are advised to download Ubuntu Desktop 23.10 from the Ubuntu downloads page using the Legacy installer ISO that remains unaffected by the incident.

This incident did however raise questions about potential Malware injections from some of its users.

Normally we do not post about Ubuntu, especially much, but we thought this would serve as a heads up to other distributions depending on third-party translations, to try and have someone you can trust to go over the translations before releasing an new version.

Another distribution that could be affected is Linux Mint, because it is based on Ubuntu. I suggest you change to LMDE6 which is based on Debian12, but also has third-party drivers repository activated.